Civic Engagement in the City That Care Forgot
significant of all—takes place during the trip itself, which typically lasts between eight and twelve days. During this time, the professor (together with a second volunteer chaperone) must be constantly on call to act as guide, bus driver, teacher, conflict moderator, problem solver, and all-around pied piper. Given the intellectual and emotional maturity of our students, my own experience doing this has been exceedingly positive and rewarding. However, all these duties are done without any additional compensation for the professor either in the form of extra pay or course release time. On top of this, leading the service-learning portion of the course requires the professor to give up his own spring break vacation—a sacrifice he has so far been happy to do but one that makes the program difficult to sustain over the long term. Trip Impact and Student Takeaway During the trip, students spend 30–45 minutes each day keeping a journal in which they reflect on their experiences, chronicling each day’s events and their reactions to them, and taking special note of the sights, sounds, and impressions of the city that cannot be gleaned from a book. Students are allowed to perform this task exclusively in writing or they can expand it into a multi-media composition with photos, video, etc. These journals form the basis for a reflection paper students write after returning to New York. While students are given great flexibility in this assignment, they are encouraged to make connections in their writing and reflections between the course’s intellectual foundations (built before the trip) and the various intellectual, social, and emotional impressions that the servicelearning experience had on them. In other words, this is an opportunity for students to make critical links between course readings and films and our varied experiences in New Orleans. What follows are selected reflections from four different students who made the service trip in spring 2013. Geoffrey “This is how I breakdown New Orleans in the end: Festivals, bars, and parties lie in the center of New Orleans. Take a step back from the center of the city and notice the broken education system, the environmental racism, and the lingering socioeconomic disparities that have existed for a long period of time. Take a step further back and watch the swamplands (that have been home to alligators, deer, cypress trees, and other wildlife) erode slowly as saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico seeps in. Overall, New Orleans is a dying city in the making—a city that parties all day long while neglecting the problems around it. Hurricane Katrina inflicted significant damage to 36
many parts of the city, but what it really did was highlight the environmental, the socioeconomic, and the political diseases that existed before the hurricane.”
Rachel “Upon arriving in New Orleans, I was immediately enchanted by this fun, uninhibited lifestyle that cloaks the city in a shroud of impenetrable recklessness. This care-free nature is what makes New Orleans ‘The Big Easy,’ an attribute that is truly unique and remarkable to experience. Despite the extreme racial and class tensions and inequalities that exist and intersect with the impoverished state of New Orleans, the city has managed to maintain this easy going, uninhibited lifestyle. While I found this lifestyle magical and entertaining, I could not help but wonder: at what point does the magic end? From a sociological perspective, without the shroud of music, festivals, and alcohol New Orleans would cease to exist as we know it, revealing a broken skeletal structure built upon inflated inequalities and unstable terrain.” José “Lawrence Powell’s The Accidental City and Richard Campanella’s Bienville’s Dilemma put the city of New Orleans in its rich historical and geographical context for us prior to our trip. Many think of New Orleans as the ‘true melting pot’ of America. This conflicted with