Bronzeville History Showcased in Student Projects
The final projects of students in a 200-level Humanities topics course, called "The City: A Human Endeavor," were put on display in Siegel Hall following the end of the Fall 2014 semester. The projects asked students to research the Bronzeville neighborhood in Chicago as it had been lived in and constructed over the past century.
Professor of History and Humanities Department Chair Maureen Flanagan taught the course, and broke the students up into four teams, each with a different research topic: collective memory, lived experiences, social inclusion/exclusion, and technology.
"The four topics were the topics that we had read about and discussed through the class, examining the city as a human endeavor in history," Flanagan says.
Each team produced an oral presentation, papers, and posters in accordance with their assigned topic. The posters highlighted several aspects of the teams' findings, and that individual team members produced their own posters as well, which demonstrated research on a specific aspect within the team's overall work on the project.
Beyond learning about oral, written and visual communication through the projects, Flanagan says, students also learn how lessons from the course apply in the context of the local community.
"They take what they have learned in the course about cities and their human components, and apply their knowledge to a specific section of a city so that they can see it on a human scale," she says. "In this case, they study Bronzeville in order to gain a better understanding of the neighborhood in which they go to school and in which IIT has had an important impact."
