Fall 2015CEP 301: The Idea of Community
Theories of community and communal rights and responsibilities. Experience building a learning community within major. Explores struggles for community in every sector of life. This class helped me understand a couple perspectives on how communities came to be and how they function best from that viewpoint. Collaborating with my classmates we were able to facilitate the majority of classes and thus able to make the curriculum as relevant to us as possible, providing meaningful learning opportunities. LARCH 300: Introductory Landscape Architecture Design Studio (Methods) Introduction to history and environmental influences in field while developing design and graphic skills. Site analyses and drawing to convey design concepts. Relationship of visual perception to drawing, role of values in design, verbal communication, and behavioral analysis of design process. This class helped me better understand the role that design plays in planning sustainable (social, environmental and economic) communities. CEP 300: CEP Retreat (annual CEP requirement) Focuses on planning analysis assessment and development of the major. Opportunities for community building and all-major policy deliberation and decisions. Workshops for skill building in consensus, facilitation, and for major-specific activities such as developing individual study plans and study abroad experiences. I joined the Community Engagement Committee and learned more about how that committee would operate in collaborative efforts to engage the University District outside of the University itself along with the City of Seattle. CEP 400: Governance Practicum (Quarterly CEP requirement) Emphasizes personal and collective leadership, democratic decision making, and learning through direct action and reflection. Explores and develops students' personal skills as doers and leaders, while also learning how to form and function as effective groups. |
Spring 2016CEP 303: Social Structures and Processes
Investigates use of formal and informal social structures and processes within context of community and environment. Looks at patterns and institutions of social organization and relationships among different sectors. Issues of interrelatedness, citizenship, knowledge, and communication SOC 292 Who Gets Ahead? Public Schooling in America (Methods) I plan to use this class and this quarter as a test to see if classes that are more theoretically based can push my thinking in ways that would give my “career” path more clarity. This class “Addresses fundamental questions about the relationship between education and society. Examines why some students learn more and advance further than others; what factors shape how schools are run/organized and which materials are taught; how race/class/gender affect students within schools; how schools maintain our economic system and can become more effective. “ SOC W 570 Anti-racist Organizing for Social and Economic Change (Methods) Applies an institutional analysis of racism and white privilege to the strategies of community organizing by communities of color and indigenous peoples. Examines anti-racist organizational transformation, intersectionality of oppressions and privileges, white allies in anti-racist struggles, and the role of social workers in maintaining and combating institutional racism. URBDP 538: Public Health and the Built Environment (Methods) Examines how the design of communities and land use and transportation decision have positive and adverse effects on health. Considers built environment impacts on physical activity, obesity, air quality, injuries, mental health, social capital, and environmental justice; and explores interventions to promote healthy community design. |
Winter 2016
CEP 302: Environmental Response
Explores issues of environmental crisis and societal responses. Readings and reflective analysis from broad selection of authoritative sources to develop grounded perspective in ecological literacy and consciousness. Concurrently, experiential education in challenges and practical responses to building sustainable society through participation in community-based environmental effort. This class helped my understand the larger picture of how paradigm shifts take place throughout spaces such as in the academy and in the scientific community as well. I was also able to learn more about the National Environmental Policy Act, and how governments set standards that organizations are supposed to follow as they develop. AIS 475: Research Topics in American Indian and Indigenous Studies (Methods) In this class I got to study how Indigenous people in the United States and Canada were colonized and how that effects the way they navigate their identity, individually and as a community. Once we covered the history I studied what it means to interrupt that ongoing psychological colonization of indigenous people. One method that we looked at specifically was the idea of making educational curriculum in schools more sensitive and thus culturally relevant to indigenous students. An example of that sort of step would look like undoing the historical revisionism that that dominates our textbooks, or rather making room everyone’s history to be told. GEOG 472: Race, Nature and Power (Methods) Explores the role that racial formation and power relations play in the cultural, political and spatial production of nature. Draws on geographies of nature-society relations, political ecology and environmental justice literatures to interrogate the link between nature imaginaries and conservation practices. This class taught me to be more critical in my understanding of, not only what I perceive to be “nature” but what has informed different racial groups in their understandings of nature as well. We looked at historical events that excluded certain groups of people from accessing their traditional lands and the threatening implications those events had on their ways of life. |