Inter session, January 6- 13, 2007, Rollins College.

Names of Instructors
Joseph V. Siry, coordinating faculty.
Larry Eng-Wilmot, Chemistry Department
Pete Ives, Director of the Rollins College Writing Center
Lynne Perisee, Institutional Advancement Office.
Meredith Hein, Assistant Director, Office of Community Engagement
Meghan Harte, Assistant Director, Office of Multicultural Affairs

Course Description: (2 credits, $190 travel expenses):
Join Rollins Relief to work and live 24-7 in New Orleans assisting its recovery from the 2005 flood. This is a student-faculty-staff collaborative effort, where you learn, by doing relief work with others in your team to experience the scope of this tragedy.
We will be reading a history of the deluge, discussing a common article with team leader, and will be working everyday from 7AM to 4PM with Habitat for Humanity to rebuild people’s homes.

We work with Habitat for Humanity Monday through Saturday and stay in their secure facility located at a new site called Camp Hope just south of Violet, Louisiana. Academically we attempt to understand and take some responsibility for helping people put their lives back together by reading articles and books about this ongoing tragedy, discussing what we see, hear and read, keeping a journal of our experiences and writing an essay about rejuvenating the City upon our return. In addition, teams of students will conduct a forum or discussion for all interested students in the spring term.
The essence of this project is teamwork. Our success depends on each of you, and your willingness to work effectively together.

Learning Objectives
1. To immerse students in experiences requiring responsive cooperation under extraordinary conditions.
2. To articulate in writing and in verbal presentations the plight of the dispossessed.
3. Describe and articulate the tragic circumstances of New Orleans since the Great Deluge.
4. Give students an opportunity to witness the aftermath of human recovery from disaster.

What is expected?
To convey to others how a relief program, under the best of circumstances and with the best of intentions, could still fail to meet human needs.
Turn in all forms, required signatures, contact information and health center forms. Actively participate daily in work and attend evening discussions & presentations (34% of the grade) . Complete the assigned readings by keeping notes on the information presented (33% of the grade) . Write an essay and present your findings to the class (33% of the grade) after you return to campus.

Readings:
E-Reserve for Siry, (password is flood).

Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, (excerpts).

John Updike, After Katrina. New York Review of Books. Volume 53, Number 19 · November 30, 2006. Review: New Orleans After the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 19–December 10, 2006.

Michael Grunwald, The Threatening Storm, Time Magazine, August 13, 2007, pp, 28-39.*

Movies: “Seven Days That Changed New Orleans” & “When The Levees Broke”

Daily Log and Personal Journal—(33% of the grade)
Reflections: Journals: capturing the voices of recovery and despair, telling the stories of resilience. This is a daily requirement of the class. It is an honest and personal reflection of the work you do, people you meet, and the things you see. You have the responsibility to give a representative sample to a member of the faculty. This journal can include various forms of media, but the text must be in your own writing voice.

Essay: (33% of the grade)
The course also requires that each participant must submit an essay paper on the topic: “Should New Orleans be restored (if so then, how, when, where and why?) This paper should have a title based on your contents, with (1) its principle author’s full name and phone number, (2) date completed, (3) and with page numbers on the upper right hand corner.

The essay should follow the style and content of papers in the Rollins Undergraduate Research Journal and it should be double-spaced, 12pt font (either Times/Times Roman or Arial) and at least 5 pages long, excluding the Literature Cited page and any notes, figures, photos, or graphs you may choose to use. This review paper must be handed in no later than 17 February 2008. Of course you are very welcome to hand it in earlier and you are also encouraged to discuss it with me, your team leaders, other instructors or faculty and submit a draft to me for review before final submission.
This Paper must be word-processed. This is an Open Source document. Our intent is to make this document public. The source of figures used must be fully acknowledged and plagiarism must be avoided absolutely (any evidence of plagiarism will result in a score of zero and a No credit for the course).
You may make this paper general, but with an emphasis on history, the articles you have read, and the experiences you draw from your journal with concepts from my web site; or you may focus on a single problem or conundrum raised by our speakers & related to your experience. The essay will be marked critically as though you were submitting it for publication. It should be legible, grammatically correct (recheck for proper wording after use of a spell checker), and engaging to someone who is not familiar with the work you did in class.
For example, if you have a biomedical interest you may wish to compare the needs of the people whose homes you are rebuilding with those of the larger population and these people’s access to health care or exposure to disease from what you understand having completed the assigned readings. Or you may wish to focus on the socio-economic dynamics of restoring communities, or the dynamics of race and/or gender with respect to disadvantaged populations in Louisiana.
You may want to describe the particular low-income populations, or the economic dynamics of working-class families in a restricted housing market. You may take an expressive arts approach or a journalistic direction to presenting the depth of human interactions in distressed areas recovering from disaster. You may want to assess the impacts of relief agencies in meeting the needs of people you encountered while working, based on the readings and discussions.

* Citations and sources of information should focus on primary sources and must be cited as having been read (do not cite sources that you have not seen). Secondary and tertiary sources (e.g. web or magazine sources) may be used but must not predominate. Yours or other students’ Personal Journals should be cited, by name as the day and date of the entry.

Academic Honesty
You are responsible for making yourself aware of and understanding the policies and procedures in the College Catalog that pertain to Academic Honesty (pp. _-_). These policies include cheating by doing someone else’s work or using their work as your own, fabrication of information, falsification of data and forgery, multiple submission, plagiarism, complicity and computer misuse.
If there is reason to believe you have been involved in academic dishonesty, you will be referred to the Dean’s Office for a violation of the Honor Code. You will be given the opportunity to review the charge(s). If you believe you are not responsible, you will have an opportunity for a hearing. You should consult with me if you are uncertain about an issue of academic honesty prior to the submission of an assignment or working with other participants.

Itinerary
Wednesday November 28, 7PM, TBD Meet class, team leaders, and instructional staff, exchange mobile phone #’s, pre-departure check-in and briefing.

Sunday, January 6, 9:00 p.m., meet in the Alfond Parking lot & check in with team leaders
Sunday, January 6, 10:00 p.m. Depart Rollins College, Travel Time: nearly 12 hours.

Monday, January 7, 11 a.m. Central Time: Arrive in New Orleans, lunch not included.
1 p.m. Mr. Errol Baron walking tour on Architecture Location: TBD
Monday January 7, 3 p.m. arrive and check-in, Camp Hope: 4 p.m. and 5:30, dinner
7 p.m. Briefings by Camp Hope staff with student and faculty liaison and leadership teams.

• Camp Hope: camphope@habitat-nola.org
• 1201 Bayou Rd.
• St. Bernard, Louisiana 70085
• (504) 872-0676 – Office (504) 301-1672 - Fax

Tuesday, January 8,
8 a.m. Field Work
3:30 p.m. Return to Camp Hope for showers and dinner
7:00 p.m. Joseph Siry seminar on Geography, Rivers and Creole Culture at Camp Hope

Wednesday, January 9,
8 a.m. Field Work
3:30 p.m. Return to Camp Hope for showers and dinner
7:00 p.m. The Garden District & Lower 9th ward contrasts. Camp Hope discussion and slides with Dr. and Mrs. Isidore Cohn, Jr. lecture

Thursday, January 10,
8 a.m. Field Work
2:30 p.m. Return to Camp Hope for showers
4:30 p.m. departure for the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA)
5 p.m. NOMA Museum Visit Dinner at the Museum & tour of the holdings with Mr. Bullard’s staff.

Friday, January 11,
8 a.m. Field Work
3:30 p.m. Return to Camp Hope for showers
6:30 p.m. Preservation Hall Jazz presentation in the French Quarter.

Saturday, January 12,
8 a.m. Field Work
3:30 p.m. Return to Camp Hope for showers, pack and checkout
6:00 p.m. Downtown New Orleans, French Quarter, Closing Dinner
10:30 p.m. Depart New Orleans, La. for Orlando, Fl.

Sunday, January 13,
Noon, Arrive in Winter Park, Rollins College Campus.

Statement of student collaboration

Rollins Relief was created as a formal student organization in June, 2007, Rollins Relief is a collaborative forum for students, staff, faculty and administrators to learn from one another and from their common experience of contributing their assistance, where needed, in disaster situations.

Mission Statement of Rollins Relief
Rollins Relief is a student organization that provides all members of the College community with accessible, cost-efficient disaster response opportunities in the local region, on the national level, and in the international arena.

A special thanks for making this service learning course available to students goes to:

Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Dean of the Knowles Memorial Chapel
Office of Community Engagement and Environmental Studies Department
NOMA, New Orleans Museum of Art
Camp Hope & Habitat for Humanity
The Cohn Family

J. Siry

Sources:

Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. (New York: Harper, 2006).

Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and life in its disaster zone, (New York, Free Press, 2007).

Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006).

Craig Colten, ed., Transforming New Orleans and its Environs:Centuries of Change, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).

Stanley C. Arthur, Old New Orleans, (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Company, 1995).

Billy Sothern, Down in New Orleans, (Berkeley: University of California Press. 2006).

Michael Grunwald, The Threatening Storm, Time Magazine, August 13, 2007, pp, 28-39.*

Fischetti, Mark, “Drowning New Orleans,” Scientific American, October 1, 2001. (Sciam.com)

Bibliography from the Atlantic Monthly

Reading, Writing, Resurrection
... Atlantic Monthly Hurricane Katrina destroyed one of America's worst school systems and made New Orleans the nation?s laboratory for educational reform. But ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200701/waldman-katrina

Things Left Undone
... Imagine if, in advance of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of trucks had been waiting
with water and ice and medicine and other supplies. Imagine if 4,000 ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/richard-clarke-on-fema

Primary Sources
... The Nation. The Year After. In the months since Hurricane Katrina, the Brookings
Institution has been tracking reconstruction efforts with a ?Katrina Index ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200611/primarysources

The Politics of Global Warming
... can sense the mood on climate change shifting. Ever since Hurricane Katrina, the
mainstream media no longer has a doubt. The problem is real, huge, and urgent ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200606u/nj_crook_2006-06-06

Our Faith-Based Future
... of control even before the enormous increases in spending to cope with Hurricane
Katrina and the persistently dire situation in Iraq (see "Disasters and the ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/faith-based-future

After Katrina
... in Corby Kummer's October column "Sweet Home Louisiana" were in the path of Hurricane
Katrina and the subsequent flooding. As a result, it seems that some ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200510u/new-orleans-distilleries

Catastrophe Management
... emerged recently is that the real cause of what happened in Katrina was not just
the hurricane itself, but it was the apparently structural problems in the ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200608u/chertoff-full/4

Struggling to Survive
... CHALMETTE; By the time water encroached on the Chalmette Medical Center
parking lot, the worst of Hurricane Katrina was over. Upstairs on the second ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200608u/nj_rauch_2006-08-15

Katrina and the Economy: a Toxic Combination
... in the Republican Party? If so, Katrina confronts them with quite a problem. The
costs of supporting hurricane victims and reconstructing shattered cities are ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200509u/nj_crook_2005-09-27

Calendar
... to pre-Katrina strength 169 miles of the 350-mile levee system that protects New
Orleans, which would in theory guard against a weak Category 3 hurricane ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200606/calendar

Catastrophic Failure
... those people in the beginning; and, I take it, now there is no dispute about it,"
former President Clinton said a few days after Hurricane Katrina struck. ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200509u/nj_schneider_2005-09-20

Reading, Writing, Resurrection
... good ones would emerge. Less than a year before Katrina, he had founded the nonprofit
Choice Foundation to ... he should have been praying for a major hurricane. ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200701/waldman-katrina/2

Open for Business
... heaped on the sidewalk, and a bright-pink sign from the Office of Public Health
taped to the front door: Approved for Re-opening Following Hurricane Katrina. ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200603/new-orleans-restaurants

The Preacher
... s unwillingness to play the political card was evident during the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, when he was one of the few black leaders who did not come ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200603/td-jakes/4

Hard Times in the Big Easy
... A fter Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August, a level of destruction and chaos
that had once seemed impossible in America became devastating reality. In ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200510u/big-easy

Clive Crook Index
... the sustained, systemic, outrageous incompetence—that marked the government's
response to Hurricane Katrina is genuinely hard to believe. ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/by/clive_crook

Reading, Writing, Resurrection
... Trinesha?s post-hurricane odyssey had been typically epic. She had swum ... they had
stayed in Houston for the year. Katrina had ruined the family?s Eighth Ward ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200701/waldman-katrina/6

Calendar
... size, speed, and damage potential of a hurricane, expire when the storm makes landfall,
and ... damages for the 2005 season, when Katrina and Rita hit) a new way ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200706/calendar

The Preacher
... aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky scandal) and George W. Bush (in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina) when those presidents needed a black man of God at their side. ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200603/td-jakes

The Sazerac
... The trinity of Sazerac ingredients survived Hurricane Katrina: Herbsaint liqueur,
Peychaud?s Bitters, and Sazerac 18 Year Old Rye Whiskey. All are owned by ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200603/sazerac

The Neglect of Libertarians
... base will be vindicated. If the party gets the drubbing that Iraq, Hurricane Katrina,
assorted congressional scandals, and those awful poll numbers all point to ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200610u/nj_crook_2006-10-31

An America I Never Expected to See
... the sustained, systemic, outrageous incompetence—that marked the government's
response to Hurricane Katrina is genuinely hard to believe. ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200509u/nj_crook_2005-09-13

Post Mortem: State of the Union
... so well on the President when it comes to, say, the response to Hurricane Katrina
or the management of post-war Iraq, his effectiveness in presenting political ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200602u/state-of-the-union

A Closer Look at the Neutral Point of View (NPOV)
... like “George W. Bush” or “Hurricane Katrina,” changes accumulate
as events unfold and new information is added. With an entry like ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200609/wikipedia-sidebar

Pervasive Economic Pessimism
... I n the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush is trying to turn the page.
The problem for him is what's on the next page: economic pessimism and a ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200509u/nj_schneider_2005-09-27

Welcome Back, Carter
... The White House is still struggling to recover from its faltering response to Hurricane
Katrina. The Republican Party is busily trying to wave away a scent of ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200510u/nj_powers_2005-10-11

Karma Chameleons
... its own terms, it obliterates all other story lines—9/11 and Hurricane Katrina
being the most prominent recent examples. Maybe the Virginia Tech massacre ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200704u/imus

The Preacher
... the discussion to the tragedy itself. He went on to talk about Hurricane Katrina
relief efforts, about poverty in America and overseas, about the prospects for ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200603/td-jakes/2

Catastrophe Management
... or "DHS," a lot of them mention two things: the botched response to Hurricane Katrina
and the fiasco over entrusting some of our biggest seaports to an outfit ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200608u/chertoff-full

When One Party Rules, Both Parties Fail
... Disaster response after Hurricane Katrina was abysmal. The preparation for and conduct
of the Iraq occupation was little better. Abroad, world trade talks are ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200611u/nj_rauch_2006-11-04/2

Reading, Writing, Resurrection
... many records had been lost in Katrina. The school had no counselor or ... upheaval of
this fresh start denied hurricane-buffeted children the stability that they ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200701/waldman-katrina/4

Why Iraq Has No Army
... or changing Social Security, or saving Terri Schiavo, or coping with Hurricane Katrina,
mattered more than any possible other cause. Creating an Iraqi military ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/iraq-army/5

Disasters and the Deficit
... T his year's hurricane disasters, coupled with extremely high military ... the next twenty
years. The bill for Katrina reconstruction will reach $250 billion if ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/deficit

Leadership Vacuum
... In the Katrina crisis, which is bigger and more complex than 9/11, with no ... convention
center until today." That admission came four days after the hurricane. ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200509u/nj_schneider_2005-09-13

Star-Crossed
... we need, another celebrity journalist elbowing his way into Katrina. ... work. I haven't
seen a speck of his hurricane coverage, but I bet whatever he did was good ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200510u/nj_powers_2005-10-04

DC Dispatch Index
... October 4, 2005. Social Studies: In the Wake Of Katrina, Will Anger at Government
Storm Back? ... Wealth of Nations: Katrina and the Economy: a Toxic Combination. ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/index/dc_dispatch

Date: 19 November 2007