This paper investigates the experience of Staten Island's diverse urban communities with limited financial resources regarding access to affordable housing after the 2008 economic downturn. It details a successful partnership in researching the challenges faced in these communities and offers recommendations for the targeting of resources to…

Describes a college course which uses field studies to examine communities and small urban places. The course is designed for undergraduate students with little or no field experience and is offered as an intensive two-week session between semesters. (RM)

Guided design involves an instructor in developing a problem that students are expected to solve and then leading them, step by step, through the problem to its solution. This teaching method was used to help students explore how individuals, small groups, and then larger numbers of people in larger areas interact to form the Muncie (Indiana)…

Identifying local environmental problems and solutions is suggested as a way to integrate environmental studies into the social studies curriculum. (DE)

Describes a writing course for undermotivated students which focuses on careful precise observations through the study of other time periods in the history of the town where the school is located. (DD)

How fiction is used in a college-level political science seminar to teach about democratic decision making and U.S. politics is described. The fiction used is clustered around the following topics: community-level decisions, limits to consensus, group values and politics, acquiring elected offices and trying to keep them, and public bureaucracies.…

THIS PLAN FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A NAVAJO JUNIOR COLLEGE GOES INTO ALL ASPECTS OF ITS ORGANIZATION. IT DESCRIBES THE PRESENT NAVAJO SCHOOL SYSTEM, WHICH IS A COMBINATION OF MISSION, PUBLIC, AND BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS OPERATIONS. FINANCIAL HELP TO STUDENTS WANTING MORE THAN A HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION IS PRESENTLY INADEQUATE, THROUGH INCREASING. IF…

Described is a community experience activity, utilizing independent study, which was implemented in a secondary alternative school in Canada. As a result of an initial visit to the local community, students had to come up with a product (e.g., an essay, arrange for a guest speaker to come to class). (RM)

This year-long economics project helped first graders from a low-income area recognize and see themselves as participants in an economic world. Students studied their community to learn about the different types of work people do, goods and services, problems of scarcity, the necessity for rules and goals, the use of natural resources, the…

Precipitation data for Macomb (Illinois) for the period 1912-1981 were the bases for developing classroom exercises that offered college students experience in collecting such data. After students collected the data, they reduced them to manageable proportions, and then examined average long-term relations which may have emerged among yearly,…

A manual is presented which provides a common, preliminary frame of reference for seminar participants who desire to develop procedures for studying major social problems through the use of the urban community as a laboratory. Broadly, the seminar concentrates upon providing access to data and facilitation data collection and analyses. Although…

Described are two approaches for using newspapers to teach local, regional, or state geography courses to college students. In the first approach, the instructor developed a manual to supplement an introductory geography course which examined spatial patterns of various phenomena as they are found in the Cincinnati (Ohio) metropolitan area. He…

Undergraduate students increase their understanding of human geography and become aware of their community's health ecology by examining the degree and geographical pattern of dog-associated health hazards in Athens, Georgia, and by studying the behavioral patterns and attitudes of Athens's residents that might be causally related to these health…