Download the Fall 2004 PDF - Augsburg College

core curriculumEngaging Minneapolis“MEETING” THE CITYThe first-year orientation booklet tells incoming day students,“When you come to Augsburg, you arrive at the heart of a vibrantcity.” While most students have probably visited the Twin Citiesbefore, it was most likely while visiting family or as a tourist,which gave them little knowledge about studying, living, andworking in this area.Engaging Minneapolis highlights the importance of Augsburg’surban location and introduces new students to the resources,issues, opportunities, and diversity of the city. This is the urbancontext that enables Augsburg to fulfill its mission to preparestudents as responsible citizens and leaders in service to the world.Engaging Minneapolis is not the name of a single course, butrather an added course component that makes intentional andsubstantial use of city resources. Courses with EngagingMinneapolis components are not about the city, but engage the cityas a learning laboratory in which students study their particularliberal arts or general education subject matter.Activities in Engaging Minneapolis courses can vary widely—attending concerts and other cultural events, exploring the ethnicrestaurants in the neighborhood, tutoring immigrant children oradults preparing for citizenship tests, helping care for communitygardens, or discovering the many bike and walking paths along theMississippi River near campus.Some of the Engaging Minneapolis courses also include courseembeddedservice-learning—an Augsburg signature. In theseclasses service experiences and reflective learning are integratedBicycling Minneapolis is a lifetime fitness course that fulfills EngagingMinneapolis by exploring the history and culture of the city along itsbikepaths and trails.As part of her Search for Meaning course, Ashley Boyd helpsSomali high school students with their homework and hasopportunity to learn about their religion and culture.into the students’ coursework, and the communityexperience becomes a “text” for the course. Both thestudents and the community partners learn from eachother.Very few colleges include service-learning in first yearcourses. Mary Laurel True, director of community servicelearning,says that community service is “part of who weare,” and that it’s important for new students right away toget a taste of what it means to be engaged in thecommunity.Several of the AugSem paired classes work with newimmigrants in the neighborhoods surrounding the College.In Professor Janelle Bussert’s Religion 100 class, studentsspend 15 hours at Trinity Lutheran Church in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood helping Somali high schoolstudents with their homework in Safe Place, an afterschoolprogram.The students study Islam in their religion class, andthen find opportunities to talk further and ask questions ofthe Somali high school students about their religioustraditions. Bussert says that some wonderful conversationshave arisen while they work together.English professor Bob Cowgill’s Effective Writingstudents spend 15 hours during the semester working withadult immigrants, mostly from East Africa, at the FranklinLearning Center in the Phillips neighborhood near campus.The students review English lessons or help with flashcards as the adult learners study for citizenship tests.Cowgill’s English course investigates how one knowsand accounts for identity through language. He says thathis students benefit from meeting and working with theimmigrants, and have remarked about how hard theimmigrants work to learn English and become Americans.22 Fall 2004