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Honors College
Duquesne will devote one of its Honors College
seminars (all Honors College students, whatever
their discipline, are required to take such a
seminar at some point in their undergraduate program)
in the fall 2000 semester to the subject of Community
and University. The seminar will focus on the
communities of the Hill District and Uptown. Dr.
Evan Stoddard, Associate Dean of the McAnulty
College and Graduate School
of Liberal Arts, will lead the seminar, which
will take the form of a service-learning course,
largely constructed on the specific interests
of the students who enroll. (Seventeen students
are enrolled to date.) In marketing the course
to students, Dr. Stoddard described the course
as follows:
Being involved in the
life of the community, what people are calling
civic engagement, is one important mark of an
educated person in a democratic society. More
practically, whether you plan to become a teacher,
a scientist, a business leader, a lawyer, or a
Peace Corps volunteer, your career and life choices
will shape and be shaped by community realities.
This cross-disciplinary seminar begins with an
analysis of needs in the community around Duquesne,
explores implications for the disciplines represented
in the seminar and uses customized readings to
learn how professionals are helping solve important
societal problems. Students will have the opportunity
to develop their own recommendations for future
community involvement at Duquesne. We will also
document what we learn to assist others who are
interested in forging links between universities
and their communities.
Sequence of Activities
The course will meet twice weekly for fifteen
weeks. The initial task will be to assess the
interests and skills of the students who are members
of the seminar and their own learning objectives
for the course. Next will be to assist them to
become familiar with and, eventually, immersed
in understanding the needs and concerns of the
communities, and to achieve some understanding
of what community residents, the university, and
others are doing to address those needs. Finally,
students will be asked to identify ways in which
they can use their growing professional abilities
to help address community needs and concerns,
and to find ways to do so in an effort both to
assist the community and to enrich their own ability
to apply their knowledge and skills to service
outside the academy.
Products to be Developed
and Impact Objectives
It is impossible to predict what the specific
products of the seminar will be, because they
will depend on the interests and expertise of
the participants, as those relate to needs in
the community. There will be products, but their
exact nature will not be evident until well into
the semester. There will also be impacts, both
in the community and in the students. While it
is not possible at this point to predict the impacts
on the community, an important objective of the
course will be to increase the participants civic
engagement, engagement in and for the betterment
of the community, and to find satisfaction in
that engagement. Success on that factor will be
measured by students anonymous responses to the
course.
Contact: Dr. Evan Stoddard or
call 396-5179
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