The River Community

Information Fluency in the Service of Community

 

Environmental Literature

Studies in Literary Habitat

Honors 302

steve phelan   Spring 2003

 

           

         TEXTS:

            Belleville, Bill: River of Lakes: A Journey on Florida’s St. Johns River (RL)

Douglas, Marjory Stoneman: The Everglades: River of Grass (RG)

Francis Harper: The Travels of William Bartram (BT)           

            Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan:  Cross Creek (CC)

 

            Optional: Carr, Archie: A Naturalist in Florida (AC), Audubon's Field Guide to Florida,

                        Green, Deborah: Watching Wildlife in the Wekiva River Basin (DG)

 


 

 

 


Week

Date

Reading Assignments, Workshops, and Field Trips

 

 

 

 

 

FLORIDA: THE LAND OF SPRINGS

1

Jan. 14

Stepping into the flow: introductions. 

What is your watershed? Which are America's great rivers? What are your favorite river songs, novels, poems, paintings?

 

Jan. 16

The Friends of the Wekiva River, Inc. (FOWR) – basic documents for board members and a video of the first president, Russ Fisher

Workshop 1: Sandy Bryant

How to Use Blackboard and Email (20 minutes)

 

 

Night-time showing of Wekiva: Legacy or Loss * focus paper

2

Jan. 21

The Nature of the Everglades (RG1); The People (RG2)

 

Jan. 23

Workshop 2: Wenxian Zhang

Searching by Discipline at Rollins: The On-line Catalog of Books and Journals (incl. data bases) versus the Internet

 

 

 

3

Jan. 28

Reports on the Discovery and Conquest of Florida (RG3-6)

** disciplinary bibliography including web sites

 

Jan. 30

Workshop 3: Wenxian Zhang

Introduction to the Archives and the Florida Collection

 

 

Field trip to Wekiwa Springs State Park and Kelly Park

4

Feb. 4

Reports on Osceola and The Seminole Wars (RG8-10) and on chapters in Motte’s Journey into Wilderness (on reserve)      *** paper prospectus

 

 

 

 

 

THE SAINT JOHNS RIVER

 

Feb. 6

Bartram: Naturalist and Artist (BT: read carefully, part I-introduction; then browse the rest)

 

 

****Conferences on topics for your paper, anytime this week

 

 

 

5

Feb. 11

BT: part II, c.1-4

 

Feb. 13

Workshop 4: Steve Phelan and/or Linda Watson

Evaluation of the Friends of Wekiva Web site

 

 

 

6

Feb. 18

BT: part II, c.5; report on c.6-7

 

Feb. 20

Workshop 5: Steve Phelan

Evaluation of the FOWR materials and records for archiving

 

 

 

7

Feb. 25

BT: part II, c.8-11, browsing near the end

Bartram's essay on the place of natives in the new democracy (handout)

 

Feb. 27

Workshop 6: Linda Watson

How to Make a Web Page (Composer)

 

 

 Field trip to the Twin Mounds ***** (midterm grade reports)

 

 

 

8

Mar. 4

The River Community at Cross Creek (CC1-5)

 

Mar. 6

Workshop 7: Linda Watson

How to Scan Documents and Images

 

 

Field Trip to a Board Meeting of  The Friends of Wekiva

 

 

 

9

M. 9-16

Spring Break

 

 

 

10

Mar. 18

Rawlings and the Oklawaha River (CC6+9-11+23; browse the rest)

 

Mar. 20

Workshop 8: Bill Belleville

How to Make a Documentary Film (including interviews)

 

 

Field Trip to the Seminole Forest

11

Mar. 25

Reports on Archie Carr  (browse the reserve AC skipping 51-83, 125-138)

 

Mar. 27

Workshop 9: IT staff

How to Use Powerpoint

 

 

 

12

Apr. 1

Belleville's River of Lakes (first third) reports

 

Apr. 3

Workshop 10:  Bill Belleville

How to Get the Message into the Media

 

 

Field Trip to a political meeting

13

Apr. 8

RL: (second third) reports

 

Apr. 10

Workshop 11: Linda Watson

How to Use Film and Music on a Web Site

 

 

 

14

Apr. 15

RL: (last third) reports

 

Apr. 17

project workshops

 

 

 

15

Apr. 22

Show and Tell

 

Apr. 24

project workshops

 

 

 

16

Apr. 29

Last class: projects due.

 

 

 

 

May ?

Final examination: Your Definition of Community: How Has It Changed?

 


 


GOALS OF THE COURSE:

            To provide an overview of our Florida river heritage and the literature which sings it.

            To present an ecological approach to learning about the watershed and its communities.

            To foster political action and to learn how the politics of the Wekiva River works.

            To explore the river basin and to establish a personal relation to the land.

            To introduce the Honors juniors to techniques of research useful for the senior thesis.

            To give students all the tools they need to have information fluency.

            To make critical thinking the center of the worlds of information and community service.

            To demonstrate how the liberal arts function in a community grassroots organizaton that                                     seeks to create change in the community.

 

GRADE FORMULA:

Participation in workshops.                   20%

Participation in literature classes            20%

            Final examination: essay                        10%

            Major individual project/paper  30%

            Community service project (log)            20%

           

 

JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY SERVICE:

            Students are encouraged throughout the term to use their weekends to explore a number of Florida and esp. Wekiva river sites. In addition, there will be a number of field trips to acquaint the students with the wilderness, the parks, the developments, the transportation, and the political institutions at work in the Wekiva basin. We will use the Blackboard’s Discussion Board for arrangements and reports of outings. Each student in addition will keep a complete log of all extra-curricular activities relating to the course, including especially: written accounts and descriptions, connections to the readings, accumulations of ideas for the major project, photos, sketches, and other legitimate findings.

 

MAJOR PROJECT:

            Early in the term, each student will assess the problems and issues of the Wekiva River and decide on a topic for an expository paper on some feature of the Wekiva River Community. The asterisks in the syllabus refer to stages in this process. Furthermore, the key materials of this highly focused paper should be prepared for loading into the public domain, e.g. into the Wekiva 2020 or FOWR websites. The audience, therefore, is the general public (including some residents who perhaps have not been paying attention, have just moved to Florida, or are currently in the 8th-12th grades of the school system) and teachers who are interested in teaching their subjects through exposure to a local community issue. Other forms of project product are also possible, given the wide range of IT workshops offered. All students are expected to do all the workshops, but each project may rely more heavily on one or the other and engage the services of the instructor and the intern.

 

COMMUNITY SERVICE PROJECTS:

Finally, the class as a whole will decide on one or more group projects, in conjunction with the FOWR, and these will naturally be built out of the individual papers and web page productions. This is entirely a project-oriented course where all the work fans out to three different levels of the Surdna grant which helps to fund all our work.

 

ATTENDANCE:

            Continuity in the course requires that you attend every class session. If you miss a class, it is your responsibility to find out from a classmate what you have missed. Some field trips will include class discussions. It is essential for you to let me know beforehand if you have some reason you must miss a field trip.

 

CONFERENCES AND INFORMATION:

Please come to see me at Orlando 109. For office hours and class schedule, consult my web site (http://fox.rollins.edu/~phelan). Make appointments after class or by phone (x2409) or through email (phelan@rollins.edu). On my web site, in addition to this syllabus, you may find a wealth of information about the basic concepts of my courses, my own critical perspectives, and my criteria for grading papers. Just click on CONCEPTS on the first page.