Focus of the Course

Each of the collegium courses have different learning outcomes associated with them. For IDS 3302, the overriding objective is that learners (i.e., you) will understand the concept of community, recognize the needs and interests that form and disrupt communities and apply that knowledge in their analysis of contemporary issues. This is no small undertaking.

To get started, we will need to ponder the meaning of community for Americans living at the end of the 20th century. Robert Reich's The Work of Nations provides an intellectual history of the economic and political forces that have formed and disrupted communities in the United States. The thrust of Reich's analysis is that the United States is increasingly divided between a minority of well paid symbolic analysts and a majority of production workers and in-person service providers. Nationalism is often about a shared national destiny. In light of deepening economic and political divisions, Reich wonders whether there is a shared national destiny that unites all or even most Americans.

How should be respond to these growing socio-economic divisions? Should we expand public investment in non-symbolic analysts? Should we limit the size of government in the hope that economic growth will eventually lift all boats? What course has the Clinton administration steered with respect to these issues?

The questions that Reich raises concern not only abstract public policy questions, but also the public world in which all of us live. It is important to examine the public realm since this is where communities are both formed and disrupted. What kind of public realm do we get in the wake of deepening socioeconomic divisions? In answering this question, we look at the number of regions in the United States: St. Louis, Los Angeles, Tucson, and Lee County, Florida. There are a variety of questions to consider as we examine these communities. For example, how does the built environment within each create the public spaces in which particular forms of community take shape? Might we consider these communities as a reflection of the broader socio-economic trends discussed in Reich? Or do they display a different dynamism?

These concerns will lead us to consider the nature of civil society in the United States. Civil society is that sphere of public engagement between government and the market place where people in their capacity of citizens take part in public affairs. A great deal has been written lately about the decline of civil society in the United States. We will consider some of this literature. But we will also inquire into the way in which communities organize themselves for change. Students will examine a range of case studies across a variety of fields (environment, media, family, health, etc.) in order to discern the manner in citizens attempt to transform their communities for the better.

As a whole, then, the course shifts from the global to the local, that is, from the consequences of globalization to the dynamics of community organizing. Globalization established indispensably important context for understanding community. Efforts at community organizing demonstrate the ways in which people, as members of communities, come to terms with the kind of world globalization has engendered.

Nature of the Course

This class meets once a week. The other half of our class activities will take place over the Internet - in particular, they will occur through WebBoard postings. These postings typically ask you to apply ideas into the course readings to a particular scenario or hypothetical situation.

When we meet on Tuesdays our focus will be preparing you to do the WebBoard activities by means of discussing and clarifying the key ideas in the course readings. I expect that you will have done all of the course readings scheduled for a given week by the time we meet on Tuesday morning. The WebBoard assignments will form a third of your grade. The other two thirds will be accounted for by the mid-term essay, the community involvement project, a photo essay, and a case study analysis. Each of these major assignments is discussed following the section on grading.

Collegium

This course is part of the Collegium of Integrated Learning and is required for the B.A. in Liberal Studies. Students and faculty will work together to investigate selected contemporary political/economic issues and problems and how they have developed across time. Individually and in teams, students will develop intellectual histories of an issue or problem. These histories will require building an integrated context by examining issues through the perspectives and methods of knowing in the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. Organized in interdisciplinary ways and problem-based, the course will stress engaged learning. Students will be expected to formulate their own interpretations and responses to the issues. Consequently, success in the course will rely heavily on critical, creative, systematic, and collaborative thinking and the sophisticated use of communication, information, and technological skills.