It is a measure of my love for you all that after working on a paper for 3 days straight I am once again clicking away at my keyboard to update my dormant blog. Well, my catnapping blog. If I haven’t used up all my organizational brain molecules on structuring my paper (Three Kinds of Violence: Challenges to peace for minority students in Chicago Public Schools), I’ll try to make this several short focused posts, instead of one long rambling one. I’ll start with:
Foundation Course, That’s a Wrap!
Friday was the last day of the Foundation Course. We did our group presentations in the morning and celebrated the end of our first course in the afternoon. Discussions at the party generally fell into one of two categories- What are you doing on the break? and What did you think of the Foundation Course?
Unfortunately my answer to the first question was, “Writing my paper, working on my group presentation for the next course and trying not to fret about International Day of Peace.” My answer to the second question is much longer. There was a certain cadre of people who did not like the Foundation Course. They either found it too basic (people who either studied this stuff in undergrad or have been working extensively in the field) or too far from the work they plan to do (pretty much everyone in the Natural Resources and Sustainable Development program and some of the folks in the Environmental programs). And all of that makes sense. For me, it was great- a combination of learning terms and definitions for concepts I knew without knowing I knew them and discovering totally new ideas and models. We learned a bunch of different conflict models, some theories on conflict persistence and escalation and the beginnings of methods for conflict resolution. We had some really interesting discussions in our seminar group (and to be honest some failures at having any kind of conversation, interesting or otherwise). The best part was hearing from classmates who’d been out in the field (Sudan) or were from a country with recent conflicts: South Korea, Indonesia. The perspective is very different and in some cases much more cynical than mine. It’s too soon to say if that’s coming from who they are or what they’ve seen.
2 comments:
That's interesting, that it was the folks in seemingly "green" concentrations who were most disappointed. I've been thinking in recent years that if there's going to be another global conflict it's likely to be started by climate change - specifically by the so-called Third World furious at the so-called First World for continuing to drive our cars and throw our trash into the ocean.
I'm actually really interested in what your paper had to say.
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