Brief notices
A couple of short items today. First, from Terry Cooper at USC, a notice of the 35th anniversary of the USC Joint Educational Project, which he thinks may have been the first service-learning project in the country. Be sure you're on a fast connection if you try to access the pdf newsletter, since it's about 30Mb. Terry writes:
I imagine most of you know of the USC Joint Educational Project (JEP) which may have been the first service learning project in the nation and which has come a long way over its 35 years of work. I am providing below the link to the online version of the 35th anniversary JEP newsletter for those who might be interested.
http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/jep/resources/newsletterjep2007_spring.pdf
By the way, I was a witness to the founding of this program in a very "up close and personal" way. I was working on my Ph.D. while leading an experimental urban studies program called "Urban Semester"--a highly experiential learning program in which the 40 students each semester took their entire 16 units of work in an integrated program with 5 faculty and 5 TAs. Barbara Gardner, the founder of JEP, occupied an office across the hall from mine and we often chatted about her vision for the JEP program. My lasting image of her is looking across a narrow hall seeing her bent over her desk talking to someone on the phone with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. She was a woman with a mission and the sales skills to persuade others of its worth.
Second, we've added a new blog to our list of links, from the new Institute for Law and Politics (http://www.politicslaw.org) at the University of Minnesota. Not to belabor the obvious, law and politics are two of the crucial areas in which active citizenship plays itself out.