Service Learning Courses
Courses with a Service-Learning Component
Here are some of the academic service-learning opportunities offered in J-term and Spring of 2010.
We will update this list as new courses are designated.
COJO 472: Family Communication
Bruess, Carol
J-term 2010 Section 01 CRN 10237
Students conduct oral histories with residents at a local assisted-living facility (Rosewood Estate), writing a complete "history" of their lives. This project/partnership has been sustained for more than ten years.
Hawaii: Multicultural Communication in Diverse Organizations
Petersen, Debra; Scully, Tim
J-term 2010 Section N/A CRN N/A
Our community partner is the Hawaiian KeKola Ni' ihau O Kekaha School (K-12) on Kauai, Hawaii. This charter school is attended by students who are becoming bi-lingual in their native Hawaiian dialect of Ni'ihau and in English. Our activities vary from year to year; in 2009 we studied the coral reef with them. Projects included developing puppet shows in their native Hawaiian language, playing music and singing songs about the coral reef, and filming and producing a DVD for each family and for the school's lending library.
JPST 250: Introduction to Justice and Peace Studies
Klein, Mike
J-term 2010 Section 01 CRN 10025
Our service-learning project with the Jane Addams School for Democracy will allow you to learn alongside a person who is a recent immigrant from Latin America, East Africa, or South-East Asia. After training and orientation, you'll learn about each other's culture through one-to-one conversations in a group setting at the Baker Community Center in St. Paul's West Side Neighborhood. Your learning partner may be studying to become a US citizen, or simply eager to learn more about Minnesota and US culture while improving their English skills. You in turn will get a personal account of a country's culture that will be studied in class while also contributing to the integration of recent immigrants in St. Paul.
COJO 111: Communication and Citizenship
Bruess, Carol; Gavrilos, Dina; Wyatt, Wendy
Spring 2010 Section 01 CRN 21636
Students in COJO 111 will be working on a variety of collaborative academic projects with students at Cristo Rey (CR). Beginning in fall of 2009 and continuing into spring 2010, our work will be centered in Cristo Rey's 9th grade English curriculum. We will work collaboratively to explore our obligations and voices as citizens through construction of persuasive essays and letters to community leaders. Students in COJO111 will be exploring, through this partnership, the nature of being a mindful, ethical, and thoughtful citizen-communicator while working side-by-side the Cristo Rey students; the Cristo Rey students will be not only heighten their awareness and skills as citizen-communicators as well -- while advancing their understanding of persuasive communication -- they will also continue to explore the notion/ideas/possiblities of "college" as they "get to know" a few college students in their UST partners.
COJO 360: Videography: TV Production in the Field
Scully, Tim
Spring 2010 Section 01 CRN 21666
Students will produce public service announcements and profiles for community partners.
COJO 460: Advanced Video Production
Scully, Tim
Spring Section 01 CRN 21672
Students will produce a documentary about the music of immigrant communities in the Twin Cities.
ENGL 112: Critical Reading and Writing II
Larson, Kelli
Spring 2010 Section 22, 28 CRN 20226, 20232
Research shows that it only takes one person to make a difference in someone's life. Maybe you are that one person this semester. Or maybe you will find someone this semester who makes a difference in your life. We will engage in a series of visits to a nearby assisted living facility. We will be gathering the social histories of seniors who live there and then turning those social histories into stories. Although turning memory into fiction will be one of your primary objectives when interviewing the seniors, you should not lose sight of other needs, namely companionship and friendship. Keep in mind that this "learning" relationship is reciprocal, however. Our experiences with this remarkable group of seniors should teach us much about who we are and where we came from. In addition, your listening, interviewing, and writing skills will be honed and enhanced through this hands-on experience.
ENGL 300: Theory and Practice of Writing
Callaway, Susan
Spring 2010 Section 01 CRN 20242
The service-learning in this course enables students to observe and affect the literacy development of refugees and immigrants attending a local international high school (specifically Wellstone International in Minneapolis). This literacy project will be fully integrated into the course and include time for: training, orientation, and reflection; field notes kept in an online journal; a final reflection paper; and a letter to the school about your experiences.
ENGL 326: Topics in Writing Literacy Nonfiction: Representations of Consciousness
Batt, Matthew
Spring 2010 Section 01 CRN 21383
Adequately representing the ways the mind works in prose has long been a challenge for writers. We often diagnose stream of consciousness writing as the only way this is achieved, but texts we'll read argue that, sometimes, consciousness is more like a lake, sometimes a puddle, and occasionally a desert. This semester we'll focus on some of the hallmark and recent works which have sought directly to story the lives of the mind, including possible texts from James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Milan Kundera, Lauren Slater, Dave Eggers, Oliver Sacks, and David Foster Wallace. The class will spend half its time discussing published work and the other half workshopping essays you have written this semester. You will be asked to write one essay from an interior perspective (eg. memoir) as well as one from an exterior perspective (eg. immersion journalism). Also, this class will include a significant service learning component with the objective of gaining experience by helping other people tell their own stories. Possibilities include creative writing tutoring with school kids, memoir mentoring with seniors, or even therapeutic guided writing for others. The objective is to gain as much experience as possible through literature, class discussions, your own writing and community interaction to help understand how we write about what we think. This course fulfills the Writing distribution requirement for English majors and counts as a writing course for English with a Writing Emphasis majors. Prerequisite: ENGL 252, 253, or permission of the instructor.
ESCI 310: Environmental Problem Solving
McGuire, Jennifer
Spring 2010 Section 01 CRN 22084
This course explores methods for solving environmental problems facing society. These problems are by nature, interdisciplinary and are rarely addressed in a substantive fashion in traditional science courses and textbooks. Every semester tackles a different, current societal concern from a rigorous scientific perspective but also from the perspective of those in business, journalism, and law/public policy. Students learn to educate themselves about the selected problem using scientific tools including quantitative models that enable them to evaluate possible solutions. Students then work with various community partners to develop the ability to effectively communicate scientific findings to a group of educated non-scientists in various practical settings. This course will give you the skills to advance the common good by addressing tough environmental problems.
HIST 114: Modern America in Global Perspective
Fitzharris, Joseph
Spring 2010 Section 02, 03 CRN 20881, 20882
Students are required to do a "Veteran History Project" (in conjunction with the Folklife Center, Library of Congress). They find and interview a veteran, do contextual historical investigation first to derive questions for the interview, and then further research to build the context for the veteran's story. They make a transcript of the interview, write that full story, and provide the veteran with a copy - to get a final grade for the project and the course.
JPST 470: Conflict Resolution
Klein, Mike
Spring 2010 Section 01 CRN 21043
Our two community partners will provide service-learning projects exploring local and international level conflict resolution in practice. The Dispute Resolution Center offers mediation services to low income residents of the Mt. Airy Public Housing Project in St. Paul. The Center for Victims of Torture coordinates the New Tactics in Human Rights Project, linking international activists online to share and develop tactics for managing, resolving and transforming conflict in nationally and culturally diverse settings.
LAWS 941: Clinic - Community Justice Project
Levy-Pounds, Nekima
Spring 2010 Section N/A CRN N/A
The Community Justice Project offers an opportunity for students to integrate the University's mission into their Clinic experience as they work for justice and reconciliation. Following the sub-Saharan African ideology of "ubuntu," students will focus on creating systemic changes that will further humanitarian goals. The Community Justice Project focuses on bridge building with community stakeholders and problem solving in distressed communities. Students will gain valuable advocacy, legal research and writing, litigation and outreach skills. Students in the practice group will be agents of change to ensure that justice is obtained for undeserved members of the community. For example, in the past students have conducted research related to juvenile justice, community policing models and restorative justice.
MATH 333: Applied Statistics
Arkady, Shemyakin
Spring 2010 Section 01 CRN 21092
Students work on practical statistical analysis for not-for-profit community partners outside UST (Cristo Rey Jesuit High School) or work on service projects for UST clubs and organizations (Development, MARC). In the first month of the semester small groups are formed, the topics are chosen, and partnerships established. In the second month the general plan of action (objectives of the project, methods and timeline for data collection, study methods, working schedule) is developed and discussed. In the course of semester, communication of student groups with community partners and their progress is monitored and facilitated by the professor. The emphasis is on providing meaningful statistical results by the end of semester. These results should be presented as a research report accessible to the community partners and external agencies (school boards, trustees of non-profits, UST clubs and organizations).
PSYC 428: Theories of Counseling and Psychotherapy
Braswell, Lauren
Spring 2010 Section 01 CRN 20598
Learning about different theories of counseling and psychotherapy is interesting content that invites great discussion and thought-provoking experiential exercises in the classroom. The material becomes even more engaging, however, when students have the opportunity to practice their basic listening and encouragement skills with patients experiencing major mental health concerns. This exciting task is accomplished by having all students in PSYC 428 complete a hospital orientation followed by 10 two-hour volunteer sessions on the Regions Behavioral Heath units. This direct exposure also promotes interesting class discussion of both the strengths and weaknesses of various theories and the reality of boundary issues and other ethical concerns. To participate in the course it is required that students be juniors or seniors and have completed PSYC 301: Psychopathology or an equivalent course as approved by the instructor.
PSYC 490: Topics: Qualitative Research with an Aging Population
Chalkley, Mary Anne
Spring 2010 Section 01 CRN N/A
Students in this class will be learning about the aging process and also about how to do qualitative interviews. They will be interviewing seniors in a variety of living situations regarding their life histories and their current thoughts about their living arrangements. As this also qualifies as a family studies course, particular emphasis will be on the role of the family in the older person's life. The information the students collect will be analyzed using qualitative techniques to develop a portrait of the lives of these older adults. This information will be shared with a group that is trying to develop a new living center for seniors in the Twin Cities.
