Today was day #1 doing research down at the Reuther archives. Learning all I can about Detroit's "freshman college" initiative, a multi-site program that used wpa money to provide a free year of college education to the unemployed and their kids during the Great Depression. I'm in awe of the amount of information. (Usually one of the biggest challenges of working with open-access learning is the lack of archives--since these schools often run on tiny budgets and lack a physical plant, info doesn't get preserved the way it does at universities.) Literally scores and scores of folders full of stuff: meeting agendas, minutes from meetings, memos, planning documents, course catalogues, syllabi, student evaluations, student work, assessments, pyschological inventories, budgets, payroll data, etc, etc.
One of the emerging themes: the aggressive marketing of "special interest" (non-credit-bearing) classes. It's interesting to see in the planning documents the search for rhetorical strategies for decreasing baccalaureate aspirations (changing the name of the institutions to "community colleges" seems to be one such strategy). One leader writes, "The undefined hope for a college degree is characteristic of most high school graduates." There's a whole slew of English and writing classes that fall under this "special interest" rubric--a lot of belletristic stuff, vocational offerings of course, and then also classes with odd names like The Magic of Words. It's going to be fun research.
Favorite quote so far from the director of the program: "Dancing, as such, may not be offered. Any dancing which is a legitimate part of a Health Education class is permissable." (from a memo to teachers)
2 comments:
Wow--I'm jealous. It sounds like you've hit the mother lode there.
Hiya Jonathan. Yes, definitely the mother lode. Hope I can make untangle and then maybe re-tangle some of the stories that are emerging. Thanks for reading. -B
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