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HSER 325 Working with/in Community

This course will explore working in community as a form of civic engagement and an arena of human service work. This is typically referred to as community practice. Community practice, whether by the volunteer or the professional, entails helping a community at-large solve its problems and achieve its goals. Insightful, grounded community practice enables helpers to impact the total milieu of peoples lives, improving the broader spectrum of peoples lives in ways that direct client-centered helping cannot. Through the theoretical component of the course students will examine different ideologies of helping and how those become expressed in various forms of community helping including: service, organizing and development, social change and empowerment, and advocacy. Through the experiential component of the course students will become familiar with the varied tools of this distinctive type of helping within a specific Twin Cities social movement. This course is presently designed principally to expose College of Health, Community and Professional Studies students to the local food movement and related movement community-based enterprises. Other students may take this class with permission of the instructor.
4 Undergraduate credits

Effective January 13, 2014 to present

Learning outcomes

General

  • Students will understand and be able to apply such concepts as power, politics, and justice to the execution of community practice.
  • Students will be able to analyze and reflect on the ethical dimensions of civic engagement as community practice.
  • Students will be able to recognize diversity of political motivations as articulated through different ideological frameworks for community practice.
  • Students will identify roles, skills and ways to effectively participate in different forms of community practice as an expression of responsible citizenship.
  • Students will be able to frame and articulate ways different local food movement group engage in outreach, advocacy, education, empowerment, crisis intervention, partnership collaboration, social activism, and resource mobilization as modalities of community practice.