Courses

2009: Grave Markers

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Students were assigned particular grave markers in the cemetery. Students researched a deceased person, while studying how artifacts can mark the history of space and place within the urban environment of Middletown. John Hinchman, a lecturer and research specialist in the Architectural Conservation Laboratory of the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Pennsylvania, taught Milroy’s students how to use a “total station” and scanner tool to map the cemetery’s terrain and grave markers. The collected data is imported into engineering software AutoCAD, and as a result, the class will have a detailed and accurate map of the entire cemetery’s physical layout.

At the end of the semester, The class’s findings were donated to the Middletown Old Burial Ground Association.

Read more about the project in the Wesleyan Connection:

“Service Learning Class Studies Local Cemetery” (10/8/09)

 

 

2011: Judaica Exhibition

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Students in Professor Magda Teter’s class on east European Jewish history have been exploring studying history through objects. This was possible thanks to a new partnership developed between Wesleyan and the local congregation Adath Israel. The congregation houses a small, but impressive, collection of Judaica. Students in this class examined, researched, and curated an exhibition using objects related to east European Jewish history.

A WesSeminar during Reunion/Commencement weekend 2011 showcased the students’ work by taking participants on the tour of the exhibition at Adath Israel and highlighted the exciting experience such collaboration with a local community can bring.

Click here to view thumbnails of various artifacts featured in the museum at Adath Israel

 

 

2010: Inferno

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Students worked with inmates at Gates Correctional Institution in analyzing, adapting, and performing excerpts from Dante’s Inferno. Three former inmates from York Correctional Institution who had taken part in the previous years’ theater workshops were invited to participate as teaching assistants. The theatrical adaptations of the Gates men were shared in a later workshop at New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility.

Watch excerpts of the Gates men’s adapted work presented by Wesleyan students and York women:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-o1oY4AWs8[/youtube]

 

Click to read an article about the Dante Project featured in the New York Times:

“Dante’s Hell, With Those Who Can Relate” (10/24/10)

 

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2007: The Tempest

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Students worked with juveniles at the Connecticut Juvenile Training School/Walter G. Cady High.

Inmates and Wesleyan students together worked on theater exercises, improvisation, and prepared works including Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and The Tempest by William Shakespeare.

For an articles featured in the Hartford Courant:

“Wesleyan Students, Youthful Offenders Collaborate In Theater Project” (5/27/08)

“Shakespeare’s Words Resonate With ‘Thugs'” (5/4/08) (written by Prof. Ron Jenkins)

 

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2011: Bird Blind Shelter

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North Studio is working on a new project at the Bent of the River Audubon Center located in Southbury, CT. Students will be designing and constructing a bird blind shelter for the community of Southbury and surrounding areas.

 

 

 

 

Read more about the project in the Wesleyan Connection:

“Budding Architects Design Wildlife Viewing Station Under Huge’s Wing” (3/23/11)

“With Bird Blind, Architecture Students Help Nature Lovers See” (6/22/11)

 

 

2009: Wesleyan Sukkah

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A Sukkah is a  temporary structure erected every fall for Sukkot – the annual feast of tabernacles – the sukkah offers students a place to pray, study, eat, sleep, dwell, and socialize.

In the spring of 2009, North Studio worked with Wesleyan’s Center for Jewish Life to create a new university sukkah. In response, North Studio designed and built a structure to harmonize with the surrounding landscape – to be inviting, approachable, and intriguing to anyone walking by – while

simultaneously maintaining the “intentional sacred space” and privacy expected for the sukkah’s religious users.

Beyond the requirements for its religious use, the Wesleyan Sukkah also needed to accommodate 50 people, withstand outdoor exposure, repeated assembly and disassembly, and store easily.

The final design is sited at the top of a hill at the center of campus that is both serene and social. The Sukkah’s simplicity of construction and ephemeral tectonics reinforce its historical ties to nomadic huts, while its explicit impermanence encourages both introspection on the fragility of human life and an awareness of the vastness of the built and natural world of which it is a part.

Watch to learn more about the Wesleyan Sukkah:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH_rQV4-cio[/youtube]

 

Read more about the project in the Wesleyan Connection:

“Jewish Community Celebrates Holiday in Student-Designed WesSukkah” (9/22/09)

“WesSukkah Dedicated Oct. 3” (10/8/09)

 

THEA 140: Middletown Arts

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This civic engagement class will explore how students can be active participants in society by defining and practicing the integration of art and social change. Community organizations find creative solutions to political, social and economic issues in urban, rural and global communities. Community artists have been collaborating with and working for community organizations, service providers, cultural & educational institutions, and government agencies as active agents for social engagement and change. This class will survey the Middletown arts community, including Kid City, Oddfellows, the Buttonwood Tree, ArtFarm, and Wesleyan’s Green Street Art Center, as well as individual artists living in Middletown Artist Cooperative (MAC) 650, an art space. Students will be integrated into activities and programs, attend community and board meetings, and meet with founders, directors and artists to understand the social dynamics that infuse art into everyday society and create environments that offer distinct and unique partnerships and collaborations. Students will also be introduced to WESU 88.1 FM, a community service of Wesleyan University. Class deliverables will be public service announcements, Main Street monologues, and other creative methods that highlight and showcase the arts in Middletown.

Read more about the project in the Middletown Patch:

“Arts Course Brings Wes Student Entrepreneurs to Community” (5/10/11)

 

HIST 267: Jews in Europe

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This course offers a view of Jewish history in Eastern Europe that takes us beyond the (legendary) shtetl and into a complex, more textured world of Jews living among Christians from the beginnings of Jewish settlement in the thirteenth century to the contemporary period and Poland’s small Jewish community, trying to reinvent Jewish life in Poland in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the 1968 forced migrations.

Descendants of East European Jews are now the largest demographic group among Jews in the United States. Until the Second World War, Jews in Eastern Europe were the largest Jewish community in the world. From the 16th century, their impact on Jewish culture and society has been tremendous, from shaping one of the most important codes of Jewish law, the Shulhan Arukh, in the 16th/17th centuries, to shaping the ideology of the Zionist movement at the turn of the 20th century. Yet, the history of this important Jewish community has been vastly misunderstood, largely due to the devastating legacy of the Holocaust and the persistence of imagery of “the shtetl” created by 19th-century writers of Yiddish fiction, later popularized through Broadway plays and films such as “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Films and additional lectures will be part of the class.

This is a “service-learning” course. One of the assignments will be related to the collection of Judaica from eastern Europe at the Adath Israel Congregation in Middletown. Students will be part of a workshop on Jewish art and material culture and will investigate the material aspects of Jewish culture.

See this website for some of the work accomplished by students in past years.

Final Project – 2011

Final Project – 2014

AMST 287: Issues in Education

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This seminar explores critical traditions in education from both theoretical and practical perspectives. We investigate a number of nontraditional educational projects, with a focus on the Center for Prison Education’s (CPE) college in prison initiative. All students will participate in a CPE practicum that will be central to our work, requiring ethnographic research and reflection on teaching, learning, and curriculum development.

Course readings will address the challenges of work with “underprepared” students and the complex problem posed by teachers who bring identities and positions to their work with particular students or groups of students who possess their own, quite different identities and positions. The institutional, intellectual, and political workings of public school in the contemporary U.S. are the template against which we raise questions and imagine possibilities for education in alternative settings.

Click here for more information on the Center for Prison Education

 

 

SOC 273: Sociology of Education

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This course will address the role of power, culture, race/ethnicity, gender, and class on the development of schools as a social institution and within school dynamics and pedagogy. We will cover the following topics: philosophical debates about pedagogy with readings from Dewey, Piaget, Skinner, Bruner, and Friere; the origins of schools as an institution; the organization of schools with readings about tracking, charter schools, private schools, and school vouchers; the influence of power and political movements on both the explicit and hidden curriculum; educational reforms such as progressive education, the back-to-basics movement, the whole-language movement, the standards movement, and high-stakes testing; and the influence of language, labeling, cultural capital, and social capital on student learning. We also will examine international differences in schools and schooling. This class will have a service-learning component where students will observe and tutor in two different schools: either a high- and low-income school or a traditional and a charter school.