Approved Spring 2004
THE DYNAMICS OF COMMUNITY CHANGE
Level II
RATIONALE: Essential to the work of Community Studies and applied work in real communities is an ability to understand the causes and consequence of social change over extended periods of time. Students need to be aware of how researchers document and describe changes in community structures, relationships, and identities. They should be familiar with the approaches and methods that historians and social scientists use to distinguish internal and external forces of change, to explain the varying kinds of human response to change, and to interpret the meaning of change. Finally, students should be able to identify and examine various agents of social change, ranging from external forces to internal movements for community control and social change.
COMPETENCY: Can identify, describe, and explain the various external forces that affect communities as well as the internal dynamics that produce conflict and change in history.
CRITERIA:
1. Choose and define a community and identify a time period during which that community experienced a significant change.
2. Using several sources of information, describe the change that took place.
3. Using these sources, as well as other sources on community dynamics, discuss the factors which contributed to the change and the impact of the change on the community.
4. Compare the change you have examined in one community to similar changes that have affected other communities of a comparable nature.
PORTFOLIO LINKS: You are expected to use the Writing Portfolio criteria and standards as guidelines for the written products required by this competency. Papers written for this competency may be considered for submission to the Writing Portfolio.
STANDARDS:
1. For Criterion 1, you must identify a community and explain why and how it can be studied as a community changing over time.
2. For Criterion 2, you must identify at least six different sources of information about the community, including at least three published sources with qualitative information and at least two sources with quantitative information. You must also identify a time period in which to study community change, not less than twenty years and not more than fifty years.
3. For Criterion 3, you must use the sources above to describe the causes and effects of the change that took place over a significant period of time, i.e., more than twenty years.
4. For Criterion 4, you must use at least one source of written information about the process of change you are studying as it has occurred in another community and/or other communities, or as it is described in general historical surveys. Your final report can be a written paper or an oral presentation.
Prior Learning: A student who has been working in a community-based agency for several years uses published reports issued by that agency, articles in local and city newspapers, oral history interviews, and census statistics to describe a change in the quality of community life caused by the closing of several factories and the opening of several businesses offering food and cleaning service and employing low-wage and part-time workers. The student also reads literature by historians, sociologists, and economists assessing the effects of de-industrialization and the growth of service employment on other communities.
Independent Learning: A student works with an advisor/evaluator to read key works in the history of Boston communities describing the effects since 1953 of suburbanization, deindustrialization, housing deterioration, and city neglect and then applies that literature and some its methods and concepts to update the study of the Dudley Street neighborhood as described in the 1994 study Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood by Medoff and Sklar.
Course: A student completes a CPCS course addressing the competency or shows an appropriate transfer.
Field Project: A group of students and a faculty member work with a agency providing human services to the Haitian community in Boston to assess the impact on the community of political changes in Haiti from 1995 to 2004. Using reports from the agency, newspaper articles in English and French, academic studies, and interviews, the students describe the type of community the Haitian people have created in greater Boston, and how it has been affected by the changes in Haiti and the dynamics of migration created by those changes.