This course will review the determinants of the location, size, growth, and form of urban areas. Students will study the major issues of contemporary urban life: physical deterioration, growth of ghettos, congestion, pollution, transportation, and land use.
Students measured and documented an aspect of New Orleans economic redevelopment after Hurricane Katrina.
This course serves as an introduction to the economic theory of how and why people make decisions that have consequences for the natural environment and the availability of renewable and nonrenewable natural resources. Analysis will include valuation of pollution damages and controls, the use of environmental valuations to determine optimal rates of extraction and utilization of natural resources. The course will apply analytical results to current environmental and natural resources issues.
Students designed contingent valuation surveys to assess the local communities’ willingness to pay for environmental amenities and programs.
English
ENLS 3010
Archives and Outreach
Michael Kuczynski
Archival study is thought of, by scholars and non-scholars alike, as an esoteric (and therefore "closed") academic field. The purpose of this class is to flip that understanding of the archive by emphasizing the deeply communal, public origins of archival collections, especially those assembled here at Tulane, and the need to introduce the general public to archives as a means of realizing and enlivening their use--that is, preventing them from becoming mere repositories of neglected or entirely forgotten rare materials.
Students introduce local high school students to a program called the Book as Gateway--an introduction to the History of the Book for grade 9-12 students that emphasizes books as a technology; to several campus-based archives; and work with the h.s. students on an archive portfolio, documenting their progress over the term.
ENLS 3620
Place-Based Storytelling in New Orleans
Luisa Dantas
This course examines basic concepts, principles and techniques of storytelling grounded in place and its application as a tool for fostering dialogue and communication across diverse communities, with a specific focus on New Orleans. Students will learn to analyze and construct narratives that incorporate and/or redefine the concept of place,using various media and platforms, including written, video, audio and online texts.
Tulane students enrolled in this course assist middle and high school students at a partner institution in scripting, producing and editing their own “place-based” multi-media story projects about their New Orleans communities.
ENLS 3620
Workshop in Creative Writing: Journalism
Michael Luke
Using journalism as the medium, students will work collaboratively with high school students from New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics High School to produce a bi-annual magazine that will be published at the end of the semester. The students from both schools will create the magazine in a newsroom lab at Science High School. The students from Science High School and Tulane will publish jointly in the magazine, each working on semester-long projects to produce narrative-driven non-fiction pieces, full-length profiles, large Q&As, and possibly some opinion work. The students from both schools will assist one another to complete their stories, as the work will be done in a collegial milieu, instead of a tutor-pupil relationship. In addition to a traditional printed publication, the magazine will have an online presence, with students publishing digital content and using social media.
In concert with reading journalism on issues that are critical in New Orleans, students will get out of the classroom and engage the people of New Orleans through extensive reporting and research. Through their reportage, students will experience these communities firsthand, and their subsequent writing will illuminate issues these communities are facing. In addition to the civic engagement element, the Tulane students and Science High students will gain real-world experience by working as reporters, editors, publishers to learn the current skills to work in the journalism field.
This is a classical rhetoric course grounded in the thought of Aristotle and Quintilian. It is an attempt not only to think about rhetoric and the good life, but to practice them.
Students coached debate teams in four New Orleans middle schools where over 95% of the students qualify for free lunch. Those debate teams are the foundation of a new, thriving, citywide league. Students read Aristotle’s Topics, Rhetoric, Nicomachean Ethics, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, a few Platonic dialogues, and letters from Cicero and Seneca.
ENLS 4010
New Orleans and the Early Modern Caribbean
Adam McKeown
This is an archives-based class on the literature and cultural history of New Orleans and the Caribbean during the Early Modern Period (1492 to 1800). While New Orleans was not settled until the last third of this period, the course is predicated on the idea that its settlement is an extension of the Atlantic colonial project and may be productively viewed in the context of European colonial activities in North America and, particularly, in the Caribbean. The goal of the class is both to advance students’ knowledge of early modern New Orleans and the Caribbean and to develop students’ understanding the role of the archives in preserving and disseminating the documents and objects through which early modernity can be known at all.
Students work with the Historic New Orleans Collection, which makes available historical archives on New Orleans, and also offers extensive education programs designed to “teach the teachers” of Louisiana about the history of the region and ways to incorporate the history into their curricula.
Students learn a detailed understanding of the way remote historical forces (the rise of the creole in the 18th century, the rise of the slave-market in the 19th century) shape the major literary artifacts associated with New Orleans.
The service-learning students in this course will spend twenty hours over the course of the semester interviewing people who live near The New Orleans Healing Center on St. Claude Avenue in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. On the basis of these interviews, the students will write profiles of their interviewees that will be published as a regular column called "Heroes and Histories of the Saint Claude Corridor" in the newsletter and website of The New Orleans Healing Center. This project will help affirm and stabilize the mission of The New Orleans Healing Center to connect with, respect, and keep visible the communities "indigenous" to the area and who are increasingly at risk of being pushed out by gentrification.
ENLS 4060
The Teaching of Writing
T.R. Johnson
This course prepares students to become teachers of writing by introducing them to fundamental theories and practices in the discipline of rhetoric and composition.
Students learned the fundamental theories and practices of writing instruction and then applied, tested, and extended this knowledge by tutoring at Green Charter School.
ENLS 4850
Makers and Motivations: Culture & Organizing in New Orleans
Catherine Michna
This course will map and analyze the politics and practice of public engagement in the arts within the creolized, African-diasporic infused landscape of New Orleans and surrounding communities in the Gulf South. A unique feature of this seminar will be that Tulane students will partner on a weekly basis for discussions and collaborative writing workshops with 15 high school students in the Students at the Center (SAC) and Bard Early College programs at McMain Secondary School. The final product for the course will consist of a class book and a series of short videos that historicize and compare the "methods and motivations" of community-engaged artists and culture makers in New Orleans.
Students take workshops in anti-racist dialogue building and oral history interviewing. They then apply what they learned from the workshops to mentoring work grounded in equitable partnerships and democratic dialogue with McMain students in the following activities: one-on-one writing tutoring; sustained team mentorship of McMain students in the work to design, draft, and revise the class book; and scholarly research tutoring.
ENLS 4860
Building Community through the Arts
Barbara Haley
This course is a sustained study of topics such as nationality, popular culture, cultural institutions, and postmodernism.
Students worked in teams with students from Xavier University, with local artists on Home, New Orleans: a multi-disciplinary, art and community development project grounded in the 7th Ward, Central City, and Lakeview.
ENLS 4860
Food and Culture
Supriya Nair
In this course, students will engage with the local community through public service and learn more about its food cultures.
Students worked with partners Hollygrove Market and Farm and New Orleans Food and Farm Network on activities related to culinary tradition, geography of food (or food pathways), gardening, growing and eating local.
