The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 3 - 58

Stephanie D. Sears * Dawn Lee Tu

race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and
other "borders" to understand their social and
political impact. The program has an integrated learning experience with four components:
residential community building, sociology
curriculum, service-learning, and a travel experience. The residential component begins
with a weekend retreat and continues with
facilitated weekly community meetings that
provide on-going structured time for students
to continue building a strong sense of community with peers.

During Community Organizing in the
spring, students learn about hip-hop
as a potential site of resistance
and change, in which community
organizing for youth is possible.

The academic component consists of two
courses: Social Problems (fall) and Community Organizing (spring). It is important to
note that while the course titles have remained
the same over EMDS's 10-year existence, the
course content for the Social Problems course
has varied according to faculty expertise and
interest. This paper draws upon four cohorts,
where the Social Problems course focused on
hip-hop. Over the past five years, the program
chose hip-hop as the subject matter because
the history and cultural production of hip-hop
provide an opportunity to analyze complex
58

social, historical, and political factors that
create and perpetuate inequality, oppression,
and marginalization of communities of color.
Moreover, hip-hop cultural production offers
a vehicle to critically reflect upon the connections between the personal and the political, as
well as interrogate our intersectional positions
within the matrix of domination. During Community Organizing in the spring, students
learn about hip-hop as a potential site of resistance and change, in which community organizing for youth is possible. Students explore
how social change happens locally in community-based organizations and via an on-campus
social change project called "Fight the Power."
At the heart of the academic curriculum is
the year-long service-learning component.
Here students provide direct service as well as
create a project with a community partner that
addresses community-identified needs. The
travel component, which occurs during the
winter session, allows EMDS students to learn
how the socio-political context impacts a social
problem and its solutions across multiple environments. These four components provide an
integrated and holistic learning experience that
ties together the educational values of USF that
calls for students to create change with a critical lens toward applied knowledge or praxis.

METHODS
One of the key pedagogical strategies in the
EMDS curriculum has been reflection paper
assignments, where students are asked to
reflect on their experiences, growth, and learning during critical points in the year. Reflection
papers are a rich source of information and can
provide insight into how students have internalized and gained a deeper understanding of the
course content and experiences (Boud, Keogh,

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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 3

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