Allegheny College has launched a minor to engage students, faculty, and community partners in theoretical and practical inquiry about the nature of citizenship, service-learning, and democracy. This interdisciplinary academic program will allow students to understand social action and its ethics intellectually as well as practically. The minor with roots in the psychology, philosophy, and economics departments strengthens the curricular layer of Allegheny’s already deep commitment to the Crawford County community.
“”Values, Ethics, and Social Action”" (VESA) will make the primacy of education for citizenship more explicit for students, faculty, and community partners. With support from the Demmler Fellowship, which funds faculty initiatives in academic program enhancement, six VESA faculty engaged in course development. Rather than scattered, unconnected efforts in service-learning and social justice, VESA offers a coherent course of progressive study that connects the disciplines as it encourages students to explore citizenship and values. Students must complete six courses, including interdisciplinary introduction and Capstone seminars (all of which include a substantial service-learning component). Other courses explore issues of wealth, poverty, politics, ethics, community, behavior, environmental justice, moral theology, gender, and diversity. Students enrolled in the minor must complete experiential learning components to accompany classroom learning: a service-related internship and 84 hours of community service. Students will be placed in various agencies addressing issues of poverty, education, welfare, and teen pregnancy with at-risk children and youth, the elderly, and adults. The joint aspects of this theoretical and practical learning will attempt to move students from talking about justice to promoting it, from debating about good citizenship to living it, and from community service to social action.
Engagement in our community and significant reflection in the classroom helps students understand what it means to value citizenship in a democratic community. VESA enhances students abilities to think critically about social systems, with the community service component acting as a laboratory in which they are led to confront their assumptions and learn problem-solving skills in the context of socially meaningful work that addresses real community concerns. In a time of increasing social problems and scarce resources for social programs, students can supply much needed ideas, skills, and time to meet community challenges. Likewise, by working in partnership with local non-profit agencies, we can offer our students opportunities for learning about and contributing to our shared community in a way that is grounded in realism as well as academically rich. VESA demonstrates to our community that Allegheny’s commitment to the common good is linked in vital ways to our educational mission and that we are proud to engage in mutually beneficial partnerships with our neighbors.
Contact person: Elizabeth Weiss Ozorak, Associate Professor of Psychology and VESA Coordinator, eozorak {at} allegheny(.)edu
On the web: http://webpub.allegheny.edu/group/interdis/VESA.html
