20%
40%
20%
20%
Special Note:
Academic accommodations are available for students with disabilities who are registered with the Office of Disability and Support Services. Please schedule an appointment with the instructor early in the semester to discuss any accommodations for this course which have been approved by the Director of Disability and Support Services as indicated in your DSS accommodation letter.
Sometimes, the struggle in community development revolves around getting residents to invest their energies and sentiments in their neighborhoods. So it is with participation in this class; students and instructor have to take full responsibility for making the mental and emotional effort needed for our unstructured group collaboration to succeed. You are required to regularly attend class meetings on campus, take part in class discussions, and do the assigned readings (including other students' field briefs). Missing more than two days will hurt your participation grade.
Attendance also entails spending sufficient time in the field doing your fieldwork. On several days, class will not meet so you can use classtime on your individual fieldwork. While this gives you flexibility as to when you actually do fieldwork -- i.e., it need not be performed during regularly scheduled classtime hours -- fieldwork must nevertheless be conducted before the next class meeting and during valid neighborhood hours (for instance, not on Sunday nights).
Field briefs comprise the qualitative data we will discuss in class and analyze in our final report. Students are required to write eight briefs throughout the semester, choosing from ten of the following fieldwork opportunities as the field brief topic:
Each brief should be at least three single-spaced pages in length, which corresponds to roughly one to two hours of fieldwork. Briefs are to be formatted in order to feature three sections that are clearly separated from each other:
1. Thick description. This section relates the settings and activities you observed in the field. Be sure to include basic description of the setting: location, layout of room and people, numbers and kinds of people present, sequence of events, even dialogue (use quotes only if you're very sure your memory is accurate). Stick to objective description without implicit analysis (for example, "the man's voice got louder and more emphatic as he addressed the agency coordinator" and NOT "the man got upset as he yelled at the agency coordinator").2. Running hypotheses. This section explains how you understand what you observed in the field. Here you may interpret your observations based on prior fieldwork by yourself or others, other field data (e.g., newspapers, organizational documents), readings in class, and/or knowledge from other classes; be sure to reference these sources whenever they support your hypotheses. Among other things, you should consider how well the 2-block target area is represented in the groups and settings you observe (by race, class, education, income, activities, jobs, etc.), and conversely what kinds of groups are not well represented. Doubtless you will need to make assumptions in your running hypotheses; try to make the bases for you assumptions as explicit as possible.
3. Questions and topics for further investigation. This section is very important. Here you articulate questions and topics provoked by your observations that you want to investigate further; even if you in fact never do this; because students will be reading each other's field briefs, another student might put this section to use. These questions and topics may simply provide information that could validate some of the assumptions you made in your running hypotheses. More ambitiously, they could point to hidden dynamics or better understandings of the very problems this class is studying.
The centerpiece of this class is the report we will prepare and deliver to Hudson River Housing. To this end, you will be responsible for creating a set of survey questions and conducting a number of surveys to residents in Poughkeepsie, the results of which will comprise the analysis in our report. Furthermore, each student will need to do some follow-up research, writing and analysis for our report to come to fruition; your specific tasks will be determined as the need for them arises.
Each student will write a paper of 5-8 page length on how you have come to understand the problems and solutions of community development in Poughkeepsie. Address the readings, data, and topics of discussion presented in class as much as possible. This paper will be due on May 14th; e-mail it to lenevarez@vassar.edu.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|