Place Corps Friday Digest: Cooperate

Gap Fairs Image c/o Dynamy

Here we are moving into our Portfolio & Practicum semester! It is an exciting time for residents to self-organize and apply their learning to topics, communities, and issues that have personal resonance. The practicum projects are opportunities for residents to stretch their capacity into the public with service projects they co-designed with their advising organization or mentor. We are all excited to support and witness this exciting work over the next few months.

This week has been a transition week, as residents complete their final draft of their practicum service projects, prepare for work-study next week, begin thinking of their Place Corps portfolio and wrap up Entrepreneurship & The New Economy. Next week residents begin their Tiny House Design Intensive, where they use their newly acquired practical skills developed in the fall design-build course to design a unique Tiny House Plan. Place Corps is an experiential learning curriculum, this means that we ensure that our residents learn through doing real work. Residents will complete this intensive and leave Place Corps with a project plan unique to their building interests complete with time and costs estimates. In this way residents will have full knowledge of a start to finish design-build project.

Our word for this week is COOPERATE. What does it mean to be part of a whole? How do we work together for shared purpose or mutual benefit? What qualities in us need to open, adapt, and change in order to cooperate with others or the environment around us? As we think about the many opportunities to expand into collaborative and cooperative models of being we examine our own rigidity and our willingness to explore deepening our capacity to trust in others for mutual benefit. 

“Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information.”
― Paulo Freire