HECU3573: Inequality in America: Internship and Integration Seminar

The Internship and Integration Seminar is an 8 credit course comprised of two interconnected parts.. The internship is concentrated practice, and facilitates student learning on many levels. Students integrate and refine their theoretical understanding, build and develop skills, gain a greater understanding of methods of social change, and grow in their understanding of vocation. The program deliberately integrates these experiences with themes and experiences from the other courses in the program. Students work a minimum of 200 hours at their placement, approximately 20 hours each week for the duration of the program. This seminar integrates theoretical and experiential work in the other seminars of the program with internship work, and provides further theoretical frameworks for making meaning from the internship experiences. Students analyze the operation of organizations that are dedicated to changing systemic inequalities, learn how, when, and why organizations collaborate, and explore the perspectives that internship organizations and staff bring to individual and societal change. Assignments ask students to articulate and assess worldviews on social change and movement-building, including; their own, those in texts discussed in the classroom, those expressed by field speakers who visit the program, and staff at their internship sites. Through guided examination of the assumptions they bring to interactions with practitioners and communities, students see how those varying worldviews play out within organizations and in processes of social change. Finally, students reflect on the impacts their classroom training and lived experiences have in real-world work and community environments, and articulate plans for their future engagement. This course is one of three courses taken concurrently that make up the Inequality in America: Policy, Community, and the Politics of Empowerment program taught through our institutional partnership with HECUA. Students are also enrolled in HECU 3571 Inequality in America: A Political Economy Approach and HECU 3572 Political Sociology of Building Power, Change and Equity. Departmental consent required.

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