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VOLUME XIII, NUMBER 29

INNOVATION ABSTRACTS

PUBLISHED BY THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STAFF AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (NISOD), COLLEGE OF EDUCATION,

Meee eB Ae CMU Re ela Be eae aC FOUNDATION AND THE SID W RICHARDSON FOUNDATION

Developing Community: Taking THE COURSE

One of every three people in Charlotte wasn’t here
15 years ago. They lack roots.

As we begin to understand and appreciate each
other's roots, community develops.

Developing a sense of community, encouraging an
understanding and appreciation of a community’s roots,
was the goal of THE COURSE—an 11-week, home-study,
newspaper, hands-on, project design, field trip, light
readings, get-up-and-go-and-do, film study, map-making,
involvement course for families in the Central Piedmont
Community College (North Carolina) area.

Registration

With the local newspaper as co-sponsor, promotion
was heavy. The college made a small profit although it
kept registration fees low ($5), getting across the subtle
message that community colleges are everyone's best
bargain. Approximately 1400 families registered by phone
or by the newspaper mail-in form. (One registration
served for an entire family.)

Students who enrolled in THE COURSE lived in 13
different states including Arizona, California, Illinois,
Maine, Mississippi, New York, Texas, Wisconsin, and
Kentucky. They registered from five countries—U.S.A.,
Belgium, Sierra Leone, Uruguay, and Vietnam. Three
students were over 90 years old.

Curriculum

THE COURSE text was printed in the Charlotte Sunday
newspaper (circulation of approximately 320,000). The
text covered 11 broad subjects: geology, religion, medi-
cine, politics/law, business, education, women/minori-
ties, arts, sports, preservation, and the future.

Eleven different authors were commissioned to write a
single chapter each of this text, and the single theme was
“Charlotte and how it got the way it is today.” Each
author approached the theme from his/her specialty area.
Thus, a geographer began with the woolly mammoth
10,000 years ago and brought us to the present where the
clay-like land and swift streams still shape how our region
develops. A black minister and a white minister traced
the coming of religion to Charlotte and the thread that
connects “then” with “now”—for example, how can one
region embrace Billy Graham, Jim Bakker, and Sweet
Daddy Grace?

Each week after reading the newspaper article, students
opened a home-study packet. The packets included
objectives, related family projects, and suggested field
trips. Some of the packets included old newspaper pages
for the chapter's time in history. Many contained addi-
tional writings from early times, old photographs, do-it-
yourself graphs, maps for the students to complete in
various colors (to illustrate district gerrymandering or the
spread of the city limits, for example), and eyewitness
accounts.

Sample Projects and Field Trips

e “From Brown Mules to Orange Buses,” the chapter on
education, included the history of school integration
and followed the first black child to an all-white school
in Charlotte. Newspaper photographs showed the
abuse she suffered. She retold her story from today’s
perspective.

e The author of the Sports chapter, titled “Gentlemen,
Start Your Basketballs,” dared list the top 25 names and
the top 25 moments in Charlotte’s sports history—and
the debate still rages. The optional project for Sports
was: Invent a game and send us the rules.

¢ The Arts chapter described “the night Caruso came to
town.” The headline read “Great Singer is Greeted at
the Station by Large Crowds” and described how
hundreds jammed his hotel just to see his signature on
the register.

¢ The project for the chapter on medicine (“Babies, Boils,
Breaks, and Blood”) required the student to write a
brief paper about the practice of medicine in the 40’s in
Charlotte. The sources for this paper were three retired
doctors who allowed us to list their home phone
numbers and invite students to call for interviews
(before 10:00 p.m. and calls limited to 20 minutes). The
field trip for this chapter was to the college for a hands-
on fair of modern medical instruments.

¢ The project for the Preservation unit was to color, cut
out, and assemble a pasteboard trolley. Students began
to see where the trolley lines went, how riders dressed
in that day, and how those trolley lines created
Charlotte's first suburbs.

¢ For the chapter on the future, students were asked to
submit the headlines and lead paragraphs they might
expect to see in the newspaper in the year 2005.

 

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THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STAFF AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (NISOD)
Community College Leadership Program, Department of Educational Administration
College of Education, The University of Texas at Austin, EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712