welcome to city life

a yearlong interdisciplinary academic program about the lives

and works of urban people

Cities have often been likened to symphonies and poems, and the comparison seems to me a perfectly natural one: they are in fact objects of the same kind. The city may even be rated higher, since it stands at the point where nature and art meet. A city is a congregation of animals whose biological history is enclosed within its boundaries; and yet every conscious and rational act on the part of these creatures helps to shape the city’s eventual character. By its form, as by the manner of its birth, the city has elements at once of biological procreation, organic evolution, and aesthetic creation. It is both natural object and a work of art; individual and group; something lived and something dreamed; it is the human invention, par excellence.

-- Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955).

French anthropologist who developed structuralism as a method of understanding human society and culture.

An Interrelationship between social life, social theory, and social research

Sociology

A Classic Study

1924 - Robert and Helen Lynd arrive in Muncie, Indiana to study religion in American life. They decided to study the entire social life of the community so that they could understand the role of the religion. They divided social life into six parts:

Robert and Helen Lynd

•Getting a Living •Making a Home •Training the Young •Using Leisure •Engaging in Religious Practices •Engaging in Community Activities

Aim: Measure the impact of the Industrial Revolution on America by comparing Muncie Ind. in 1890 and in 1924.  Method: The Lynds pioneered the use of social surveys. Schedules of questions were asked of samples of people in Middletown. The well-written questions were used in replication studies in 1977 and 1999. 

Lynds’ findings: • -Americans have a unique level of pride in their country. • -Many goods could be found in homes in 1924, but not in 1890 such as: furnaces, running hot and cold water, flush toilets, toasters, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, telephones, refrigerators and fresh fruit year-round.• Motion pictures became a common form of entertainment. • The automobile ushered in a new era of sexual relations. • Sunday was changing from the Sabbath to the Sunday holiday.  • The scandal of class. The business class worked with people and ideas and the working class worked with things.Class differences: different lives, different hopes, different tastes. Modernization eroded class distinctions as soon as it created them. Mass production gave the poor more and more of the capacities that only the richpreviously had.

1935 - Robert Lynd returned to Muncie to study the effects of the Depression on Middletown. He found a city that was basically optimistic about the future and not at all revolutionary.

For more research information on this study see Ball State Univeristy site: www.bsu.edu/library/ article/0,,29036--,00.html

Lynd Research Method

Important Question

Are you prepared to travel to a city during spring quarter?

The Syllabus

A Social Studies icebreaker from the

http://www.newyorker.com/

Lunch

See you again at 1:00 in Sem 2 D1107

Teaching and Learning in this program

City Life is based on a philosophy of teaching and learning informed by the pedagogy of John Dewey and the epistemology of Jean Piaget. John Dewey (1916) defined education as, “that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience” (76).

Likewise, Jean Piaget (p.1973) explained that, “The goal of intellectual education is not to know how to repeat or retain ready-made truths. It is in learning to master the truth by oneself at the risk of losing a lot of time and of going through all the roundabout ways that are inherent in real activity” (p. 106). More recently, Eleanor Duckworth(1996) has called this way of learning, “the having of wonderful ideas,” which is “the essence ofintellectual development” (p.13).

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan. Duckworth, E. (1996). The Having of Wonderful Ideas. New York: Teachers College PressPiaget, J. (1973). To Understand is to Invent. New York: Grossman.

Freedom - Not License!

A.S. Neil, an alternative educator, wrote a book, in 1966, by the name you see above.

Talk to two other people in this room about what he meant about freedom not license in educational settings.

“Freedom is doing what you like so long as you do not Interfere with the freedom of others.”

“Freedom, over extended, turns into license.”

Neil wrote,“I define license as interfering with another’s freedom,” such as, “monopolizing conversations.” He noted the difference between freedom and license as a matter of self-control, which he defined as,“the ability to think of other people, to respect the rights of other people.”

We Believe...The main purpose of a college is to promote student learning through:

Interdisciplinary Study: Students learn to pull together ideas and concepts from many subject areas, which enables them to tackle real-world issues in all their complexity.

Collaborative Learning: Students develop knowledge and skills throughshared learning, rather than learning in isolation and in competitionwith others.

Learning Across Significant Differences: Students learn to recognize, respect and bridge differences - critical skills in an increasingly diverse world.

Personal Engagement: Students develop their capacities to judge, speak and act on the basis of their own reasoned beliefs.

Linking Theory with Practical Applications: Students understand abstract theories by applying them to projects and activities and by putting them into practice in real-world situations.

Expectations of an Evergreen Graduate

• Articulate and assume responsibility for your own work.• Participate collaboratively and responsibly in our diverse

society.• Communicate creatively and effectively.• Demonstrate integrative, independent, critical thinking.• Apply qualitative, quantitative and creative modes of

inquiry appropriately to practical and theoretical problems across disciplines.

• As a culmination of your education, demonstrate depth, breadth and synthesis of learning and the ability to reflect on the personal and social significance of that learning.

TESC Social Contract

The Social Contract is an agreement; a guide for civility and tolerance toward others; a reminder that respecting others and remaining open to others and their ideas provides a powerful framework for teaching and learning.

Freedom and CivilityIndividual and Institutional RightsSociety and the CollegeProhibition against DiscriminationRight to PrivacyIntellectual Freedom and honestyOpen Forum and Access to InformationPolitical ActivitiesStudent Conduct Code/Grievance and Appeals

Copies of the Student Conduct Code are available at the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs, LIB 3236.Copies of Evergreen's policy on sexual harassment are available from the Equal Opportunity Office, LIB 3103.

The Program Covenant

Our learning community agreement

Tomorrow’s Seminar

READ• Articles: Handouts • Seven Levels of Interaction in Seminar

The City (1939)http://www.archive.org/details/CityTheP1939