The City as a Resource for Learning

 

Courses: Winter 2010 - A list of classes in which you can study Chicago

This Winter, many UChicago students will be advising local non-profits, driving along 100 miles of the Michigan-Illinois Canal, and studying the community organizing tactics of Saul Alinsky. These are just a few of the topics of Winter's Chicago Studies courses that will engage with our city through subjects like Urban Geography, and What is Civic Knowledge?

 

According to Bart Schultz, the director of the Civic Knowledge Project and the teacher of next quarter's What is Civic Knowledge? and The Chicago School of Philosophy, Chicago is a critical resource for students of political and social movements. Though UChicago is sometimes known for its cloistered campus and inward-focused lens, "part of the point of my courses is to suggest that the actual history of the University of Chicago ... really challenged the divide between theory and practice," Schultz says, citing the famous education theorist and Lab School founder John Dewey.

 

In fact, the hands-on activities that his and other Chicago Studies course emphasis are exactly how Dewey wanted UChicago students to learn, he adds.

 

"Both courses offer the opportunity to combine classroom and experiential learning... [the Chicago School of Philosophy] will take a field trip to Jane Addams' Hull House."

 

Schultz is team-teaching What is Civic Knowledge? a special "Big Problems" course for College third- and fourth-years, with Margot Browning, Associate Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities and Director of Big Problems.

 

"We really range across the history of Chicago and the history of the University of Chicago from the original settlements in the Pottawattamie to looking at future plans for 2020 and 2040," he says. "We read a lot of absolutely wonderful material, everything from [President Barack] Obama's Dreams of our Father, to classic Chicago authors with an emphasis on political mobilization."

 

"We're not interested in teaching 'here are the three branches of government.' [Civic Knowledge] is actually about the basis for community organizing, civic friendship, a healthier and more participatory democracy," he says.

 

The Business of Nonprofits

In Debra Schwartz's class, the Business of Non-Profits, students will be doing more than studying community activism; they'll be consulting with and advising local non-profits and then presenting their work to the rest of the class. Schwartz will also bring local non-profit leaders in to speak to the class.

 

"We cover the history of the non-profit sector and, much of it is rooted in work in Chicago, most specifically at this University," she says.

 

Like Schultz, Schwartz links the value of her course material to Chicago's rich history of public service work and University research.

 

"Some of the most influential leaders were Jane Addams and her colleagues, some of whom were on our faculty. One of the great insights they had at the time was that Chicago was tremendous urban laboratory. [This city] gives us the opportunity to really see upfront the kinds of problems we're trying to address through social policy."

 

She adds: "I don't think you can get quite the depth of experience without this hands-on piece, if you want to really understand the role that a nonprofit plays and how difficult it is to do nonprofit work well."

 

Non-Profits is an offshoot of the CS-RSO Campus Catalyst, and enrollment is limited to participating students. The non-profits range from the Hyde Park Art Center to tutoring and childcare organizations.

 

"It's a very diverse group of students," Schwartz said, ranging from Economics majors to Public Policy, Art History and Physics students. "I think it's great, because the kind of organizations we work with have diverse" services and goals.

 

 

Making Pictures

Judy Hoffman is bringing Chicago Studies to her Documentary Film Production class.

 

As part of this two-quarter-long sequence, students will work in groups to document either a portrait of a Chicagoan, a social issue or an historical narrative.

 

"This is a cinematic social inquiry, using the city as a laboratory for investigation," Hoffman says. "I try to encourage [my students] to get off campus and look at the city and its people, to figure out what really needs to be said."

 

Past projects have ranged from profiles of Chicago political figures to more experimental meditations on the city's landscape. Hoffman considers her students fortunate to have the entire city as inspiration and stomping-grounds for their documentary shooting.

 

"Chicago has I don't know how many ethnic groups, like 140, so its an opportunity to clearly to explore the landscape of the city and how a built environment informs how people live. Ranging from Mies Van der Rohe to the Chicago Housing Authority, there's a lot of different ways to look at the city," she says.

 

Urban Geographers

Love for Chicago's built environment and diverse landscape also informs Michael Conzen's upper-division class on Urban Geography.

 

The course, according to Conzen, will examine the role cities play in national and regional urban networks. He will lead students to the Regenstein library to view its collection of historical Chicago maps and documents, and on a hundred mile-long fieldtrip along the historical Illinois-Michigan Canal, stopping in the small towns "that make up the Chicago hinterlands" along the way.

 

Why make Chicago a focal point of the course?

Conzen says the benefits are clear: "Being a geographer, I believe very strongly that the visual landscape around us [help students] put their book learning on the line; they see what works terms of the consequential landscapes and environments that have been created as a result of the forces that they're reading about."

I interviewed co-director of the Renaissance Society Hamza Walker and photographer Allan Sekula about Sekula's current exhibit, Polonia and other Fables. My article is up on the University of Chicago's Arts Page.

We discussed the Renaissance Society's method of selecting contemporary artists for shows (it involves a platypus pelt, weighted coins, and rice, Walker insisted), and how the Polish-American experience relates to capitalism and globalization.

The exhibit even features a photograph of UChicago on May Day. Can you spot anyone you know?

Students are learning how Chicago is fed in hands-on Environmental Sciences program

When fourth-year Peter Smutko got hungry during his summer job, he would simply pull a ripe tomato out of the ground, brush the dirt off on his shirt, and eat it. Smutko received a crash-course in where food comes from and farm life while interning at Sandhill Organics as part of the Feeding the City: The Urban Food Chain program.

Work-days at Sandhill, a small-scale, local operation, began at 7 a.m. and ended around 5. In addition to collecting data to share with his classmates and Professor Pamela Martin back on campus in Autumn, Smutko weeded, harvested and planted the 40-some acres of zucchini, cucumber, carrots, kale, beets and asparagus with several other seasonal farm workers.

"Kneeling all day on my knees made me sore, but by the end of the summer none of it hurt," he says. The jobs may have been menial, "but none of it seemed onerous by the end. I felt like I had done something more substantial with my day," when the families participating in the farm's co-op would drive up to the farm to pick up their boxes of fresh produce each week.

Smutko was just one of more than a dozen University of Chicago students to intern on small farms throughout the state last summer, collecting data for the Feeding the City classes and group research project on the energy uses of small, diversified farms using sustainable growing practices, according to Martin, the project's leader and chief instructor, and Esther Bowen, the graduate student who devised of the program with Martin after researching the energy efficiency of local food productions with Martin as an undergraduate.

"What are the environmental impacts of specific types of agriculture, like greenhouse gas emissions or nutrient runoff?" Bowen, AB '08, asks. "The idea with Feeding the City is that students are involved in real research, and putting together more information about metropolitan food systems."

The program began in Winter, 2009, and is currently accepting interns from throughout the University for the 2010-2011 program.

Real Research

According to Martin, the program will change and improve over last year, principally because the new class will be able to analyze the data collected by current students in the program. So far, Martin says, the data suggests that small, sustainable farms have comparable energy and land efficiency to conventional, mono-crop farms--farms that are not organic and only harvest one or two types of crops (usually corn or soy). This is good news for environmental science researchers like Martin, and any student who is interested in examining how local food systems operate in Chicago.

The program is targeted toward students who are looking for some connection to environment or food in their studies, she adds. "For the science majors, the connection might be wanting to experience more of an applied science, and most of the Social Sciences people [in the class] are interested in the social aspects of food and wanted to understand more of the physical and environmental aspects of food. The key is we really want to have an interdisciplinary class," from math and economics to public policy.

"I'm a public policy major," Smutko says. What made this program stand out for him was the ability to work on a farm all summer and engage "with like minded students who are also into agricultural issues in general."

"We're gaining lots of practical knowledge that I think we generally miss out on as students," he says.

Interested in Feeding the City? 
Please send (1) your resume, and (2) a page or less (double-spaced) describing your background and your interest in the program to:

Esther Bowen, Assistant Program Coordinator • eebowen@uchicago.edu

Materials must be received by 9th week Autumn Quarter. Decisions made as materials received. Please feel free to email with any questions about the program, or to discuss schedule flexibility issues. We look forward to hearing from you!

For more information, and to read students' blogs from their summers on the farm, visit Feeding the City.