Professor Kate Cammack'S DRUGS AND BEHAVIOR
This course examines features of different drug classes, using pharmacological, biological, psychological and sociocultural perspectives. It identifies micro- and macro-level factors that contribute to vulnerability and resilience to drug abuse, and it examines evidence-based and experimental approaches to addiction treatment. Students collaborate with a community partner to identify and apply evidence-based approaches to drug education programming. The service learning project is designed to help advance students’ critical thinking and real world problem solving, view complex phenomena from multiple perspectives, and develop transferable skills that apply to the outside world. Students work to understand community goals/needs related to drug education and prevention, and they apply course concepts/ideas to these community goals/needs. As their service project, students’ design a set of evidence-based infographics on various substance-related issues relevant to a nearby community, with an addendum that contains data-driven rationale and references.
PROFESSOR Jennifer Matthews'S Grassroots Theatre: Theatre as Civic Engagement
In this course, students work with local community stakeholders and members to create theatre performances based on subjects important to the community partners. Through interviews, story circles, and improvisational theatrical techniques, students create short works of documentary theatre for public performance in the community. Through the project, students learn about the creative process through experience. Using devised theatre techniques, students collectively create a performance. In preparation, they study examples of community engaged performance, analysing various examples to discern the best model for creating this type of work. The creative process helps students to gain respect for the dignity and empowerment of others and a reverent concern for the world. By creating art with input from community partners, students engage with community-based dialogue, problem solving, and civic collaboration, all skills needed for full participation in a complex democratic society.
Professor Willis’s The Many Faces of Sewanee
Community engagement in this course is manifested in what the students read about earlier peoples, institutions, customs, and events—both in Sewanee and beyond. Through excursions, students assess the interactions of human and natural systems; how and why people live as they do in this area; and how local communities have changed over time. Students conduct research on some aspect of local life, conducting at least one oral interview with a member of the community. The interviewed community partners provide unique details about earlier times and help students understand contested topics. Through their research, students develop skills for interpreting the past, and they form human connections to the place and its people. Students present their research to their peers, and their final papers are placed in the University Archives to support future research (or curiosity) about Sewanee.
EXAMPLES OF COMMUNITY ENGAGED LEARNING FROM PAST YEARS
PROFESSOR O’CONNOR’S INTRODUCTION TO ANTHROPOLOGY
Students are required to spend 10 hours "on site" in the community. At the end of the semester, they write a five to seven page paper that applies anthropology to their experience in the community. Some projects are unique [e.g. coaching youth soccer] but most are through local organizations including Folks at Home, the Sewanee Senior Citizens Center, or the Cowan After-School program.
Students use anthropological theories and methods to analyze their community-engagement experiences and thereby gain a better understanding of the goals and methods of anthropology. In this course, the service placement is used, beyond the help it provides community partners, as a means to provide students with ethnographic data, which they then analyze as a way to understand what it would mean to generate and justify anthropological insights about their engagement with community partners and their clients.
PROFESSOR SCHNEIDER’S POLITICS OF POVERTY
This class has an orientation similar to Professor O’Connor’s class but differs in that the students in the class actually organize activities designed to help the clients of a local community group.
For the Politics of Poverty course, the community-engagement component consists of students programming activities and events for, and mentoring a group of, about 30 children from three to 18 years old who participate with their grandparents in the Grandparents Raising Grandchildren program of the Franklin County Prevention Coalition. Programming includes 'College Day' at the University for middle-school- and high-school-aged children, attendance (along with grandparents) at a Sewanee Performing Arts Series performance, modules on bullying issues for the younger children, a "Fall Fest" for the younger children and several other activities.
Because almost all of the students at the University of the South have little to no exposure to populations living at or below the poverty line, interacting with the participants of Grandparents Raising Grandchildren (GRG) is essential to helping students understand the challenges and hurdles faced by lower-income Americans. These challenges include: access to adequate food with good nutritional value, challenges of learning disabilities in educational settings, childhood trauma, substandard housing, poor educational opportunities and outcomes, unemployment and underemployment, interfacing with the criminal justice system and alternative schools, domestic violence, drug and alcohol dependency and other social problems and issues that disproportionately affect low income Americans. Unfortunately, all of these issues and problems are represented in one or more members of the population of the GRG group.
When students observe in "real life" what they are learning about in texts, they seriously engage the material realizing they are learning about issues, public policy decisions and political conflict that directly affects the lives of people they know. They easily make connections between what they see and hear about from GRG participants on the one hand, and what they have learned about the evolution of social welfare policy in the United States, and current conflicts and debates on the other hand.
