This course is designed with an alternative pedagogy at its core–that of service learning (SL). It is based on research demonstrating that doing, combined with reading and listening, is a powerful way to enhance learning. Parallel to the physical sciences laboratories, where theories are tested and principles are demonstrated, it is in the community where social theories are tested and principles about human interactions are realized. Through the experience of interaction and reflection, students learn to apply knowledge and skills in the real world, exercise critical thinking, develop self learning and helping skills, develop societal knowledge and sensitivity, and enhance personal development.
This course is designed for Honors. It is also designed as a capstone class in the Honors Theme. The objectives of the course are:
To investigate how global issues discussed in the other Honors Theme classes translate into the local community;
To investigate, participate in, and reflect upon, a community empowerment experience;
To identify areas of community need for empowerment that integrate skills through service learning such as economic and computer literacy skills, research and writing skills, interpersonal skills, leadership skills, and presentation skills;
To apply service learning and the sociological imagination to better understand the social and ethical implications of accelerated social change on us as social actors, engaged in a community.
Learning outcomes:
Articulation of the meaning of service learning and social responsibility
Knowledge of human-service settings and relationship to society
Identification of skill competencies and needs
Understanding the relationship between theory and practice and concomitant benefits to help community
Identification of ways to integrate service with life
This class is organized around the following General Education objectives:
This course fulfills requirements for area D1 of GE. It deals with issues critical to the individual within society.
This course provides examples of core sociological concepts.
This course investigates the effects of national and global forces on social institutions, on your life, and on the lives of other individuals and groups.
REQUIRED READING
Custom reader (which we will refer to as your text ) available at the A.S. Bookstore.
Packet of articles provided in class.
Any specific readings requested by guest lecturers.
COURSE GRADES:
Grades will be based on the following required work:
Class Participation 10%
Background and Action Plan 10%
Field notes 20%
Weekly Papers 20%
Final Paper 20%
Final Presentation 20%
100%
Class Participation. To do well in this class, it is not enough to simply read, take notes, and regurgitate material. This class is designed to be a combination of lecture and discussion. Heavy emphasis is placed on discussing pertinent issues presented in the lecture and reading material. In order to achieve the goals outlined at the beginning of this syllabus (and to keep class interesting and lively), you will need to think about, consider, develop, and express opinions about the material, and make applications of it to the real world. This does not just mean answering questions when asked. You are expected to attend class and contribute to a meaningful dialogue about the material. Thus, for this class, participation means raising new issues or points of view, actively listening to other students, sharing examples, asking questions of the class as a whole to discuss and consider, interacting with visiting faculty, and helping to create a supportive learning environment. After each class period, we will take notes on each student s participation for that day. Once during the semester, and again at the end, your in-class participation will be evaluated. Quality daily participation in class will earn you an A on this evaluation. It should be well-noted that repeatedly talking while others are speaking, sleeping during class, doing other homework, disrupting class by arriving late/leaving early, and/or showing general signs of disrespect to classmates and instructors will have a severely negative impact on a participation grade. It should also be obvious that you cannot contribute quality participation to class if you are repeatedly absent.
Service Learning Project: Background and Action Plan. Students will share information on their service project with everyone in the class. In an oral presentation, students will describe their action plan, a profile and history of the agency/program with which they have chosen to work, an historical overview of the community s need addressed by the agency/program, and how the macro concepts such as those stated in Unit 6 are reflected locally. These reports will require research in the library and in the field. To help your audience follow your presentation, we encourage you to use a variety of instructional aides, including overheads, handouts, video, etc.
Field Notes. Reflection is the very heart of service learning. It is a cluster of skills, involving observation, asking questions, and putting facts, ideas, and experiences together to add new meaning. As much care must be given to the quality and significance of the reflection as is given to the service activity itself. Reflection is most effective when it is done before, during, and after service activities. To this end, you will learn effective ethnographic methods, including writing useful field notes. These notes will include personal and descriptive components, and will provide you with a reflective record of ongoing events, observations, and ideas for your final project.
Weekly Writing Assignments. As honors students you will be expected to write rigorous weekly papers that explore the week s topic and require you to apply concepts and theoretical perspectives from class to your experiences in the field and, at times, to your personal life.
Final Paper. You will end the semester by writing a ten-page paper analyzing the social forces that have created the need you are trying to address. You will evaluate the impact of the contributions you and your partner/organization have made to meet that need, as well as the obstacles you encountered.
Final Presentation. In this presentation, you will creatively illustrate one specific facet of what you learned in the course of completing your project. You may perform a skit, do a demonstration, have the class play a game, or use some other form of artistic expression the possibilities are endless! Whatever you choose to do, it should be creative and distinctly different from your final paper.
You need to keep a copy of every assignment you hand in or email to us. Also, save all your graded work until you get your final grade.
If you have any special needs in terms of completing the graded work, please speak to one of us after class or in one of our offices within the first two weeks of the semester so that special arrangements can be made.
WRITING POLICY
All work turned in should follow the guidelines listed below:
Your assignments should be free of typographical and grammatical errors. Proofread for both! If there are too many errors, you will be asked to redo the paper and/or to visit the Writing Center at Taylor 107.
Your assignments should be clearly written. Organize your thoughts as you write and edit your drafts. Your papers should have a thesis statement, a body that supports your thesis, and a conclusion.
Do not plagiarize. Any time you borrow someone else s ideas or information, you MUST CITE them. Additionally, if you borrow their exact (or nearly exact) words, you must quote and cite them.
Any work you hand in must be typewritten, double-spaced, with 1" margins. Pages should be numbered and stapled together. Hand-written work will not be accepted; this includes your weekly papers as well as your fieldnotes.
Staple a cover page to the beginning of your paper. It should include the paper s title, your name, the course, and the date.
ATTENDANCE POLICY
Attendance is crucial to doing well in this class: you will only learn the skills offered in this course if you are present in class and actively participating. Further, it is departmental policy that attendance is mandatory in all sociology classes.
COMMENTS ON THE MEANING OF LETTER GRADESAt the university level it is a distinct honor to earn the grade of A. It is especially an honor to earn this as an overall final course grade. The grade of A is the highest recognition and commendation there is at the university classroom level. Its use in this course will be in that spirit, consistent with the traditional meaning of "Excellence."
The following scale is used in determining letter grades:
98-100%A+
93-97% A
90-92% A-
87-89% B+
83-86% B
80-82% B-
77-79% C+
73-76% C
70-72% C-
67-69% D+
63-66% D
60-62% D-
(Note that for final course grades, the university does not allow grades of A+ or D-).
TENTATIVE SCHEDULE AND READING ASSIGNMENTS
The schedule that follows is a map of the semester. Topics are listed in the general order in which they will be covered. We have not assigned topics to specific dates, however, in order to give us the maximum flexibility to spend longer on the more popular topics, invite guest speakers, discuss important issues that arise in your service learning projects, consider current events, etc.
Readings are as follows. Reading assignments will be made in class one week in advance. You should complete the readings BEFORE class on the assigned date. Unless otherwise indicated, readings are found in your text on the page indicated.
UNIT 1 INTRODUCTION TO SERVICE LEARNING
All readings for Unit 1 are in your packet
Furco, Service Learning: A Balanced Approach to Experiential Education
Rifkin, Jeremy, A Civil Education for the 21st Century: Preparing Students for a Three-Sector Society.
Bennion Center, University of Utah, Educating the Good Citizen for the 21st Century: Service-Learning in Higher Education
Cone, Service-Learning as Contested Territory
Service-Learning hand-outs: definitions, best practices, etc.
UNIT 2 THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
Jennes, Hate Crimes in the United States: The Transformation of Injured Persons into Victims and the Extension of Victim Status to Multiple Constituencies, p. 1
Manis, Assessing the Seriousness of Social Problems, p. 30Katz and Jhally, The National Conversation in the Wake of Littelton is Missing the Mark, p. 46
Eitzen and Baca Zinn, A Progressive Plan to Solve Society s Social Problems, p. 51
Mills, The Promise, p. 78
Ritzer, The Credit Card: Private Troubles and Public Issues, p. 90
UNIT 3 SOCIAL CHANGE AND EMPOWERMENT
Marx, External Efforts to Damage or Facilitate Social Movements: Some Patterns, Explanations, Outcomes, and Complications, p. 109
Gurwitt, Nobody in Charge, p. 125
MacCoun and Reuter, Does Europe Do It Better? Lessons from Holland, Britain, and Switzerland p. 136
Massing, Beyond Legalization: New Ideas for Ending the War on Drugs, p. 144
Coontz, The Way We Weren t, p. 165
Ryan, Blaming the Victim, p. 174
McIntosh, White Privilege and Male Privilege, p. 196
Nieves, Homeless on $50,000 A Year in Luxuriant Silicon Valley, p. 213
UNIT 4 THE EFFECTS OF HELPING
Gurwitt, Death of a Neighborhood, p. 218
Chew, Global Trafficking in Women: Some Issues and Strategies, p. 230
UNIT 5 COMMUNITY
Putnam, Chapter 1 from Bowling Alone (in your class packet)
Brooks, 0% Unemployment, p. 240
Sadasivam, Community Justice: West Bengal s Women Draw on Village Tradition to Stop Domestic Violence, p. 247
Perkins and Wechsler, Perceived College Drinking Norms and Its Impact on Alcohol Abuse: A Nationwide Study, p. 255
UNIT 6 SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
Wilson, The Political Economy and Racial Tensions, p. 267
Eddings, The Covert Color War, p. 286
Flynt, Rural Poverty in America, p. 292
Snow and Anderson, The Subculture of Street Life, p. 300
Weinberger, Race and Gender Wage Gaps in the Market for Recent College Graduates, p. 328
Bradshaw and Wallace, An Unequal World, p. 341
UNIT 7 SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
McKissak, Cyberghetto: Blacks are Falling Through the Internet, (in your packet)
Rifkin, God in the Lab Coat, p. 364
Oppenheimer, The Computer Delusion, p. 372
Rifkin, Fears of A Brave New World, (in your packet)
UNIT 8 TERRORISM
Staples, The Culture of Surveillance, p. 398
The Economist, The New Terrorism: Coming Soon to a City Near You, p. 414
Homer-Dixon, Environmental Scarcity, Mass Violence, and the Limits to Ingenuity, p. 423
UNIT 9 MAKING OUR CONTRIBUTIONS: REFLECTIONS ON AND SELF-EVALUATIONS OF PROJECTS
IMPORTANT DATES
March 19 - Background and Action Plan Presentations
March 26 - No class Spring Break!!
May 14 -Final Presentations AND Final Papers Due!!
May 23 – Final Presentations 2-3:50 pm
