211-216 are advanced seminars, mainly for juniors and seniors in the Benjamin Franklin Scholars Program. All other students need permission from the instructor to enroll in these courses.
HIST 214 Urban University Community Relations: Faculty-Student Collaborative Action Seminar
Harkavy
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
Permit May Be Required: See note | SEM
Faculty and Student Collaborative Seminar to Develop a Distinctive Penn Undergraduate Education That Integrates Learning, Teaching, Research, and Service Through Action-Oriented, Real-World, Problem Solving
Inspired by its founder, Ben Franklin, President Amy Gutmann has defined Penn's distinctive mission as helping students develop their capacity to integrate theory and practice in humanistic, action-oriented, real-world problem-solving. Since the present Arts and Sciences undergraduate education falls short in this regard, one of the seminar's aims is to help students develop their capacity to solve strategic, real-world problems actively, not simply "scholastically". Among the possible ways to do that are:
1) create new academically-based community service courses based on action-oriented, real-world, strategic problem-solving
2) synthesize existing, uncoordinated, academically-based community service courses into "learning communities"
3) contribute to knowledge through "academic" research on strategic real-world problems
As now envisioned, one outcome of the new Penn undergraduate education the seminar will help develop will be courses designed to stimulate and empower students to produce, not simply "consume", societally-useful knowledge, as well as to function as lifelong societally-useful citizens. Moreover, those courses would be grouped into "learning communities": that is, interrelated, cross-disciplinary, complementary sets of courses focused on related problems. By societally-useful knowledge, we mean knowledge that can be actively used to solve such universal strategic problems as Democracy and Society, Schooling and Society, Health and Society, Poverty and Society, Environment and Society, Culture and Society, etc., as those universal problems manifest themselves locally at Penn and in West Philadelphia/Philadelphia.
