New Cur­ricu­lum Tack­les Old Is­sues

All stu­dents, no mat­ter their ma­jor or ca­reer goal, will have to take classes that fit into their gen­eral ed­u­ca­tion (more com­monly re­ferred to as gen ed) re­quire­ments. You have to meet a cen­ter num­ber of dif­fer­ent types of classes through­out your col­lege ca­reer. But what if all stu­dents all took one course that ful­filled a broader scope than those in­di­vid­ual classes? That’s what a new pi­lot course, ti­tled The High Cost of Poverty, is try­ing to do. 

nbsp;   The core cur­ricu­lum is in the process of be­ing re­worked be­hind the scenes. This new course is­n’t to try to have this sin­gle course to be repli­cated over and over again, but to rather see if the for­mat of the class is us­able as a way to teach dif­fer­ent so­ci­etal is­sues through the com­bined knowl­edge from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives.

“We de­cided [Poverty] would be the first topic and then reached out to fac­ulty who are al­ready en­gaged in those ar­eas do­ing re­search or teach­ing in those ar­eas,” said Dr. Alden Crad­dock, the ex­pert on ed­u­ca­tion for the course. 

Crad­dock makes up a fourth of the team be­hind the course with the help of Dr. Kent Baus­man for so­ci­ol­ogy, Dr. Olaide San­goseni for health pro­fes­sions and Dr. Jess Bow­ers for hu­man­i­ties. They each get three weeks to teach their sub­ject mat­ter to the larger lec­ture por­tion of the class on Tues­day. 

On Thurs­day, they each lead their own dis­cus­sion groups to talk about the ma­te­r­ial that every­body learned about. There are tests over each of the sub­jects af­ter they have gone through their ma­te­r­ial as well as a fi­nal pro­ject the fo­cuses on dif­fer­ent school dis­tricts in the St. Louis area to see the im­pacts of poverty. 

The first sec­tion of the course that the stu­dents go through for this par­tic­u­lar course, is the so­ci­ol­ogy ground­work taught by Dr. Baus­man. Baus­man’s sec­tion is placed first in the course in or­der to give the stu­dents an un­der­stand­ing of the sys­tem­atic na­ture that poverty has in Amer­ica rather than the fre­quent thoughts that poverty is a prob­lem with the in­di­vid­ual.

“We want to look at what is col­lec­tively in com­mon amongst so­ci­eties mem­bers. Why is this group more vul­ner­a­ble to poverty than an­other group? We think there’s some kind of so­cial rea­son be­hind that… it’s like a pair of glasses you put on; it’s a whole new way [of think­ing]…I can give lip ser­vice [to the is­sue, the other pro­fes­sors] can give meat to it.” Baus­man said. 

Next up for the course is Dr. Crad­dock and his sec­tion on the links be­tween ed­u­ca­tion and poverty. He teaches the class on this prob­lem with poverty and gets the stu­dents to try to grap­ple with how poverty af­fects the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem and the peo­ple go­ing through it.

While the stu­dents learned through Baus­man’s sec­tion on what the num­bers are in ed­u­ca­tion and poverty, Crad­dock will be able to show and ex­plain the ex­pe­ri­ences of poverty in ed­u­ca­tion. 

Third up in the course is Dr. San­goseni and her show­ing the ef­fects of poverty as it is re­lated to the Amer­i­can health sys­tem. She will take the class through dif­fer­ent as­pects of the health field in­clud­ing the eco­nom­ics of health­care for the poor, why un­healthy food cost more, in­creased rates of death and a shorter lifes­pan for peo­ple in poverty and the ac­ces­si­bil­ity to health in­for­ma­tion to the poor. This por­tion of the course will show the stu­dents the dis­par­i­ties that ex­ist with peo­ple in poverty and lack of ac­cess to a de­cent source of health­care. 

Fi­nally, the course will take a turn to­wards the hu­man­i­ties un­der the teach­ings of Dr. Bow­ers where she will show the stu­dents how poverty is por­trayed. She looks at how poverty is seen in rural ar­eas, where it seems to be more glo­ri­fied, as well as ur­ban ar­eas, where it seems to be more de­mo­nized. 

Stu­dents will be able to use all of the data and in­for­ma­tion that they learned from the other parts of the course in or­der to com­pare the ways the me­dia shows poverty and the truth of what poverty ac­tu­ally is. “I’m in­ter­ested in the ways in which we pre­sent and mythol­o­gize im­pov­er­ished peo­ple… how do we con­cep­tu­al­ize dif­fer­ent groups of im­pov­er­ished peo­ple?… I think our Amer­i­can val­ues play a role in [the por­tray­als],” Bow­ers said. 

The courses pur­pose is to get the stu­dents in­volved in it to think about how these big is­sues like poverty need to be tack­led from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives. You need to un­der­stand more than just one of these many dis­ci­plines in or­der to achieve some form of un­der­stand­ing of poverty and to reach a level of crit­i­cal think­ing to com­pre­hend the is­sue and oth­ers along the way. 

Baus­man said, “My in­ten­tion of join­ing this group was that I want peo­ple to be more com­pas­sion­ate cit­i­zens… even if some of you guys in the class could give two shits about the poor, at least now you have the num­bers. What­ever ar­gu­ment you want to make, it’ll be based in some kind of fact.”