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Course Catalog

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The following is an overview of program courses, credit hours, modes of instruction, and locations of instruction.  All courses listed are required for completion of the program.

The five interrelated categories of courses are:

  1. Community-based development
  2. Globalization, localization and sustainability
  3. Community change skills
  4. Monitoring and evaluating community change
  5. Applied practicum work

The first four categories are the core areas of subject matter concentration and instruction. Most of the courses in these categories include interactive online and site-based residential learning. The practicum work constitutes four terms of applied community-based research and analysis.

COMMUNITY-BASED DEVELOPMENT

Introduction to Community Change and Conservation (2 credits)

Beginning at Gandhi’s ashram in Sevagram, India, this course explores the potential of human energy to transform community life, conservation, and social movements. It synthesizes schools of thought regarding development. It introduces an approach to community change and conservation called SEED-SCALE (Self- Evaluation for Effective Decision-making and Systems for Communities to Adapt Learning and Expand). Four principles are explored in detail:

  1. building on success,
  2. forming a three-way partnership of communities (bottom up), officials (top down), and experts (outside in),
  3. basing action on locally specific data, and
  4. using community workplans to guide collective behavior.

This course examines communities successfully applying techniques associated with the SEED-SCALE approach.

Nature Conservation and Management (2 credits)

This course explores community, partnership, and conservation case studies. The emphases are equitable, sustainable, community-based conservation movements. Topics address how economic activity relates to the management of resources and nature conservation, and how alternative approaches to nature protection and management may prove successful. A field-based immersion at Adirondack State Park allows students to observe how communities, individuals, and political leaders balance conservation and development.

Going to Scale with Community Development (2 credits)

How do we move from small and isolated community successes to create enabling environments for rapid expansion of an ongoing process of human-energy-driven social change? Alternative approaches to large-scale expansion are compared and contrasted. The role of expanding quality of services in promoting the mobilization of people’s participation is also explored. The related challenge of relinquishing control serves as a focal point. In the context of Peru’s community-based and nationally-acclaimed CLAS health care systems, three dimensions of going to scale are analyzed:

  1. individual communities build from local successes to realize empowerment and local action,
  2. clusters of communities build problem-solving capacity through experimentation and training, and
  3. partnerships with government create a broader context through collaboration, adaptive learning, and extension.

GLOBALIZATION, LOCALIZATION AND SUSTAINABILITY

Sustainable Development (2 credits)

This course looks at community change of economic models and human capabilities. Topics address historical and contemporary theories of development, differing conceptions of sustainability, international institutions and interventions, policy options and implications, and alternative approaches to understanding and realizing healthy state-societal fits. The key case study is that of tribal communities in northeast India.

Food and Water Security (2 credits)

This course examines the interrelationships between agricultural systems, food production and security, water security and inter-state riparian concerns, and demographic change. Beginning with a broad historical analysis, the focus shifts to pressing contemporary issues. Observing Andean towns struggling to secure food and water needs, this course analyzes property rights and access to land, technological change, biotechnology, biodiversity, indigenous knowledge systems, water, population policy, hunger, food sovereignty, and alternative approaches to agriculture.

Human Ecology (2 credits)

This course draws on a detailed case study of the Himalayan region via a week -long trek with Nepali Sherpas. It introduces an applied framework of ecological design, one that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts and integrates living processes. Basic principles of ecological design are used to explore case studies in such areas as agriculture and land use, local economies, ecotourism, architecture and housing, energy technologies, manufacturing systems, and education.

COMMUNITY CHANGE SKILLS

Healthy People, Healthy Communities (2 credits)

The use of primary health care as an entry point for community mobilization is explored. Two foci are finding people-based solutions that fit community needs and balancing the needs of people with available resources. Examining closely two Indian field programs that are global leaders in community health programming, this course studies individual and collective empowerment, technologies of participation, process facilitation skills, selection of an entry point, credibility, and participatory decision making.

Inter-Cultural Communicative Competence (up to 2 credits)

Across the four terms of this graduate program, a student may earn up to two credits for advancing two levels of language competency. Students are to use our online inter-cultural communicative competence curriculum (IC3). While nonnative speakers of English are likely to use the IC3 platform to master English, those students coming from English-speaking cultures may study another language essential to Future Generations work or that of their own community, or they may study an alternative means of communication such as photography or GIS mapping.

Leadership and Organizational Dynamics (2 credits)

This course is aimed at the exploration, understanding, and application of leadership roles, strategies, and principles in groups, organizations, and communities. The focus is on critical thinking, problem solving, and strategic skills development within the context of participatory learning and decision making. Specific areas of attention include visioning, nominal group processes, conflict analysis and resolution, mediation, negotiation strategies, needs assessment, organizational models and management, approaches to leadership, and best practices for creating more inclusive and empowering groups, organizations, and communities.

Social Change and Conflict Transformation (2 credits)

Violence and nonviolence are strategies to balance power and raise awareness in conflicts that are not ready for verbal forms of negotiation, mediation, or dialogue. These strategies intensify conflict to coerce or persuade people to change. Violence usually spirals into a cycle and creates new victims. Waging conflict nonviolently through carefully wrought community collaboration, advocacy, and activism may ripen conditions for transforming relationships and structures while stopping the cycle of direct and structural violence. This class places the use of violence and nonviolence in a larger context of social change and peacebuilding. It stresses the need to focus on non-adversarial, relationship-based approaches. Also, students share their own communities’ violence and learn strategies for trauma awareness and resilience.

MONITORING AND EVALUATING COMMUNITY CHANGE

Applications of Nonprofit Management (2 credits)

This course covers the basics of managing a nongovernmental organization. Topics include project development and implementation, accounting, board and staff relations, fundraising, and grants development. Students analyze the management of their own community-based organizations, learn to read and understand financial documents, and learn how to research, identify and present to outside funders. Products from the course include:

  • the design of a financial report and accounting system,
  • design of a project,
  • development of a letter of inquiry, and
  • development of a grant proposal to an outside funder.

Empowerment (2 credits)

This course takes key issues related to empowerment and community development, and explores them in depth through related case studies and readings. Thematic areas of emphasis include gender, ethnicity, wealth, equity and literacy. Students also learn how to design and use EPI-INFO evaluation techniques. They then adapt EPI-INFO to their particular research needs and community context.

APPLIED PRACTICUM WORK

Practicum: Research Design and Methods (2 credits)

In this first practicum course, students describe their community. They identify critical questions of change and conservation in their community. They study and acquire quantitative, qualitative, and alternative research methods and the necessary statistical tools to analyze data, perform community assessments, and monitor and evaluate programs. Emphases are placed on participatory and action research approaches and methods as well as the identification, measurement, and use of key indicators. Philosophical reasons behind different research approaches and methods are explored in terms of the practice and use of research. Topics include:

  • community survey techniques,
  • household surveys,
  • selecting and training assessment teams,
  • group mapping and modeling,
  • surveillance for equity.

Practicum: Prospectus Design (2 credits)

In this second Practicum course, learning objectives are for students to develop competencies in an applied or professional setting, to explore the universal within the context of the particular through a case study analysis of specific community-based change processes, and to share and critique these efforts with other students. Each student is to:

  1. analyze his or her personal and community history of community-based action,
  2. identify a pertinent research question for change and conservation in his or her community, and
  3. complete a prospectus for applied research in the community.

Practicum: Applied Research I (2 credits)

Here students work closely with community members, an assigned mentor, and the course’s instructor to carry out completely a first iteration of research incommunity. Results and analysis are to be presented for collective critique by the end of this term.

Practicum: Applied Research II (2 credits)

Students build on the constructive critique of the prior term. They modify and enhance their community-based question and applied research for a second iteration of research during this fourth term of study. They finalize and complete their community-based analysis. This includes a full presentation of their research question, its analysis, and associated results. It includes an exploration of how the lessons learned from the case study and the results of the research can be adapted or “scaled up” by their own and other communities. The case study will be the basis of the student’s presentation during “Synthesis and Integration,” a capstone course during the final residential in Tibet, China.

Pedagogy of Place (4 credits)

This course evolves over four terms of study. Students explore the universal within the context of the particular. They consider place-based approaches to education and development at home and in India, the United States, Peru, Nepal, and Tibet/China. Personal learning histories and community stories are used to articulate statements of education and development philosophy. These efforts are shared, reviewed, and incorporated into a web-based profile of the entire class, the students’ communities, and other communities that enrich our learning experience. Also, each member of the class submits a Student Learning Plan, which is updated each term. Over four terms, the class discerns the relationship of lifelong learning with “best practices” in community change and conservation.

Synthesis and Integration (3 credits)

This capstone seminar is organized around each student’s presentation of his or her community-based case study, which is developed and written as the culmination of four practicum courses. Students take a lead role in organizing the overall structure and themes of this seminar, a process that will evolve during the course of Term IV. This seminar includes a student-designed evaluation of the Master’s program and each student presentation. It includes the active participation and involvement of faculty and resource persons. The aim of the course is to synthesize and integrate the entire span of learning that has occurred over four terms of interactive online learning, residential studies, and applied community research and service. Themes of this course include:

  • Transformative learnings
  • Teachers as learners / learners as teachers
  • Critical and creative inquiry,
  • Lifelong learning communities
  • Qualitative and quantitative monitoring
  • Ecological sustainability
  • Reflective practice