in message of 5 mar 96 candice bradley was discussing things she does to get
her ecologically oriented classes to function in ways that are more
ecologically appropriate, and said "I was also thinking about asking [the
students] to do relevant community service, with the "thinking" part of the
activity some kind of production about the relevancy of their project. The
community service project would be the equivalent of a term paper. But can I
ethically require students to do eco community service? Can I ethically
dispense with papers and still get folks to read and learn what I assign?"
this may be another college professor's abstrusely technical response from the
perspective of pedagogical practice (rather than a more general point about
emergent consciousness which was what started this thread) so those of you who
aren't dealing with problems of classroom organization may want to skip to the
next message
i'm also thinking of adding a community service project to the senior level
course in sociology of the environment i teach . . . my thought was to
arrangement mini-internships for the students whereby each student would spend
two hours per week (during the 14 week semester) with one of the local
environmental organizations . . . i would try to get a fairly broad spectrum
of environmental organizations, from greenpeace to trout unlimited to our
local wise use group . . . i would contact the organizations before the
semester to make the basic arrangements . . . each student would then get to
choose from a list of potential organizations . . . i would try to allocate
one student per organization . . . the bargain i would try to make with the
director of each organization is that the organization gets roughly 30 hours
of free labor, in return for which the student gets two to three hours to talk
with the director about the goals and methods and accomplishments of the
organization . . . i would then expect each student to write a paper on how
his/her organization fit into the greater scheme of the environmental movement
.. . . in writing that paper, i would expect the students to use various
readings from the course on environmentalism . . . when this idea first
occured to me it seemed rather burdensome, so i ran it past my class this
year, and they thought it was great . . . they felt that the expectations and
the payoffs were fairly well matched; for them, one important payoff was
another line on their vitae and possibly another reference for later use . . .
i'd appreciate any thoughts or suggestions you might have
cheers,
craig
craig k harris
dept of sociology michigan state university east lansing michigan
48824-1111
tel: 517-355-5048 fax: 517-432-2856
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wed Mar 6 07:00:22 1996
From: "Kirstin Dow" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 1996 09:00:18 -0500
In-Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"ecological teaching" (Mar 6, 7:06am)
References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: ecological teaching
