U R B A N . C U R R I C U L A R . I N I T I A T I V E S

The following feature story appeared in the campus publication Mosaic in December, 1996. Although some of the courses, students, and faculty members referenced in the story may have changed in the meantime, it still provides a full and accurate picture of the Urban Curricular Initiative. For the most current course information and faculty listing, we encourage you to visit the Cities homepage.

Urban Curricular Initiatives

Curricular connections to a capital city

Cities have long been places of wonder and woe, representing both the best and worst of humanity. Trinity's "hometown," Hartford, is typical of this urban complexity. A capital city, it is a seat of political power. It harbors a rich cultural vitality and a trove of New England's heritage. Although weathering some tough times, it is still the source of considerable economic power. At the same time, Hartford, like many other cities across the nation, confronts a complex array of social and economic challenges.

Recognizing both educational opportunities and its civic and social responsibilities, Trinity, over the years, has established a number of important ties to Hartford that draw on its resources and help address its problems. Internships, field-work research, cultural explorations, and community-outreach programs - these are but a few of the ways in which Trinity sustains its involvement in the city.

From this legacy of urban engagement, Trinity has recently developed, with the support of the Pew Charitable Trusts, an ambitious Urban Curricular Initiative (UCI) that makes even more extensive use of Hartford as an educational resource while recognizing both the increasing importance of urban studies and the urgent need to attend to urban problems.

UCI consists of four key components - The Cities Program, Urban Issues Forums, Hartford-Based Specialists Resource Network, and Urban Course Additions. These components are complemented by two programs (not funded by the Pew grant) - CityTerm and the Community Learning Initiative - that strengthen Trinity's extraordinary partnership with Hartford.

The Cities Program

Billed as "an innovative, non-major program that examines cities - past, present, and future - in all their extraordinary variety and complexity," the Cities Program was launched this semester, enrolling 31 first-year students who were selected on the basis of their strong academic qualifications and interest in urban topics. Currently, the students are taking "Reckoning with Cities: Issues and Insights," taught by Senior Lecturer in Women's Studies and Public Policy Adrienne Fulco. The program's equivalent of a First-Year Seminar, the course provides a variety of perspectives on urban life by "focusing on the real experiences people have had with the city over time," according to Fulco.

Saying that she "absolutely loves the program," Karen von Hardenberg '00 especially enjoys the course as "a way of integrating different areas of learning - history, sociology, economics, literature - and studying how people interacted in urban environments." Although she discovered that her interest in the course is leading her straight to a major in public policy, von Hardenberg's comment suggests that the program is compatible with many majors.

Associate Academic Dean J. Ronald Spencer, director of the program, says it was designed by an interdisciplinary group of faculty to "provide a distinctive angle of vision to examine a wide array of topics central to a liberal arts education." The courses the program requires suggest its considerable depth of field. In the spring, students will take "The Development of Urban Life, Antiquity to 1900," which will present an expansive historical and cultural panorama, and "The City as Built Environment," which will examine cities from the vantage point of architecture and urban planning.

In the sophomore year, students will enroll in three courses in the program: "Twentieth-Century Perspectives on the City," "The City Imagined: Visual and Literary Representations of Urban Life," and "Social Science Approaches to the City." They will complete the program as either juniors or seniors by choosing among several options, including CityTerm, a course on the history of Hartford, an independent project, or urban study while abroad.

Urban Issues Forums

Political columnist George Will '62 often laments that Americans now view cities more as burdens than as sources of cultural creativity and social vitality. The Urban Issues Forums could be considered a town-hall gathering to address just that perception. Presenting interactive panel discussions and nationally known urban authorities like William Julius Wilson and Robert D. Putnam, the Forums have focused on urban politics and policy; race and poverty in American cities; and, most recently, rebuilding communities and cities. The Forums have drawn audiences from the campus, Hartford, and other Connecticut cities, and they have proven to be an excellent, mutually educative vehicle, adding important dimensions to curricular endeavors as well as engaging citizens in thoughtful conversations about the direction of their cities and state.

Hartford-Based Specialists Resource Network

Trinity faculty members have often capitalized on Hartford's remarkable pool of intellectual and professional talent by bringing area professionals to their classes to introduce students to the "real-world" implications of their studies. During 1995-96, more than 60 area professionals enlivened Trinity classrooms, including a superior court judge, the director-in-residence at Hartford Stage, and legal professionals involved in the state's court system. Soon, recruitment of these invaluable resources will be facilitated by an annotated, on-line roster of some 150 to 200 professionals working in metropolitan Hartford. Coordinated by Anne Utz, Director of Internship Programs, the Hartford-Based Specialists Resource Network will offer an important tool for faculty members to extend the range of Trinity's educational experience.

Urban Course additions

Perhaps the widest curricular impact of UCI has been the introduction of 15 (of a proposed 20) new and revised courses that give the curriculum a distinctive urban cast. The courses range from Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Art History Alden R. Gordon's "Paris and London," which examines these ancient European capitals that have successfully modernized and explores the implications for American cities like Hartford and Manhattan, to Professor David E. Henderson's "Environmental Chemistry," which looks at pollution as an urban problem. Henderson articulates the educational imperative that many faculty members feel in designing urban-oriented courses: "The city provides a large market of problems that need answers. Our students are very interested in pursuing the real-world implications of their studies, and our focus on the city not only makes those problems real but also allows students to work for a positive end."

That idea of working for a positive solution to urban problems while learning about cities animates two programs that preceded and continue to support the Initiative.

CityTerm

Growing out of Trinity's 25-year tradition of internship learning, CityTerm is a specialized internship program placing juniors and seniors in urban corporate, political, legal, and non-profit organizations. Its academic foundation is a seminar, conducted this year by Fulco, that explores urban dynamics. Utz, who coordinates the internship component of CityTerm, considers the program to be mutually beneficial: "the students learn the hard skills from their practice with the organization, and the organization receives the benefit of the student's efforts."

Community Learning Initiative

Establishing collaborative links between the College and the community is also the fundamental idea driving the Community Learning Initiative (CLI), a program established in 1995-96 and led by Faculty Coordinator Professor Dan Lloyd of the philosophy department. Lloyd, too, talks about the substantial mutual benefits of "using the city as an experiential learning resource." Currently nine courses at Trinity directly involve students in some form of significant contact with the community as part of their course work. This participation, Lloyd explains, "takes many different forms" and can involve a number of activities, from field research for community agencies to working in homeless shelters or AIDS hospices; from working with schizophrenic patients to tutoring at-risk youth. The community benefit of such labor is obvious; perhaps not so apparent is the exceptional learning that takes place.

As Lloyd describes that learning, "students reach new levels of understanding of key issues, and they discover quite often that they have made a difference in a life and that they can be a part of the agency of social improvement." Typical of this kind of enriched learning is the experience of anthropology major Hardy P. Stecker '97. For her "urban component" in Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology Janet L. Bauer's course, "Immigrants and Refugees," Stecker is tutoring a group of immigrant students at Bulkeley High School in Hartford. She speaks earnestly about what she learns from her students' efforts and about the "extremely valuable experience of putting [her] privileged position as a Trinity student in perspective." Stecker adds that after a field trip to the College that she had arranged for her students, she heard some of them say they would one day be taking classes at Trinity. She was, Stecker says, "thrilled to have given them that hope."

Fostering a more informed understanding of the complexities of cities and urban life, the programs and projects grouped under UCI appear also to be doing an excellent job of capitalizing on students' desires that their learning make a difference not only in their own lives but in the lives of others.

-- Mark Warren McLaughlin