Community Learning
Lyrics on Lockdown
K45.1444 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Ella Turenne
This course will focus on the uses of the visual and performing arts and spoken word as a tool for positive social change. Through hands-on collaboration with the Blackout Arts Collective and Island Academy, students will create artistic and dialogical spaces for critically thinking about the crisis of incarceration in this country. Speakers may include representatives of the Prison Moratorium Project and Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. Readings include writings by Augusto Boal, Christian Parenti, Manning Marable, Bakari Kitwana, and Bryonn Bain. Students will create arts based workshops which they will facilitate with incarcerated youth at Rikers Island. Students do not need to be artists to participate in the course, however, creative building will be an integral part of the curriculum.
Shifting Focus: Video Production and Community Activism
K45.1445 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Mark Read
From the taping of the police beating of Rodney King to the burgeoning growth of Independent Media Centers around the world, video has become an essential tool of social struggle. This course will be a hands-on class in video production in the service of progressive social change. Class time will be used to: examine the biases of corporate-controlled media; learn the theory and history of video activism; develop basic camera and editing skills; and reflect on lessons learned in the field. Outside of class students will break into groups and collaborate with local community organizations in the conception and production of a short video piece, and subsequently strategize with those organizations about how to most effectively use video in their particular struggles. Readings will include selections from Noam Chomsky, Robert McChesney and Thomas Harding.
Urban Policy and Neighborhood Change
K45.1447 4 CR R 2:00-4:45 René Francisco Poitevin
Two questions inspire this course. First, what determines urban policy in NYC? In other words, how does the City of New York determine what kind of economic development it wants and how much it is willing to pay for it? Second, how do NYC neighborhoods – especially poor and minority ones – use the tools of public policy advocacy and participatory research to challenge the dominant "expert-knows-best" model of urban planning to make their voices heard? Working in partnership with community groups in Washington Heights, Harlem, and the South Bronx, we examine the historical, economic and political forces shaping urban policy in NYC today. While working with ongoing campaigns dealing with gentrification and environmental justice, we also explore the research and participatory approaches these organizations use to sustain effective campaigns and organize their communities. Our goal is to develop a nuanced account of how urban development works – and a better understanding of the policy challenges and organizing opportunities confronting community organizations. Readings may include among others, Paolo Freire, Michelle Fine, Ken Reardon, Rinku Sen, Harvey Molotch, Kim Moody, Arlene Davila, Evelyn Gonzalez. Note: This course entails an average of four-to-five hours of fieldwork per week in addition to assigned readings.
Immigrant Rights
K45.1456 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 Aarti Shahani
In the last twenty years immigrants from an ever-increasingly diverse set of countries continue to flood the United States to find work to support their families, as the federal government simultaneously strips these immigrants of their rights as workers and residents of our nation. This course will outline basic immigration patterns in the last century, fundamental changes in the law that have affected these immigrants, including the drastic changes implemented after September 11th, and the ways in which immigrant workers are organizing in the workplace and elsewhere to sustain rights they have and win even more. As field placements, students will be working with immigrant workers’ centers that organize immigrant workers in different industries citywide.
Literacy in Action
K45.1460 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Maura Donnelly
This course combines volunteer work in New York City adult literacy and English as a second language programs with an academic introduction to the philosophy, history, and current issues of basic education. Students will work as volunteer teachers of reading and writing oral English or mentors at such institutions as the University Settlement, International Rescue Committee, and Fortune Society. In class they will read about and discuss such key issues as which “basic skills” U.S. adults now need, which adults lack these skills and why, the implications for our economy, families, communities, and democracy, the instructional approaches developed for adults, and the steps that might be taken to build support for high-quality, adult basic-skills programs. Throughout the course, students will relate such issues to their own on-site experiences in class discussion and role-playing, and create a portfolio of writing that includes on-site observations, lesson plans, reflections, and a final analytical paper. Readings may include Auerbach's Making Meaning, Making Change; Horton and Freire's We Make the Road by Walking; and the journals Focus on Basics and The Change Agent.