This course offers first-hand lessons in urban inequality, neighborhood organizing, economic development, and other issues that you may have studied elsewhere in more conventional classroom settings. Our assignments, lectures, readings, and guest speakers this semester revolve almost entirely around one case-study project: the "Building Bridges" community food assessment in the City of Poughkeepsie. Partnering with the Poughkeepsie Farm Project and other participating organizations, the course will conduct door-to-door surveys and other research to assess the current state of food security in the City of Poughkeepsie.
Since this project promises an extraordinary amount of fieldwork and applied research, the course replaces the usual classroom procedures and requirements with a more hands-on "proseminar" format. After the first week, we will generally spend one of our two weekly meetings in the field conducting class tours and individual fieldwork; for these sessions, students will not "show up for class" in the usual sense. The other weekly meeting will be devoted to presenting and discussing our on-going research, developing and revising our methodology, discussing relevant literature and issues, and doing other classroom work toward our final goal: a final report to be written by the entire class.
Objectives for the course are: (1) to study the promises and problems of community development as they occur in real social settings through our course case study, (2) to learn and practice participant-observation, survey, and interview methods as well as research strategies in organizational evaluation and local collaboration, and (3) to evaluate critically and practically the ways that social researchers study and advance community well-being.
The community food assessment
Roughly speaking, our course project will involve four components:
| First, to identify the specific research needs of the community food assessment, we will interview members of the Building Bridges coalition, attend its advisory group meetings, and absorb prior statements and reports it has released. |
| Second, to assess the current state of food security in the City of Poughkeepsie, we will conduct fieldwork and participant-observation research on the local food system (e.g., at grocery stores, farmers markets, food pantries, local farms) and its broader social/economic/political environment. |
| Third, we will integrate our preliminary analysis with existing research on food security in the City of Poughkeepsie to develop a survey that we will administer door-to-door in a sample of City households. |
| Finally, we will analyze the survey findings and present our analysis and proposals to the Building Bridges coalition in a final report that the class will collectively write. |
Research teams
Students will perform most of the research and analysis in 3-person research teams. Each week, these teams will be assigned particular topics to research, write up, and present to the class by the following week. Team members are welcome to share or divide the following tasks among themselves as they choose, so long as the work gets done to the class’s satisfaction:
Research tasks will vary according to each week’s topics, but they can include observing field sites, participating in programs and other activities associated with the Building Bridges coalition, doing historical-archival research, analyzing ethnographic documents, reviewing existing research and secondary data, conducting interviews, and taking photos.
Writing consists of generating at least 2000 words (roughly 5 pages) of field notes and posting them to Moodle by 5:00 pm the night before you present your fieldwork in class. Field notes should emphasize thorough and thick description of observations and activities; for interviews, they should include as much verbatim quotation as possible. Field notes should also include original photos, whenever taking pictures of the field is possible and appropriate. We will discuss and practice taking field notes throughout the course; suffice it to say that our field notes will comprise a vital source of data that we will refer to and quote from in our final report. Therefore, whatever your team investigates or observes each week must be detailed in depth in your Moodle post so that it can be preserved “for the record.”
Presentations will take place on the first in-class meeting each week. Each team will take 5-10 minutes to summarize their prior week's research and do a little show-and-tell with photos from the field, organizational documents, websites, and other relevant artifacts. Most importantly, teams will (a) present their running hypotheses of how their research addresses the questions of the community food assessment and (b) propose topics and issues for further study by the class.
Each week one team will rotate as the study’s project coordinators, who will work closely with the instructor to ensure that the study is on track and has addressed questions of methodological reliability and validity. The project coordinators’ tasks include consulting the methods literature to help design the study, compiling the running hypotheses and questions for further study from the Moodle posts and classroom discussions, and helping the instructor organize the following week’s topics for team assignment. Additionally, the research team will advise the instructor on how to evaluate the other teams’ work for the week.
Each team will have its own group site on Moodle that only team members and the instructor can access. The instructor will give instructions and advice to each team here; any questions to or follow-up with the instructor should be posted here (so that the other members can share the conversation). Also, teams can use this site to correspond with each other about logistics, share online resources, and exchange writing-in-progress. However, the final version of each team’s weekly field notes should be posted to the class-wide Moodle forums.
Individual responsibilities
Participation: As individuals, you also have several tasks crucial to the success of the study and the class. Students will read all the teams’ field notes as well as assigned readings from textbooks and articles. Students will also post at least a small paragraph in response to each day's assigned readings, reflecting on how they can address, direct, or call into question our research and classroom discussion.
Survey administration: Over the fall break, each student will have a certain number of CFA questionnaires to administer door-to-door in the City of Poughkeepsie. You will be responsible for knocking on the doors of your assigned households, trying again at least once if you get no response, and accurately entering your data into a classwide survey database.
Individual research: Once the survey data are completely gathered (around the next-to-last week of the semester), students will be responsible for analyzing and reporting on survey findings for particular variables. In the last week of classes, students will write analytical essays on selected topics (to be assigned later) that will be compiled into the final report.
At the end of the course, students will turn in a final essay of 5-8 pages length on how they have come to understand the problems and solutions of community development in Poughkeepsie. |
