A Classroom Beyond Campus
By Kaitlin Solimine
USC College Sociologist Kelly Musick crouches next to a table littered
with papers and textbooks. “What brings you here?” she intently asks a
fresh-faced teenage girl who softly answers, “I want a career.”
The conversation takes place in A Place Called Home (APCH), a
neighborhood where 65 percent of households are below poverty level.
Located just a few miles from USC’s University Park campus, it hosts
youth and after-school programs; this particular class is for high
school drop-outs who need tutoring to acquire their General Education
Diplomas.
As an assistant professor of sociology, Musick requires her students to
volunteer at local schools, service agencies and domestic violence
shelters. In this particular case, she is integrating the community
service into her course “Changing Family Forms.” Her students see first
hand the family issues they are studying in class, such as the
variation in family patterns and the structural constraints families
face.
“I wanted the students to have experiences that would be different from
their own, that would help them to understand the course material and
its connection to some of the debates around the family and child
welfare,” says Musick. “Some of our students have faced these issues
growing up, but many haven’t.”
Musick recently received a grant from the Fund for Innovative
Undergraduate Teaching to further integrate service learning into her
courses. To provide “real world” data for research projects on family
and community resources, she works in close collaboration with the
College’s Joint Educational Project (JEP), a program that brokers
between academic courses and service agencies and schools in the
university’s community.
Lili Tan, a junior majoring in computer science, is a student in
Musick’s class. “I live far from USC’s campus and so volunteering at
APCH has
really been a new and eye-opening experience for me.”
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