Wednesday, June 26, 2002

Al Gore Pushes Community Development Through a Satellite Course By MICHAEL ARNONE Al Gore is teaching a distance-education course on the role of families in discussions about community development. Videotapes of the two-semester course, made this past year, are available for other institutions to use. Mr. Gore is teaching the course as part of his work with the National Community and Academic Consortium, a group of about 10 institutions that includes Columbia University, Tufts University, and University of California at Los Angeles. Academic institutions are starting to view how families affect community development as a viable area of study, says Neal Halfon, a professor of pediatrics, public health, and public policy at UCLA who is also chairman of the consortium. The consortium is developing an interdisciplinary curriculum, and Mr. Gore is teaching the first course, which was mostly developed at UCLA, Mr. Halfon says. "The traditional community-support movement hasn't taken families into account," says J. Lawrence Aber, a professor of public health at Columbia University. He is also director of the National Center for Children and Poverty at the university. He has worked with Mr. Gore to develop the course and the ideas behind it. "Just as you can't teach medicine without a student seeing patients, you can't teach [community building] without students getting involved in the community," Mr. Aber says. For each of the past two years, Mr. Gore has taught the course at two test sites, Middle Tennessee State University and Fisk University. The for-credit course is aimed at anyone who intends to work in communities -- social workers, government workers, employees at nonprofit organizations, and others, says Jacquie L. Ebert, who works with the consortium. The course takes an interdisciplinary look at how families can help solve the problems that communities face, Ms. Ebert says. It focuses on combining academic research and practical problem-solving in communities around the institutions. The first semester is 10 lectures, each two hours in length. In the second semester, students have fewer lectures and spend most of their time doing projects in their communities, Ms. Ebert says. For example, a group of students created an intergenerational program at a local senior center, she says. Mr. Gore has been involved at every step in creating and teaching the course, Mr. Aber says. Mr. Gore delivers a 20-minute speech at the beginning of each class. He then acts as a moderator between two guest speakers invited to speak on the day's topic. One guest is an expert on theory, and the other is an expert in practical application. Mr. Gore doesn't teach the course entirely by himself -- he also works with four other professors from a number of disciplines, including political science and sociology. These professors run small-group discussions with the students and oversee the service projects. At Middle Tennessee State, some classes of the course were broadcast by satellite to Motlow State Community College and several of the university's teacher-education sites, says Faye R. Johnson, assistant to the executive vice president and provost of the university. Students at the University of Georgia School of Social Work started watching the broadcasts last spring, she says. One of the broadcasts, on intergenerational care, went out to more than 70 universities, she says. Mr. Halfon, of UCLA, says his university taught the course last spring, with Mr. Gore as a co-teacher. Mr. Aber, of Columbia, says that institutions can either use the course to supplement existing programs or as a seed for developing their own curricula. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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