Learning Through Listening: Native American Issues in
Rural
Ethnic Studies and Sociology 499/599
Course Directors:
Kurt Peters and
Course Facilitators: Justin Fuller & Kate Sweeney
Office: Ethnic
Studies Department 225
Office:
Office Phone numbers: 737- 0709 737‑5369
Course Web Page
Address: http://osu.orst.edu/instruct/soc204/plazad/native3/index.htm
Office Hours: Anytime throughout the scheduled five days of the course. After the course is completed by appointment only.
Email addresses: Kpeters@orst.edu; dplaza@orst.edu; ksweeney23@yahoo.com; fullejus@onid.orst.edu
Class Meetings:
On Thursday, March 23 we will meet at 4:00- 5:00 pm, at OSU, Strand Agricultural Hall, Room 226. You are required to attend this short pre-course information meeting. At this meeting the syllabus will be distributed, pre-departure planning will be finalized and a short ice breaking session will take place. Students unable to make it to this required meeting need to contact Tina Johnson (Ethnic Studies Department) to make arrangements to get the syllabus, the reading kit, and final instructions on where to meet on Sunday March 26th.
On Sunday March 26 we will meet in Strand
Agricultural Hall Room 226 at 8:30 am. We will leave OSU and travel together by
van to Burns Oregon. Students will spend five days living in Burns and Hines
** This class
requires LONG hours of processing after we return from stakeholder
meetings in the afternoons. Please note that we can often be in class until
9:00 p.m. Thirteen-hour days are not uncommon
in this intense course. You
therefore need to bring a positive up-beat attitude to this unique learning
experience. Turbulence is also very much part of the group dynamic process and when
orchestrating a course of this nature. Please be mentally prepared for this.
We will be staying at
the Best Western Hotel, 534 Highway 20 North Burns/ Hinds
During the course there may be some unavoidable circumstances that arise which cause adjustments in the schedule below. In this case it will be YOUR responsibility to find out what those adjustments might be.
Course Goals:
The purpose of this course is to bring together diverse
community members together in order to learn about sustainable rural
development in
Required Course Materials:
A Lively Little History of
Cupernall, Jan (2005) Heritage Walk: A Walking Guide to Burn’s Unique Past.
Course Reading Kit
One notebook (i.e. binder/ spiral) to be used as a reflection journal
One floppy disk or Zip Disk
Summary of the Final
Grade Calculation
Intellectual Engagement/Participation 25 percent
Group Presentations (each one worth 10%) 20 percent
Personal Journal/ Writing to Learn 15 percent
Research paper 20 percent
Web Page Production 20 percent
Throughout the week
we will be using a video camera and digital camera to record our discussions
and experiences. Your cooperation in this matter is greatly appreciated.
Throughout the week
member(s) of the local or state press might accompany us to observe the pedagogical
method of learning. Your cooperation in helping them understand the learning
that is taking place in the course is greatly appreciated.
Graduate students
enrolled in the course are required to make their personal journal, book
review, web page and participation in the course more extensive than
undergraduate students. The course faculty will meet with the graduate-level
students separately to discuss this requirement.
Services For Students with Disabilities
Students with documented disabilities who may need accommodations, who have any emergency medical information the instructors should know of, or who need special arrangements in the event of an evacuation, should make an appointment immediately.
The
The
Course Content
The course begins by introducing action research and active
listening as two modes of inquiry for doing research and understanding the
changes which are taking place for the stakeholders living in rural
Sunday, March 26 Meet
at 8:30am at OSU,
8:30-9:00 am meet in Strand Ag Hall room 226.
9:00-10:00 am Jim St Martin orientation to the Paiute tribe and rural communities.
Video on Sustainable development
10:30-12:00 pm Exercises for Active Learning and Active Listening.
Brainstorm questions to ask various stakeholders.
12:00-12:30 pm Pizza Lunch at OSU
Depart for Burns
Arrive in Burns @ 6:30 pm—Prime Rib dinner at the Casino.
7:30 pm Students arrive at the hotel—get room keys.
8:00 pm Group convenes in the Best Western conference room
and brainstorms questions for the next day. Appoints facilitators and note
takers. Lunch and dinner provided this
day.
Monday, March 27 Burns
8:00 –9:30 am Dave Courtney Superintendent of schools Harney Country (Best Western hotel conference room).
9:30-10:30 am Troy Greg Superintendent Eastern Oregon Youth Correctional Facility. (Best Western hotel conference room).
11:00-12:00 am Minerva Soucie Tribal Education Specialist
12:00-1:00 pm Lunch
1:00-2:00 pm Twyla Teeman Tribal Health Care
2:00-3:00 pm Dave Speeden Young Tribal Member Tribal Fisheries and Wild life (Reservation)
3:30-5:30 pm
6:00-7:00 pm Dinner at the Casino
7:30-10:00 pm Debriefing & Development of new questions for stakeholders
Breakfast, Lunch and
dinner will be provided this day.
Tuesday, March 28
8:00-9:30 am Pauline Braymen, Media reporter and senior community member. (Best Western hotel conference room).
9:30-10:30 am Connie Brumback, Executive Director Harney County Chamber of Commerce (Tourism). (Best Western hotel conference room).
10:45-11:45 am William Burstow,
Business Development Coordinator,
12:00-1:30 pm Lunch--
2:00 -3:30 pm Ruth Shultz Mayor of City of
4:00-5:30 pm
6:00-7:00 pm Dinner (Casino) Dean Adams Paiute Tribal Council Leader.
7:30-10:00 pm Debriefing & Development of new questions for stakeholders.
Breakfast, Lunch and
dinner will be provided this day.
Wednesday, March 29
8:00-9:30 am
10:00-11:00 pm
11:15-12:30 pm Shana Withee Harney County Extension Office-- (Extension Office conference room)
12:30-1:15 pm Lunch.
1:30-2:30 pm
3:00-4:00 pm Lauren Huseby (Burns high school student) and Ryan Day (young ranch employee). (Best Western hotel conference room).
5:00-6:00 pm Brainstorm Ideas for the final
presentation. (Best Western hotel conference room).
6:00-7:00 pm Dinner (Casino)
8:00-10:00 pm Debriefing & Preparation for final presentation
Breakfast, Lunch and
dinner will be provided this day.
Thursday, March 30
8:00-9:00 am Fred Otley Cattle Rancher
10:00-12:00 pm Preparation for presentation
12:00-1:30 pm Lunch and Afternoon Public Presentation in Burns Oregon Best Western Hotel
2:00 pm Return to
Breakfast, Lunch and
dinner will be provided this day.
Friday, March 31
9:00 -10:30 am Web training in Milne Computing Center Room 201
10:30-12:30 Preparation for the Final Public Presentation—working in groups—Set up Westminster House.
1:00-2:30 pm Public Presentation/ Lunch
Lunch catered by Urmila Mali-- Nepalese Cuisine.
2:30-3:00 pm Clean up
Lunch Provided Today
Intellectual
Engagement and Active Participation
During the five day period that the course runs, we expect each student to at various times be an active listener, facilitator, recorder, presenter and an overall collegial and sensitive member of the learning team for all activities. At the end of the five days each person will be asked to submit a self evaluation of their performance and learning throughout the process. The self‑evaluation will be used by the teaching team for assessing the individual’s final grade. Overall, intellectual engagement and active participation will be worth 25 percent of the final grade.
Reflection Journal
One of your central learning activities during this course will be keeping a personal reflection journal. You should think of this writing as talking out loud or thinking out loud. And you should realize that some of your most interesting (to you, we mean) and productive journal entries may well begin with questions or notions that you haven't really thought about much. They might also be observations of the stakeholders’ perspectives/ positions on education that make you wonder. If you are used to writing essays and tests only, then you'll need a paradigm shift. You will need to lower your standards in order to get the full benefits of your journal. Think about it: essays and tests ask you to be sure. They ask you to write clearly and authoritatively about a topic that you've come to some conclusions about (or even master).Part of the challenge of writing essays and tests lies in deciding for yourself what your conclusions are. No doubt you will come to conclusions during this short course and you can certainly use your journal to reflect on them and examine them. But you can and should also use the journal to try out new ideas, to pick up on some aspect of a stakeholders concern or class discussion that you disagreed with or agreed with or that we didn't get to fully air. The journal can and should be your place to continue our class discussions and your conversations while out in the field. It can and should be your place to record your reactions to the reading you do. Your entries can agree or disagree with the readings. You can argue with it, or just talk about what might be confusing in your readings. If you end up temporarily lost or at a dead end, that's reasonable and even useful. The point is that you're using the journal to become fully involved in all the issues the course raises and your action learning experience is giving you. Don't forget to go back and re‑read earlier entries; sometimes they'll still look accurate, sometimes they'll look naive, and sometimes you'll find that you now have answers to earlier questions. These insights can become new entries. Finally, use your journal to draw connections between this course and the others you've had.
Grading of Journals
The reflection journal counts for 15 percent of your grade. It will be evaluated according to three criteria: commitment, ambition and engagement. Your journals will NOT be graded according to correctness or paragraphing or sentence structure. So feel free to write quickly. Punctuate in any way that makes sense at the time. Your journal will need to include a reflection on each article in the course kit. Reflections on each stakeholder and the newspaper articles in the course kit are also expected to be part of the journal. Note, we expect that you will have at least 15 pages of handwritten commentary in your journal by the time you submit it for grading.
Writing to Learn In
Class Exercises
Throughout the week you will be asked to spend 5 minutes of in‑class time to participate in short writing to learn activities. The purpose of these exercises is to help you learn more about the course content. These exercises may include: write and pass, micro‑themes, reading response questions, media/film reflections, or end of class observations. These writing to learn exercises require no more than one or two paragraphs of written response in your journal. Your written work will be submitted to the instructors in your journal at the end of the course.
Research Paper (Due April 17, 2006)
Apart from the reflection journal we want you to complete a short
research paper on the issue of rural sustainable development in
Web Page
Participation
Students can work alone or in pairs to construct a mini-web page. Each mini web page will ultimately be joined together to form one large class web page. The web page will have sustainable rural development as its focus. Each web page should have a theme which is based on the course readings, classroom discussions or stakeholder issues. Each mini-web page also needs to include a statement (minimum 4 paragraphs) about the learning experienced during the course. In addition students are expected to surf the net, do library research and discuss the rural development theme they are most interested in (e.g. tribal issues, youth, migration, gender, health care, schooling, recreation & tourism, the aging population, youth in small towns, drugs, commerce, environmental issues etc.). These newly discovered sites should be included as links where additional information on the topic can be found by someone visiting your web page. We envision the final class web page to be one which captures the overall learning experience from the students’ perspective. Some training will be provided on how to construct a web page but not much. The web page activity will be worth 20% or your final grade.
Group Presentations
Throughout this course emphasis is being placed on listening
and thinking critically about rural sustainability issues which community
members have faced as they moved into the new millennium. It is in this spirit
that you are asked to critically explore and present the competing arguments.
As a group we will decide by consensus on the best way to present back to the
stakeholders what we have learned throughout the week. Each mini-presentation
group will consist of 2 people (facilitators for the stakeholder). All
presenters will be limited in terms of visual resources. Presenters can use
power point, an overhead projector, colored markers, or bristol
board paper. Presentations will take place both in Burns (Thursday March 30th
and when we return to
The practice of marking the final resting-place of a loved one goes back thousands of years. The ancient pyramids are conceivably the greatest example, standing today as a reminder of the ancient Egyptian glorification of life after death. Many of the elaborate grave markers erected in the 19th and early 20th centuries were styled after the memorials of the ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian civilizations. Cemeteries are living lessons in history, sociology and cultural studies. People who buried their dead said much about themselves and the ones who had died. While not considered a primary historical information source, gravestones are an excellent source for sociological speculation and theorizing. Most tomb-stones contain the persons name, place of birth, dates of birth and death, the number of children they had, and their marital status. Gravestones can also provide evidence of occupation, military service, and membership in a fraternal organization and religious affiliations.
On March 28th we will visit the main public
cemetery in Burns. We will use unobtrusive qualitative methods of research in
order to study the history, demography and social structure of
Working in teams of two you will systematically record information from each grave stone in your designated area. Each headstone is unique and will not necessarily yield all of the data below. We would like you to however write down as much information as appears on the head-stones in your designated area. This might include the following:
Name (full)
Date of Birth
Date of Death
Place of Birth
Cause of Death
Marital Status
Number of children
Occupation
Religious affiliation
Can you estimate the social class of this person (based on the size of the stone head or location in the cemetery)?
Are there any relationships stated on the stone?
Are children or other close relatives buried close by?
Is there any information written on the back of the stone?
Are there any other instructions on this head stone?
After completing this assignment we would like you to make an extensive journal entry (1-2 pages) describing what general findings you made in the cemetery and how this relates to the course reading kit or issues discussed in the course so far. What occupations did men/women do? What were the major causes of death in the 19th/ 20th centuries? What was the average number of children women had? What was the rate of marriage? What was the most practiced religion? Were most people born in Burns or did they migrate from elsewhere? How long on average were women living compared to men? What social class would you estimate most people were in the area you surveyed? Overall what can you say about the people in Burns based on this assignment?
By completing this
assignment the student will:
Apply their understanding of Native American history and course material in their analysis
Question the use public cemeteries and who was included and who was excluded
Make a linkage between
history and the current day treatment of the Native American population in the
We will visit the Harney County Historical museum on March 27th in the late afternoon. We will also participate in a walking tour of the Burns.
The Museum contains a wealth of historical artifacts, records, photographs, and an art collection.
While at the museum we would like you to walk through the exhibitions and collections (take approximately 45 minutes). While moving through the museum take some initial notes on what you see. Working in pairs we would like you to begin to assess how the history of Native American peoples and/or culture(s) has been represented compared to the White Euro-American pioneer population in Harney county. In answering this question, you could focus on a single room, an art collection, the photograph collection or, if appropriate, a single artifact. Pay particular attention to the use of language in the descriptions of exhibits or photographs. Also pay particular attention to the way the museum curator/historian has chosen to describe the living arrangements, family structures, and culture of each group. Are both groups described the same throughout the museum? Provide specific examples of the differences (if any?). What might different treatments suggest about each groups social position within the society?
Working in pairs you
will complete a walk through the city of
After completing both the walk and the museum tour we would like you to make an extensive journal entry (2-3 pages) describing what findings you made and how this relates to the course reading kit or issues discussed by stakeholders in the course so far.
By completing this assignment the student will:
Evaluate specific representation(s) of the past and assess their influences on the present
Apply their understanding of Native American history and course material in their analysis
Question the purpose of such institutions and express personal opinions on public representations of history, people, and/or material culture
Make a linkage between
history and the current day treatment of the Native American population in the
Better understand the history of Burns and its people. Hear first hand what life is like in a small town.
Self Evaluation
You will be asked to provide the teaching team with a self evaluation of your participation and learning in the course. The team will consider your self-evaluation when calculating a final grade for your intellectual engagement and participation throughout the course (keep in mind however that we may not arrive at the same conclusion!). The self-evaluation will be in the form of a letter to the teaching team. The letter does not have to be formal, but you need to include comments on your performance from the following areas. How did you do as: an active listener, facilitator, recorder, presenter, participant in group debriefing sessions, and as an overall collegial and sensitive member of the learning team. Did you experience intellectual growth which you feel might be attributed to your experience with this course. Overall, considering all of these factors, what letter grade would you assign for yourself using the scale of (A, B, C, D, or F)? Please submit your self-evaluation letter along with the other materials by April 17, 2006