The purpose of PPPM 325 is to explore community, the process of social change, and sustainability. As future planners and policy makers, part of the skill set you are learning is the capacity to integrate and synthesize a multitude of perspectives into a coherent idea – this class is ideally suited to push you in that direction.

PPPM 325 requires that you do most of the work – through your thinking, synthesizing of ideas, researching, observing, participating, and writing. I teach this class as though there are six of us sitting around a table and exploring new ideas by our back and forth conversations.

That we have 50+ students in class should not mean that the opportunity for deep thought, exploration of ideas, testing of opinions, and sharing of insights cannot be done. We will work together in large groups, small groups, and individually to explore notions of community and community change. What this means for you is that information will not be handed to you through dense lectures of numerous facts.

Class time will present just enough information to get the discussions going. Readings and assignments will provide additional opportunities for depth of learning. This means that if you want to get something out of this class, you’ll have to put something in.

Hopefully by the end of class, your conception about what community is and how change is pursued will be enlarged, you will have been pushed a bit to look inward and challenge your assumptions and stereotypes about the world, and that you will leave you with a richer (if not more confused) notion of how the world works and what can be done to make things better.