President Barack Obama’s work as a community organizer helped prepare him for the presidency. Now U-M undergraduates can choose to prepare for their futures by pursuing community organizing as an academic minor concentration — or take other new courses that similarly cross disciplines to rise to demands for innovative instruction.
In coming months, the new Community Action and Social Change (CASC) minor will join classes including The Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic, Creative Process, and Sustainable and Fossil Energy: Options and Consequences. They are among the newest courses receiving funding through the university’s Multidisciplinary Learning and Team Teaching (MLTT) Initiative.
The MLTT effort was announced in Fall 2005, when President Mary Sue Coleman dedicated $2.5 million to support team-teaching and multidisciplinary courses and degree programs at the undergraduate level, to prepare undergraduates for a life of productive endeavor in the 21st century.
The underlying belief is that major problems of our time, from the environment to poverty to terrorism and more, all involve integrative thinking. Recognizing this, a growing number of educators have issued reports recommending that such learning be a key component of the undergraduate experience.
“Four rounds of requests for proposals have produced seed support to four programs and seven courses, based on the recommendations of the president’s campuswide steering committee,” says Ben van der Pluijm, senior counselor to the provost, who chaired the committee.
“The expected long-term success of these activities has roots in the committee’s focus on introductory offerings that will impact many undergraduates by examining societally-relevant topics that demand interdisciplinary perspectives, with support of schools and colleges toward these interdisciplinary offerings,” he adds.
The new Community Action and Social Change Minor (Lead faculty member, Mary Ruffolo) involves collaboration between the School of Social Work, LSA, the Program in American Culture, Psychology, Sociology, the Program in Intergroup Relations, the Residential College and the Michigan Community Scholars Program.
Students are asked to analyze types, levels and sources of power to understand how inequities are manifested, maintained and reinforced and how they can be addressed through community action and social change efforts. Undergraduate students may take any of the courses without declaring a minor.
The MLTT has announced that other new interdisciplinary courses to be presented in coming months include:
• The Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic course, available in Winter 2011, addressing the 30-year-old global HIV/AIDS epidemic through structural factors of political economy and global inequality to individual behavior. (Lead faculty member: David Halperin)
• Smartsurfaces, available in Fall 2009, in which artists, designers, architects and engineers come together to build physical systems and structural surfaces that can adapt to information and environmental conditions. (Lead faculty member: John Marshall)
• Sustainable and Fossil Energy: Options and Consequences, available in August and taught at U-M’s Camp Davis Rocky Mountain Field Station in Jackson Hole, Wyo., using nearby hydroelectric generators, wind farms, solar arrays and more. (Lead faculty member: Joel Blum)
• Creative Process, available in Winter 2009, which provides an experiential and conceptual foundation for the cultivation of creativity across academic fields. (Lead faculty member: Bryan Rogers).
Further details on the president’s initiative, the steering committee and supported offerings can be found at www.provost.umich.edu/programs/MLTT/.
