The City is a Laboratory: Chicago Studies Winter Courses

What I like best about Winter Break is the three weeks of joy I can experience over choosing my classes, unadulterated by the notion that once the quarter gets underway I will be too busy/stressed/freezing cold to tell the difference between Phy-Sci Core and Spanish Literature anyway. So on that note, let's get excited about the new crop of Chicago Studies courses being offered this Winter:

This winter, UChicago students will advise local non-profits, drive along 100 miles of the Michigan-Illinois Canal, and study the community organizing tactics of Saul Alinsky.

These are just a few of the topics covered in next quarter’s Chicago Studies courses. The classes will allow students to engage with the city of Chicago through everything from geography to philosophy.

According to Bart Schultz, the director of the Civic Knowledge Project and the teacher of next quarter’s “What is Civic Knowledge?” and “The Chicago School of Philosophy” the city of Chicago is a critical resource for students of political and social movements.

Schultz is team-teaching “What is Civic Knowledge?” a special course in the Big Problems department, with Margot Browning, Assoc. Dir. of the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

“We’re not interested in teaching ‘here are the three branches of government.’ [“Civic Knowledge”] is about the actual basis for community organizing, civic friendship, a healthier and more participatory democracy,” Schultz says.

“We really range across the history of Chicago and the history of the University of Chicago from the original settlements in the Pottawattamie to looking at future plans for 2020 and 2040,” he explains. “We read a lot of absolutely wonderful material, everything from [President Barack] Obama’s Dreams From My Father, to classic Chicago authors with an emphasis on political mobilization.”

In Debra Schwartz’s class, “The Business of Non-Profits,” students will do more than study community activism. They will consult with and advise local non-profits, then present their work to the rest of the class, she said. Schwartz will also bring local non-profit leaders to speak to the class, which is limited to members of the RSO-branch of the non-profit consulting group Campus Catalyst.

Like Schultz, Schwartz links her course material to Chicago’s rich history of public service work and University research.

“Some of the most influential leaders were Jane Addams and her colleagues, some of whom were on our faculty. One of the great insights they had at the time was that Chicago was tremendous urban laboratory. [This city] gives us the opportunity to really see upfront the kinds of problems we’re trying to address through social policy,” Schwartz explains.

“I don’t think you can get quite the depth of experience without this hands-on piece, if you want to really understand the role that a nonprofit plays and how difficult it is to do nonprofit work well,” she adds.

The non-profits range from the Hyde Park Art Center to tutoring and childcare organizations. Because of this diversity, Schwartz said the class attracted a broad range of students, including Economics majors, as well as Public Policy, Art History, and Physics students. “I think it’s great, because the kind of organizations we work with have diverse [services and goals],” she says.

Judy Hoffman is also bringing inspiration from the city to her Documentary Film Production class. As part of this two-quarter-long sequence, students will work in groups to document either a portrait of a Chicagoan, a social issue, or an historical narrative.

“This is a cinematic social inquiry, using the city as a laboratory for investigation,” Hoffman says. “I try to encourage [my students] to get off campus and look at the city and its people, to figure out what really needs to be said.”

Past projects have ranged from profiles of Chicago political figures to more experimental meditations on the city’s landscape. Hoffman considers her students fortunate to have the entire city as inspiration and stomping-grounds for their documentary shooting.

“Chicago has I don’t-know-how-many ethnic groups, around 140; so it’s an opportunity to clearly to explore the landscape of the city and how a built environment informs how people live. Ranging from Mies Van der Rohe to the Chicago Housing Authority, there’s a lot of different ways to look at the city,” Hoffman says.

Chicago’s diverse landscapes also inform Michael Conzen’s upper-division class, “Urban Geography.”

According to Conzen, the course will examine the role cities play in national and regional urban networks. He will lead students to the Regenstein library to view its collection of historical Chicago maps and documents, and on a hundred-mile field trip along the historical Illinois-Michigan Canal.

Why make Chicago a focal point of the course? Conzen says the benefits are clear.

“Being a geographer, I believe very strongly that the visual landscapes around us [help students] put their book learning on the line; they see what works terms of the consequential landscapes and environments that have been created as a result of the forces that they’re reading about.”