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."

You've eaten your first Garbage Pizza at the Med. You've ridden your bike down Halsted St. with Dean Boyer on the annual South Side Bike Tour. Now, the South Side Solidarity Network wants you to know Woodlawn.

Woodlawn, the low-income neighborhood just south of the University of Chicago campus, has a deep history of conflict and resolution with its ivory-tower neighbor. If you ask third-year graduate student Mark Hopwood, trying to understand this complicated relationship is exactly why students should venture south.  

Hopwood, a member of SSN, shared community lore about the 1893 World's Fair, legendary organizer Saul Alinsky, and the street gang the Blackstone Rangers, with a dozen students and other residents of Hyde Park on the SSN's annual tour of Woodlawn last Sunday afternoon. The tour began on 61st and Ellis Ave in front of the new South Campus dormitory, and proceeded West along 63rd St. to the Cottage Grove commercial district.

"Woodlawn was never a particularly upscale neighborhood," Hopwood said. "But it was a place where you would come to have fun, kind of like the Coney Island of Chicago"

As the group walked Hopwood traced the arc of Woodlawn's development, from a swampland settled by Dutch immigrants in the 1950s to the home of the sprawling Columbian Exposition of 1893, to its current status as a diverse, up-and-coming lakeside neighborhood.

Hopwood was joined by Wardell Lavendar, a community member who has called Woodlawn home for the past 53 years, and has the memories to prove it:

"This street used to be lined with businesses," he said, gesturing to the brick row houses lining 63rd St., once the South Side's commercial district. According to Wardell, commercial activity in the community dropped off substantially when the Green Line, which used to run East above 63rd St. from Cottage Grove to Kimbark, was torn down.

More to know about the University and Woodlawn:

*The University of Chicago made an agreement with the community activist group The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) that it will not develop the campus south of 63rd St.

*In the 1960s, Woodlawn was home to the Black P. Stone Rangers, Half a civil-rights organization and half cocaine-trafficking street gang, the Stones were the most powerful gang in Chicago until an FBI-led crackdown.

*Saul Alinsky, a community organizer famous for the mass power tactics he outlined in his book, "Rules for Radicals," organized in Woodlawn, Back of the Yards, and other Chicago neighborhoods around issues of race and tenants' rights.

How are you getting to know your neighbors?

Links to get you involved in Woodlawn:

Woodlawn Collaborative

UChicago's South Side Solidarity Network's website

STOP Chicago

The Blog that Works wants to know:

• Where were you on Inauguration Day?
• Who was with you?
• What about the day will you remember 20 years from now?
• What was the biggest mark Chicago left on inauguration events? 

Answer by commenting below.  More UC Student Inauguration Coverage.

"A national organization of radicals who work in, around, and in spite of institutions of higher education."

One of the least-appreciated but most fantastic resources on campus is the Special Collections Research Center in the Reg. Among its many resources are thousands of documents, rare manuscripts, letters, photographs, and ephemera that have been collected since the University's founding in 1892. Presidents' papers, students' notes, yearbooks, student publications, and assorted RSO paraphernalia are all easily accessible, and can provide more nuance to history than a secondary account ever could. The archivists and librarians in Special Collections are tremendously knowledgeable and helpful in turning the myriad resources into usable material, making primary research an absolute pleasure.

Last winter, I was enrolled in the Chicago 1968 course, which involved a good deal of archival research. I focused on student activist groups in the late sixties, and turned up a surprising number of parallels to current activist RSOs. The New University Conference organized a walkout at Billings Hospital that was uncannily similar to the battle SOUL (Students Organizing United with Labor) and campus and hospital staff waged last year to secure a fair contract. The Chicago Women's Liberation Union and Chicago Women's Union held a conference with workshops that prefigured several of the Feminist Majority's events from spring quarter 2008.

Below I've summarized some of my findings about one student group, including citations to the relevant archives in Special Collections. Check out the finding aids to see if the RSOs you're involved in have precursors. Were they working for the same things your group is today? Was membership similar? Were their hairstyles particularly ridiculous? All good questions.

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