Social Problems Course

"Social Problems in Contemporary Society" is a regularly scheduled academic course taught as an "Off-campus" course. The academic or cognitive, or pre-departure component of the course is taught during the fall semester and is organized as any undergraduate sociology course might be. The course meets each week, lectures and discussions take place, texts are read, exams are given, term papers are graded. Then, in early January the sixteen undergraduate sociology students and the professor meet in downtown Atlanta and begin a week of intensive interactions with individuals suffering from a variety of social problems and social agencies and individuals attempting to offer services to address these problems.

A typical day begins at a local nursing home with the students interacting with patients in an Alzheimer's unit while a banjo-picking musical therapist plays old time Methodist hymns for all present. The music gives the social problems students and the residents of the nursing home a common focus and a positive experience to share. After assisting in the noon meal, the students, professor, and a variety of members of the nursing home staff retire to a conference room and begin an extended dialogue the knits together their recent experiences and the materials they have read in their assigned text on the dynamics of long term care for the frail elderly. The students learn of the effects of governmental cutbacks in Medicaid funds and the subsequent effects on the quality of care in such homes. Next stop may be a waste water treatment plant where they learn of the mechanical and biological efforts to clean waste water before it enters a local stream. I always take a glass and fill it from the discharged waste water and ask if any of my students would like to drink it. All will decline the invitation. They are then asked, "Why would we expect people downstream to drink it when you would not?" We graphically observe the adage that we are all downstream from someone.

During the evenings after dinner, we return to our hotel to begin some of the most vital, intellectually informed and emotionally charged discussions I have witnessed as a teacher. We debate the issue of capital punishment after spending the day at a maximum security prison, the cost effectiveness of environmental protection, the dynamics of crime after riding with the Atlanta Police for an eight hour shift as a "Civilian Observer", and the role of genetics and the social environment in creating addictive behaviors after sitting in on an A.A./N.A. meeting. This is only a partial list of the activities we engage in during our week together in downtown Atlanta after the regular classroom meetings during the fall semester.

Allowing students to observe and participate in this fashion facilitates a greater intellectual sophistication and a greater awareness of the contingencies between private decisions and public consequences. The notions of civic engagement and public morality infuse all of our discussions and begin to inform the student's emerging sense of "public life".

For more information, please contact Dr. Mike McQuaide (mmcquai@emory.edu).