May 11-30, 2014

http://www.okcu.edu/petree/world-house/

Course Description

This course explores what will be needed in the 21st century to live effectively in sustainable, compassionate human communities, and introduces students to cutting edge change-agents in Oklahoma and across the nation. The content and civic engagement aspects of this course will focus on systemic approaches to addressing ecologically, economically, and socially unsustainable structures in our city and in our society as a whole. We will be exploring possible cultural, economic, political and personal responses to these challenges through research, discussion and reflection, and civic engagement.

All student participants will live on campus for this intensive 3-week experience. Service learning will be a key component of the institute, and students will earn 3 college credits under the course title “21st Century Problems Seminar.” For School of Liberal Arts and Sciences students at Oklahoma City University, this meets two of your liberal education core requirements for graduation.

Students will:

• Critically assess social realities & issues related to social and ecological sustainability, as they relate to social and economic opportunities & inequalities.
• Develop a framework for understanding of social and ecological justice, and articulate how that framework might inform contemporary issues.
• Show an ability to integrate class readings and discussion with personal experience.
• Explore, seek involvement in, and demonstrate ability to intelligently reflect on social and ecological justice problems affecting life in the Oklahoma City area and globally.
• Identify causes & issues of social and ecological justice, and develop individual and group responses to social injustices.

OCU course number : INDP 3963

Students must pay $500 to reserve a spot in the course, and a second payment of $500 will be due by April 15, 2014.

“This is the great new problem of humanity. We have inherited a big house, a great “world house” in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Muslim and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this one big world, to live with each other.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr.