Community Service in American Culture
“How, Then, Shall We Live?”
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course is sometimes called “the history course” in the Department of Public and Community Service Studies. In truth, the history of community service in America hasn’t been written (at least to our knowledge). We’ll look back on selected “moments” in American history in which individuals and communities were trying to cope with situations that have relevance for us today. We’ve given the course the pre-title of Tolstoy’s question, “How, then, shall we live?” in order to suggest a dual focus: how shall we live together as a society, and how shall I choose to live out my own life in relation to others? These questions cannot be answered independently of each other. Our answers to them create our vision of service. In everyday life, of course, our answers are acted out, mostly by habit. Habitual actions by nature involve history. One word for social history is “culture,” which is the enacted memory of how “we” of a given culture give skilled performances of our design for living. A word for individual history is biography. The social schemes and individual lives we will read about, discuss, and relate to our lives and work in this course involve people working out how to handle ‘situations’ in their times in some recognizable relation to their culture and biographies. The past is indeed not dead.
This course is also a research course. Starting with research into the history of a given specific question about “How, then, shall we live” and some autobiographical reflections, you’ll have the opportunity to explore alternative public and private arrangements of living, working, and serving. The goal would be your own formulation of “how do I want to live” and its relation to “how would I like to change social arrangements to help all of us live better?” What questions could be more foundational? We’ll work out how to do and share this research together.
COURSE OBJECTIVES
Upon completion of requirements for this course, students will be able to:
In the final analysis, this course most hopes that students will understand “the essential dignity, freedom and equality of every person” and that students will begin to articulate their responsibilities, not only “as productive citizens serving in their own society and the greater world community,” but also as members of the one human family “that proceeds from its one Creator.” (Quotations from the Mission Statement of Providence College)
REQUIRED TEXTS
All other readings will be available on-line.
A WORD ABOUT COURSE METHOD
Learning in this class is rooted in shared inquiry into questions about service, community, justice, and democratic practice that cannot be fully answered or even addressed. Your instructors make no claim to offer answers. Our plan is to pose questions and to inquire with you into evidence and reasoning pertinent to them. We do not privilege evidence derived from written texts over evidence from participants’ past and present experience or over logical or metaphorical reasoning. In fact, we will urge you to integrate all three kinds of evidence in discussion and writing. We see our first responsibility, then, as getting you to read, talk, and write about the questions this course asks us to address. We hope you will join us in striving to create an active and energetic learning community in the class. Hopefully this approach is reflected in the course requirements/assignments outlined below.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
Students with special needs of any type should discuss their needs and arrange any special accommodations with the instructor during the first week of class.
Oral Participation (30%): Do the reading, come to class, and contribute to the learning of the class. We should strive to be a true learning community. Thus, each participant has a responsibility and obligation to attend and participate fully in the course. You are asked to be actively engaged in the class by participating in discussions, presentations, and exercises, and by posing questions, advancing ideas/arguments, and suggesting lines of inquiry. A crude rubric for discussion participation (25%) would be:
Once during the semester, students will be responsible for facilitating part of the class’s discussion. This means the students will offer topics for discussion, keep the discussion on-topic, and keep it moving forward. It is not the students’ responsibility to summarize the readings for the day, do any outside research, or make any sort of presentation. That is, students should not “teach” that day’s class. Students facilitating discussion do not have to contribute an essay for that week (5%).
Written Participation (40%):
a. Students will write and post short (300-600 word) mini-essays based on the reading(s) for that week (20%). These “thought papers” should demonstrate familiarity with the text(s) assigned and offer original insight and analysis of the information presented in the readings, drawing on reasoning, other sources, and/or personal experience. They should be written in a formal tone (but without academic pedantry) for the class learning community. A suggested discussion question or topic for the class should be appended to each essay. A Rubric for these writings might be:
b. Personal Reflections: There will be several short biographical writings about issues that are raised by our readings and inquiries during the course (20%).
Research (20%): This is in part a research course. A variety of options for community-based research (individual or in teams) will be discussed. Our hope is that issues can be identified that touch both on “how should we all live” socially and on “how I want to live personally,” thus relating the research to public policy and the researchers’ own biographies. (For example, housing, health, education, and eating would seem to be fertile topics.) A variety of research options will be explored (site-visits to public and private agencies; oral histories of service providers; analyses of local service organizations; exploration of alternative arrangements of living and/or working). Our hope is to make this research maximally useful to the researchers and also to the class, so its timing and format (writing, video, mixed-media) will have to be negotiated.
The instructors will schedule periodic meetings with each researcher/research team to give feedback and suggestions about project development in terms of the public problem or civic issue being investigated and in terms of the proposed personal and community responses to it.
Final (10%): The final paper asks you to draw together what you’ve learned from readings, reflections, and research into a statement about your current vision of how you might integrate your future personal ways of living and working with the kind of society you’d like to work towards.
Each of these requirements will, of course, be elaborated at the appropriate time.
Ethical Behavior
Both the Providence College Undergraduate Bulletin and the Student Handbook detail a broad range of behavioral expectations and guidelines for students. All students are expected to act ethically in pursuing their studies and presenting their work. One specific point especially deserves your attention:
Claiming responsibility or credit for the work of others is unacceptable for Providence College students (“Academic Dishonesty,” Undergraduate Bulletin).
Please remember that plagiarism involves the submission of thoughts or formulations of other persons as part of one’s own work without citation or credit being given for those thoughts/formulations. For this reason:
Please err on the side of scrupulousness in these matters!
Good scholarly practice requires that you maintain notes and/or Xerox copies of all materials used to prepare a paper. If any questions were to be raised about the source of any of the content of your work, you should be able to show your notes or copies of materials used in manuscript preparation.
Course Outline
Since any course evolves differently with each new group, we’ll be learning and feeling our way—in collaboration with you—as our study progresses. We will amend the syllabus in response to learning needs and acknowledge our responsibility to promulgate any changes in a timely and effective manner. We will do this by always posting assignments for upcoming classes on the Angel Calendar and will usually email you updates as well.
“A” Contributor
· Contributions in class reflect excellent preparation as evidenced by frequent authoritative use of textual/material evidence.
· Contributions in class almost always reflect substantive thought (i.e., perceptive, original, and/or synthetic) about the material/topics and provide direction for the class.
· Contributions often facilitate group interaction/learning via additions (e.g., examples, arguments, stories), questions, process comments.
If this person were not a member of the class, the quality of discussion would be diminished markedly.
“B” Contributor
· Contributions in class reflect sound preparation as evidenced by competent reference to textual/material evidence.
· Contributions in class often reflect substantive thought (i.e., perceptive, original, and/or synthetic) about the material/topics and provide direction for the class.
· Contributions sometimes facilitate group interaction/learning via additions (e.g., examples, arguments, stories), questions, process comments.
If this person were not a member of the class, the quality of discussion would be diminished.
“C” Contributor
· Contributions in this class reflect preparation as evidenced by some acquaintance with textual/material evidence.
· Contributions in class sometimes reflect substantive thought (i.e., perceptive, original, and/or synthetic) about the material/topics and provide direction for the class.
· Contributions occasionally facilitate group interaction/learning via additions (e.g., examples, arguments, stories), questions, process comments.
If this person were not a member of the class, the quality of discussion would be diminished somewhat.
“D–F” Contributor
· Contributions in class reflect inadequate preparation: they seldom evidence familiarity with textual/material evidence.
· Contributions in class seldom reflect substantive thought (i.e., perceptive, original, and/or synthetic) about the material/topics and provide direction for the class.
· Contributions seldom facilitate group interaction/learning via additions (e.g., examples, arguments, stories), questions, process comments.
If this person were not a member of the class, the quality of discussion would be little diminished. Said persons need to leave this category and move into a contributor category!
Class
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5
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7
8
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10
11
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13
Date
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Week 9
Thursday, Nov 4
Week 10
Week 11
Week 12
Week 13
Week 14
Topic
Introductions to each other & the course
The Poorhouse Era:
Public Response
The Poorhouse Era:
Perennial Questions
The Poorhouse Era:
Private Response
Institutionalization:
Public Response
Institutionalization:
Private Response
Reorganization:
Public Response
Reorganization:
Private Response
Field Trip?
Organizing:
Public Response:
War on Poverty
Organizing:
Public Response:
Civil Rights
Privatizing:
Public & Private Responses
Reconstituting:
Search for Sustainable Community
Readings for this Class
(Always check Angel course calendar for updated readings for each class!)
Martin Luther King
Gap Class/Research paper discussion
Final Exam Paper Due
Out of Class Work Due Today
APPENDICES
First Short Biographical Writing
Henry David Thoreau writes in the first chapter of Walden that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” Elsewhere in the work he offers a corrective: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. . . . Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand . . . simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.”
What is your own “quiet desperation,” past, present, or anticipated in the future? What is the relation of your “private resignation” to “public customs and structures” in your society? What is/might be your way to ‘advance in the direction of your dreams, to live the life which you imagine’ [paraphrased from Thoreau’s conclusion]?
Second Short Biographical Writing
Jane Addams writes, “It was suddenly made quite clear to me that I was lulling my conscience by a dreamer’s scheme, that a mere paper reform had become a defense for continued idleness, [that] it is easy to become the dupe of deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep . . . that I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.” Following Tolstoy, she called this her “’snare of preparation’ . . . which we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew.”
Tell a story of your own “snare of preparation”? What was the impediment to your own “fine action”? What did it hold you back from doing? How did it function? (For example, how much would you attribute to society and how much to yourself?) How did/might you “escape” the snare and “restore a balance of activity”?
Third Short Biographical Writing
Dorothy Day writes, “I condemn poverty and I advocate it.” She quotes Peter Maurin that “we cannot see our brother in need without stripping ourselves.” Day puts precarity (precariousness)—existence without predictability or security—at the heart of poverty. Yet precarity is perhaps the condition we human beings seek most to escape. As Dorothy writes, “The thing is not to hold on to anything. The tragedy is, however, we do, we all do hold on.”
Tell a story of your own experience of the precariousness of life. What lesson(s) do you take from it? What is/should be the role of poverty, and specifically precarity, in your life? How is precarity involved in the kind of life you want for yourself in the future? What are the costs of trying to reduce precarity in your life? What are the benefits?
Please address at least some of the questions raised above. In addition (or as part of the above), please consider: Is precarity intrinsically related to service?
Fourth Short Biographical Writing
My Pilgrimage
Martin Luther King writes about his “pilgrimage to nonviolence.” You are asked to write about your own pilgrimage.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines pilgrimage as follows:
1. a. a journey (usually of a long distance) made to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion; the action or practice of making such a journey;
2. gen. a journey; a period of travelling or wandering from place to place;
3. fig. the course of life, esp. mortal life as a spiritual journey leading to heaven, a future state of blessedness, etc.
Your life can be seen as a journey or pilgrimage, a period of wandering toward and/or purposefully traveling to an important end. You may not (you do not!) know that end, or even your next steps, but you are on that “pilgrimage.” MLK writes about intellectual and experiential experiences that were formative on his journey. What are yours?
You may choose to narrow the focus of your writing to a particular (e.g., ‘my pilgrimage to/in service’), or you might simply share some influential experiences and speculate about how they have shaped and will shape your journey.
Potential Areas of Research into How Then Shall we Live
You’re looking for an area to research that:
is of personal interest
concerns how you’ll live
has mainstream solutions
can be researched in literature
and
and
and
and
is of potential interest to others
has public policy implications
has intriguing alternative ways
can be researched by local “field
visits” to alternative arrangements
Final Assignment
The supra-title of our course has been “How then shall we live”? Service, at root, always involves putting into practice “how we think things should be” in terms of living conditions and relationships. The same can be said for public well-fare policy that we’ve been following historically: it stems from differing visions about what’s best for human development and for human agency. We’ve also been reading about and discussing how certain individuals throughout this history have answered this question about how to live (and serve) for themselves.
During this semester, you’ve written about the readings, discussed them, written about their relation to your own life, and researched public and private aspects of a particular dimension of life. For your last writing, you are asked to step back and take a look at your work this semester, to review your work—discussion comments and questions, readings’ essays, biographical writings, and team research—as a “text,” almost as though it were the product of someone else. You are further asked to assume that there is some underlying thematic unity to your body of work and to address the question, “what is the author suggesting about how ‘I [the author] and we [our community/society] should live’”? This task can be further specified as follows:
· Try to formulate your interpretation concisely, probably identifying several component dimensions or elements of the author’s [that’s you!] position.
· Support each element of your interpretation with evidence from the author’s [i.e., your own] essays, writings, research, and class statements or actions.
· Once you have finished your interpretation of the author’s view, take a critical stance toward this vision of how to live by arguing for and against the position (by assessing its strengths and weaknesses) and offering any changes to the vision that make it better as a guide to ‘how then shall I/we live.”
Suggested range: 6-8 pages. A crude rubric for the assignment might look like this:
* Please note that team research efforts will be evaluated based on assigned readings for and facilitation of class discussion of your subject plus anything you present about your research in this final paper. So this is the place to document any research activity or findings not previously presented.