Immigrants and Refugees

Students are required to work with immigrant/refugees agencies, families, children or cultural organization in the Hartford area once a week in order to understand the different facets of the immigrant experience. Written requirements for the class revolve around integrating these projects with class readings and discussions.
Janet Bauer

Reforming America

All societies change. Some societies recognize the need for improvement, to make themselves more just, more prosperous, more orderly, more efficient.  The United States is unusual in the degree to which, historically, it has welcomed change and entrusted the tasks of social improvement to the organized voluntary (non-government) efforts that are called reform movements.  This country holds no patent on the idea or the practice of social reform, but probably no other country has had so much of its history made by reformers.  "Reforming America" will study the anti-slavery and temperance movements of 1825-1845, and the civil rights and modern women's rights movements of 1955-1975.  We will also bring the record of reform up to the present and into our own experience by examining social reform campaigns going on today in the city around Trinity.  Students will write critical or analytical papers and make oral presentations based on papers. They will also investigate, report on, and possibly get involved in a movement underway in Hartford.  Readings will include protest literature, autobiographies, and works of history and sociology.  Class exercises will include simulated reform "conventions" in which students play the roles of reform activists and debate the issues that movements have confronted.

Eugene Leach    

World Music

A comprehensive survey of global traditions, including village and urban styles of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, India, the Middle East, Indonesia, and Native North America. The course is designed to highlight the central role of musical expression in human life, exploring musical sound and movement in sacred, secular, ritual, and non-ritual contexts. No previous musical knowledge is required, but students are expected to learn basic listening skills and identify musical styles. An intensive community learning component has been added to the course, in the form of a collective fieldwork project with a Hartford musical ensemble, culminating in the production of a concert with the group and a Web-site about the traditions it performs, oral histories of band members, and the local ethnic community it is part of. Students will choose which aspect of the project they wish to work on. The ensemble for the 1999 fall semester is SIN FRONTERAS, a Latin American folkloric group.

Lise Waxer

Health and Human Rights

Health and Human Rights will explore the relationship between human rights violations and health care. This will include topics on ethical use of human research subjects, the health effects of torture and armed conflict, and health effects of poor access to care. Students will participate in community learning at one of three sites. The first is a lead paint safehouse program for children exposed to lead paint. The second is a migrant farmworker school for children of migrant farmworkers. The third is an evaluation and treatment center for refugees suffering from trauma.           

Sarah Raskin

Medical Anthropology

This course covers major topics in medical anthropology, including biocultural analyses of health and disease, the social patterning of disease, cultural critiques of biomedicine, and non-Western systems of healing.  We will explore the major theoretical schools in medical anthropology and see how they have been applied to specific pathologies, life processes, and social responses.  Finally we will explore and critique how medical anthropology has been applied to health care in the United States and internationally.   The course will sensitize students to cultural issues in sickness and health care and provide some critical analytic concepts and tools.

Jim Trostle

Field Research Methods in Anthropology,
This course will acquaint students with a range of research methods commonly used by anthropologists, and with the types of questions and designs that justify their use. It will describe a subset of methods (individual and group interviewing, and observation) in more detail, and give students practice in their use, analysis, and presentation. Through accompanying readings, the course will expose students to the controversies surrounding the practice of ethnography and the presentation of ethnographic authority. Students will conduct group field research projects during the course, and will develop and write up research proposals for projects they themselves could carry out in a summer or semester. The community learning project for this course consists of a research project sponsored by the Trinity Center for Neighborhoods. The class is designing and implementing a study of discharge planning following hospitalization for elderly residents of Hartford. We will use a combination of individual and group interview methods to describe positive and negative cases of discharge planning, and will collect descriptions from professional caretakers, elderly patients, and their families. We will present our results formally at the end of the semester, both orally and in a written report.
Jim Trostle

Community-Campus Exchanges: Linking Theory To Practice
Community-campus partnerships raise important and difficult issues about power, organizational cultures, incentives, needs, and resources. This course will bring students, faculty, and community members together to discuss questions including: What is a community, and in what sense can it be a partner? How can one evaluate the impact and utility of community-campus partnerships? What institutional capacities (e.g., planning, fund-raising, research, training, service) can be developed through collaboration? How? How can qualitative research assess campus and community needs and resources? How do market pressures influence student, faculty, and community interest in collaboration? What models of community-campus exchange exist cross-culturally? The community learning project for this course is a student-designed study of Trinity's own community and neighborhood initiatives. The class has chosen to focus on Trinity's work with public schools and on its broader community development efforts in the neighborhood. We are inviting guests from Trinity and from various neighborhood groups to join class discussions, and will be presenting our results through an oral presentation at the end of the semester and through op-ed pieces written by the students.
Jim Trostle

Environmental Chemistry
Students are required to participate in some ongoing project related to the environment. While Community Learning is not the only way to fulfill this requirement, it is proving popular and it appears that all of the students in the course will be doing this. Each student will spend between 20 and 40 hours over the semester working on a community initiative. At the present time it appears that four students will be working on a health survey of Coltsville Heritage Park residents, two will work with the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice on issues related to the south Hartford incinerator, and four will be working on several DEP projects on continuing programs for children and community groups.
David Henderson

Multiculturalism and Ethnicity in Education
Not exactly a community service learning experience, this class nonetheless requires students to research diversity on the Trinity campus and in the surrounding neighborhood. Working in groups with different student organizations and neighborhood groups, students will first describe 'racialized' experiences at Trinity and later investigate diversity in Trinity's curriculum, extracurricular life, and policies (hiring, admissions and so forth). Students will prepare a collaborative policy report on transforming diversity experiences at Trinity.
Janet Bauer

Writing "Broad Street" Stories
This course combines community learning and writing as a means of discovering how we define ourselves and others through journals, diaries, essays, and stories. Students explore "Broad Street" as a social and cultural metaphor, with a wide variety of readings depicting "the other" and reflecting the voices of members of underprivileged and privileged classes throughout history. Students perform community service as a part of course activities, as we all go out to make a better neighborhood for all of us.
Bob Peltier

Should We Legalize "Victimless Crimes?"
A fresh look at (so-called) victimless crimes - drugs, gambling, prostitution. Are these consensual crimes really victimless? How do they differ from other consensual crimes; for example, corruption and assisted suicide? Should paternalism override individual freedom? What are the relations between consensual crimes and organized crime (gangs, mafia)? What are the policy options? We shall discuss some common readings, conduct a debate, and draft policy proposals. To prepare the debate, students will do a "community learning initiative", involving interviews with lawmakers, law enforcement officials, persons convicted of a consensual crime, and members of advocacy groups (for example, HART- Hartford Activists Rally Together), which recently succeeded in getting the city to close a massage parlor in the neighborhood, and the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union). The persons interviewed will be invited, where possible, to attend the debate.
John Alcorn

Immigration and Ethnicity in 20C America

This course is pairing students with new immigrants one on one. They will talk together for an hour or two each week throughout the semester. The student provides help in learning to speak English and the immigrant will help the student to understand motivations for leaving their home country and what they encountered here. The final project is for each pair to select one part of the immigrant's story to tell, and to present that story in any way they choose -- written narratives, photos, video, etc. At a reception for the students and their immigrant informants at the end of the semester we will present and display these stories. Class discussions throughout the semester will seek to integrate these "real life" experiences into the more analytical and theoretical readings of the course.
Cheryl Greenberg

Senior Seminar
This semester my senior seminar students are studying prejudice and discrimination. They have several CL-type projects. Two most pertinent are: (1) a project during Reading Week in which they will spend time shadowing a "differently-abled" person and seeing the world from this person's perspective. They will write a paper integrating their learning from this experience with course readings (e.g., on institutional and societal forms of discrimination). (2) They will visit one or two companies that have established good records of attracting and retaining a diverse workforce. This project will complement their study of affirmative action.
Sharon Herzberger

Achieving Quality and Integrated Education (and) Colloquium in Education
Because the substantive theme of each course is public school reform and improving public school quality, the community sites are intended to give students direct experience in issues of public education that will complement the academic reading, writing, and discussion of the course. In both of these courses, students are expected to engage in "service learning" (the term I use in the syllabus and in conversations). The student is expected to spend at least two hours per week engaged in tutoring or some other activity with schoolchildren at a specific site within the Hartford Public School system, including charter schools, within-district magnet schools, and innovative programs. Orientation and transportation will be provided. The student is expected to keep regular journal entries about his/her experiences and to write a final summary paper (about 6 pages in length).
David Reuman

Human Neuropsychology
This course incorporates service learning for the third time this semester. Students participate at a variety of sites in the surrounding community. Each setting is chosen to provide the student with the opportunity to interact with individuals who have neurological disorders in a way that not only provides an educational experience for the student, but also allows the student to provide a relevant service. These sites include rehabilitation facilities, schizophrenia treatment units, geriatric units, child neurology departments and adult neurology departments. The students write a weekly description of their experience in an electronic journal that is read by the class. These descriptions include interesting observations, problems, questions, and, most importantly, any ties the student sees to class material. The students will also prepare a set of educational materials to be left with the individuals at the placement site. Finally, students will write an academic paper motivated by an interesting experience observed in the placement site that provides the theoretical basis for a case, a description of a disorder or an analysis of a treatment technique.
Sarah Raskin

Social Problems in American Society
Students are required to spend a total of 10-12 hours (four visits) working in one or more homeless shelters in Hartford. During their visit should do whatever work is needed at the shelter (prepare food; tutor small children; etc. Once they have completed their visits they are required to write a 5-7 page paper that describes their shelter experience and how it relates to issues raised in the readings and in class.
Lori Waite

Sociological Perspectives on Health and Gender
Each student is asked to make a community connection. CL projects may range from Hartford Hospital, Institute of Living, Hispanic Health Council, AIDS Project Hartford etc. Eating disorders, sexual assault, breast and prostate cancer prevention are some of the topics students are considering.
Helen Raisz

The Black Press
The black press is a little-studied part of American literary history, but the pages of its journals show some of the best writing, fiction and non-fiction, that this country has seen.  No one has written a history of the black press or assembled an anthology of the writings.  This means that this amazing African-American literary contribution rarely appears in the classroom.  Students in this class work to correct this shortfall and produce an annotated anthology of the press for Connecticut High Schools. Students have excellent local archival resources - from Trinity's own Watkinson Library and the Connecticut Historical Society to the American Antiquarian Society - to draw from.  The Historical Society, Curbstone Press, the Connecticut Writers Project and Trinity's Community Learning Initiative have combined to bring in experts on the field to speak to our class, the Hartford community and Connecticut school teachers about the black press.  After the speakers present a formal paper, they hold a workshop for the Connecticut teachers on how to bring the black press into the classroom.  The teachers then have the annotated anthology to take with them. And students statewide, we hope, will better understand how historically marginalized communities mount a counter-offensive against those who seek to keep them down.  Our students' work will continue to live on in the hands of teachers of students in Connecticut.
Todd Vogel

Mapping Communities
This first year seminar is an introduction to maps and mapping techniques as a form of rhetoric and analysis.  The community learning component involves having students map aspects of a neighborhood near campus, learn computer skills to map Hartford census data, and work on mapping with middle school students in the Learning Corridor. The class explores how maps and mapping techniques can create and represent visions of community.  For example, how do people use and get distributed across the physical landscape? How do they successfully and unsuccessfully represent this three-dimensional landscape in two-dimensional maps?  And how are maps used in discussions about community, neighborhood, urban development, and other arenas where they figure prominently?  The main goal of this class is that students will learn how maps communicate meaning, and how people describe the content and boundaries of community.  It is hoped that students will become more knowledgeable about and comfortable moving within, the communities surrounding Trinity in Hartford. In addition, it is hoped that neighborhood residents see and interact with Trinity students on their streets and in their schools.  

Jim Trostle

Conservation Biology
One of the requirements for this class is to conduct a community outreach project regarding conservation.  They can visit a classroom, a community group, anything to provide an activity or program regarding some aspect of conservation.  The objective is to get them to get outside the campus sphere and reach out to the community about conservation.  Conservation biologists are not going to make any progress just sitting around and talking to each other about the sorry state of the world.  We must get out and educate and provide information to others.  This project will be a valuable part of the students’ Conservation Biology experience at Trinity.

Alternative Education in the U.S.
Students in this course were responsible for in school placements in one of three sites in area schools. Each of the schools was selected because it represented an innovative alternative. The three sites used were The Breakthrough Charter School, a PK-7 Hartford Magnet School located on Cornwall Street; The Montessori School, a K-6 Inter-District Magnet School located in the Learning Corridor Complex; and The Sports Science Academy, an alternative High School Program located in downtown Hartford.  At each of the sites the Principal of the school met with students to provide a general introduction to the school and ways in which the model reflects an alternative to traditional education.  Subsequently, students participated in twelve hours of observation and participation in the alternative schools. Early in the semester we discussed the elements that needed to be included in the development of a proposal for an alternative school.  The field placements provided a first-hand opportunity for students to ask questions of professionals who had considered similar questions in their own proposals.  In addition, the students were able to assist teachers in their classrooms and in one case in an after-school program. Students addressed the rationale supporting the alternative, sources of funding, the application process, and evaluation.  The final assignment for this class involves the preparation and presentation of a proposal for an alternative school to address a specific educational need.
Barbara Henriques

InterArts 201

In this semester there are 10 students split up into three different groups, each group of three or four doing an internship at a different community arts organization: Real Art Ways, the Craftery, or Artists Collective. Each student works three hours a week at her/his arts organization, both as a way of getting to know that organization and to pay their dues for further study of how that organization works and what it works to do. Ultimately each group has to write an essay which articulates the interrelationships between art, identity, and community which their particular arts organization attempts to construct and maintain, and assesses how successful their organization is at doing what it wants to do, being what it wants to be. These analyses accompany and complement other more conventionally academic work: readings in the sociology of art, and case studies of particular relationships between art making, appreciation, and particular identities and communities, from opera in the nineteenth-century American to contemporary prison art today, and from beebop in the 1940's and 1950's to Black feminist Toni Cade Bambara's exemplary life as artist and activist.
Fred Pfeil

Writing 101

In this writing section, we practice a variety of interactive forms of writing, including e-mail correspondence with Hartford Public High School students, in-class informal writing and peer response, online discussion board writing on assigned topics, and a final writing project that incorporates electronic dialogue, reading, discussion, and experience related to our principal topic: adolescent life issues. Weekly e-mail prompts are provided to the Trinity students, and readings focus on the social and rhetorical purposes of writing as well as four interdisciplinary and cross-cultural sub-topics: what is adolescence, adolescent relationship, adolescent education, and youth culture. Trinity and Hartford students meet three times during the semester, once to meet and choose e-mentoring partners, once to see a film that they can then write to one another about, and once to celebrate their connections. (plans for Trinity and Hartford students to peer review writing on a short story they have all read have not yet materialized, and probably won't in this semester). Trinity Students will peer review and select final writing projects for publication in a proposed Trinity College online journal entitled "Writing Matters." The objectives are for Hartford and Trinity students to use writing as a means of understanding and negotiating differences, for Trinity students to learn the academic and social goals of Hartford students through a personal connection with socially and academically engaged college students.
Ellen Wittmann

Prostitution and Pornography
This course is an examination of some of the central philosophical issues that underlie debate about the sex industry in this country. As part of their course work, students will be developing community learning projects that bring together their theoretical studies with practical work in Hartford that will be useful to various groups in the community. One such project will involve students working with the Human Services office at the Community Court, where all prostitution cases are handled. Another such project will be mapping of sex-work related crime statistics. Students will also be investigating the way in which Hartford's approach to sex-work related businesses, in contrast with the approach of other municipalities, focuses on "quality of life" issues, and will be exploring the impact this approach has on those involved in and victimized by the sex industry.
Jessica Spector

Methods of Research

This course is a graduate-level Public Policy course that meets one evening a week. The course has focused on the question "Who Rules Hartford". Each of the ten students has chosen an influential person, organization or event in Hartford to write on for their first, descriptive, case study paper. Topics including the controversy around Police Chief Barrows, City Charter Revision, the impact of bank mergers on bank-community relations, and the impact of managed care on Hartford health policy. For a second paper most students will either interview people associated with the topic of their first paper, or conduct a survey to illuminate some aspect of the Hartford political process. Guest speakers in the class have included Nick Carbone, a former Deputy Mayor; Jack Minmaugh, a community organizer; and Susan Haigh, a political reporter. Daniel Sibirsky, the Kellogg Evaluator will also introduce the students to focus groups by leading one with them on their feelings about Hartford. Finally, some of the students will be pre-testing a survey instrument designed by Dr. Hughes, in collaboration with the Trinity Center for Neighborhoods and the Mega-Cities Project, to measure the opinions of influential members of the Hartford community.
James Hughes

Analyzing Schools 
This course introduces the study of schooling within an interdisciplinary framework. Drawing upon sociology, we investigate the resources, structures, and social contexts which influence student opportunities and outcomes in the United States and other countries. Drawing upon psychology, we contrast theories of learning, both in the abstract and in practice. Drawing upon philosophy, we examine competing educational goals and their underlying assumptions regarding human nature, justice, and democracy. In addition, a community learning component, where students observe and participate in nearby K-12 classrooms for three hours per week, will be integrated with course readings and written assignments.
Jack Dougherty

Education and Technology

Schools and colleges have invested billions of dollars in computer technology, but how do we evaluate its effectiveness and hidden costs? Who designs technology and how does it reflect their values and beliefs? Who has access to computers and how are they actually used in our society? Students will explore these questions, critically evaluate software products, and engage in community learning placements to research how technology has shaped the context of schooling.

Barbara Henriques

Cities, Suburbs, and Schools

How did city dwellers' dreams of better schooling, along with public policy decisions in housing and transportation, contribute to the rise of suburbia in the twentieth century? How do city-suburban disparities affect teaching and learning in classrooms today? What promise do Sheff v O'Neill remedies for racial isolation, such as magnet schools at the Learning Corridor, hold for the future? Students will investigate these questions while developing their skills in oral history, ethnographic fieldwork, and geographical information system (GIS) software. Community learning experiences will be integrated with seminar readings and research projects.

Jack Dougherty

Race, Class, and Educational Policy

How do competing theories explain educational inequality? How do different policies attempt to address it? Topics include economic and cultural capital, racial identity formation, desegregation, multiculturalism, detracking, school choice, school-family relationships, and affirmative action. Student groups will expand upon the readings by proposing, implementing, and presenting their research analysis from a community learning project.  
Jack Dougherty

Curriculum: Theory, Policy, and Practice

What should be taught in schools and who has the right to make that decision? How do different theories of learning shape curriculum policy and development? How might the trend toward national curriculum standards influence classroom instruction and assessment? What role do interest groups play in shaping curriculum at the local, state, national, and international levels? For the community learning component, students will design, teach, and evaluate curriculum modules in cooperation with neighborhood afterschool programs.

Barbara Henriques