SCHC 330 H01 28414

SocBehavSci, BeyondClRoom, GSS

Notes:

**Course is suitable for all Honors students.**This interdisciplinary, service learning seminar is focused on understanding and addressing homelessness in Columbia. The course is organized around principles of community psychology – an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how social conditions across levels of analysis (e.g., individual, micro-settings, organizational, locality, and societal) can affect human problems. For this course we will use scholarship from different social and health sciences to understand homelessness; these will include anthropology, criminology, economics, geography, history, nursing, public health, psychology, social work, sociology, and women’s and gender studies. The course will use seminar discussion, reading, reflection, and a focused community-based intervention to structure students’ learning. We will engage community stakeholders involved in addressing homelessness to join our dialogue and to partner with local efforts to address homelessness in Columbia. Students will create projects to translate findings from critical analyses of local homelessness into programs of action that can assist community-based agencies in effectively responding to the needs of their constituents.As a service learning course, students will choose a site for 20 hours of experiential learning and contribute to the work of that organization. (One hour per week plus travel time) Additionally, students will propose a research/ advocacy project that can contribute to local efforts to address homelessness. These research projects may be done in a group or individually. Project proposals will be approved and supervised by the instructor.