Final Paper - Step 3 of Community Service Project

Sociology

Final Paper – Community Service Reflection

DUE: Thursday May 18 , 2017

After completing your service hours, you must reflect on your community service experiences.   Please write an authentic paper using details of your own experiences and relate your community service experiences to sociology.

Similar to each blog post, the paper should meet the standards of the class:

Literacy – Please relate your experiences to a variety of different sources (readings, videos, websites, images) from the semester.  Thoroughly explain the connection between the source and your service experience.  Try to be specific about what aspect of the service related to the source.  Your grade will be based on the following scale:

4- Student thoroughly connects a variety of sources from personal research or experience to community service experiences in a detailed and specific way.

3- Student thoroughly connects a variety of sources from throughout the semester to community service experiences in a detailed and specific way.

2- Student connects source from throughout the semester either lacking in variety, thoroughness or detail.

1- Student fails to connect sources from throughout the semester and is lacking in variety, thoroughness or detail.

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- Look back over my blog for the various sources we looked at this semester.

- Use your textbook as a source if necessary.

- Use Socimages (link on my blog sidebar)

Sociological Content – Please connect your service experience(s) to the sociological concepts and terms we have used this year.  Please see the attached appendix for some suggestions of how to connect service experiences to sociology.

4- Student is able to connect multiple sociological concepts from different units in a meaningful and accurate way.  The connection is explained with irrefutable conviction.

3- Students is able to connect either multiple sociological concepts in a meaningful and accurate way with irrefutable conviction.  Or, the student is able to connect multiple concepts from various units but might lack some conviction, or leaving some meaning unclear.

2-  Student is able to connect a concept in a way that is either accurate or meaningful.

1- Student is unable to make connections that are accurate, meaningful.

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- Use the appendix on the back of this handout.

- The intro unit can be applied to every service opportunity.

- Research the organization that you worked with.  Find out who they help and why – this will give you ideas about how to connect to sociology.

Academic Expectations – Please write the reflection with proper prose, grammar, spelling and format.  Use .5-1.5 inch margins, 10-12 font, and double spacing.  Turn it in on time.

4- Student is able to do all of these.

3- Student misses one of these.

2- Student has 2 or 3 mistakes or is late.

1- Student has more than 3 mistakes or is late and has other mistakes.

TIPS:
- Be authentic.
- Spell check

Appendix A – Connecting to Sociology

Introduction:

            Sociological Imagination – how are the individuals who you served shaped by circumstances larger than their own personal choices.  How are they shaped by when and where they live? Sociological Mindfulness – consider how this experience makes you aware that you are a part of society and you have an impact on it. Social construction of reality – explain how individuals’ feelings and experiences are shaped by society.  Ingroups-outgroups – explain how belonging to a group affects your feelings and stereotypes toward outgroups.

Culture:

Identify unique elements in your service experience, such as: material culture, norms, values and sanctions. Consider how these cultural elements aid in the functioning of the organization and how they contrast with mainstream elements of culture.  How do American values play a role in the plight of those being served or in your service work?

Socialization:

Analyze the modes of interaction that you engaged in during your service. Where there differences in the way that you acted towards the clients versus other volunteers versus members of the organization?  Did you see any processes of socialization occurring with yourself or with the clients that you were working with? 

Deviance:

Reflect on the whether the organization or clientele of the organization where you were volunteering bears any stigma from the larger community.  Often times, community-service organizations have the primary goal of aiding individuals who carry a deviant identity.  Whether it is poverty, substance abuse, illness, age, disability, etc. Observe how the clients manage their stigmatized identities. How do the workers at the organization treat the clients?  Do the clients manage or reject the label of deviant?  How does the work of the organization help change societal perceptions of the stigmatized?

Social Class:

What role does class inequality play in their organization?  How is the organization funded?  How do community service organizations in general generate enough interest for people to volunteer their time and donate their money to help others?  How does charity fit into the American Dream ideology?  Do you believe that most Americans are willing to sacrifice some of their own wealth to help those in need? Why? Why not?

Race/Ethnicity:

Reflect on the racial and ethnic dynamic of their organization.  Is there a difference between the racial or ethnic composition of the staff, the volunteers, and the clientele?  Did your experiences of the racial or ethnic composition at the organization parallel your everyday experiences?  Have you gained any insight into a particular group? Explain.

Service Ideas for 1 hour

If you need just one more hour for your community service requirement, here are some options:

Donating
You can clean out your closet or help your parents clean out stuff around the house and then drive the donations to Goodwill, Habitat for Humanity Restore shop or another charitable organization.  Remember to take pictures of what you donate and where you drop it off at.

Giving Blood
You can stop into a Lifesource and donate blood.  I will count this as one hour.

Feed My Starving Children
They have lots of shifts and some of them are just 1.5 hours.

Northern Illinois Foodbank will take food donations.  You can run a food drive  in your neighborhood.

It's a privilege to be...white?

What color dress is Mrs. Obama wearing in this picture?



This picture featuring Michelle Obama was published with a caption saying that she wore a "flesh-colored" dress. Are they implying that Michelle's skin is not flesh? I don't think so, but this is an example of the privilege of being white; white skin is considered normal/flesh-colored.  This is just one of many privileges of being white in a culture that sees white as normal, desirable or better than other "colors".  This type of privilege is often unnoticed, subconscious, implicit.  But, it has a big impact.
Here is another example from Johnson and Johnson.  Note that the bottle says, "Normal to Darker skin," implying that there is normal skin and then there is darker skin which is implicitly abnormal. And, here are some privileges related to Christmas.  Some sociologists call these subtle nudges of racism microaggressions.  Here are 25 microaggressions from buzzfeed.






Sociologist Peggy McIntosh writes about White Privilege in her essay, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.
In class instructions:

Please read through McIntosh's reading and choose one of the numbered privileges to respond to.  Take out a sheet of paper and write down which privilege you are responding to.  Things to consider: Have you ever thought about this before?  Why do you think McIntosh considers this a "privilege"?  Can you see this type of privilege happening in your day to day life?  

The idea is that because Americans live in a white-dominated society, whites have a host of little things that work in their favor.  Tim Wise, another sociologist, applied McIntosh's idea to the 2008 election. Read Tim Wise's White Priviledge, White Entitlement and the 2008 Election. Here is a brief excerpt,

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

When you're accustomed to privilege, equality sounds like oppression.  From Chris Boeskool of Huffington Post.


Privilege does exist and it's measurable.  From Michael Harriot of The Root who explains the ways privilege shows up in education, employment, income, spending.


Robin DiAngelo, author of What Does it Mean to Be White and White Fragility; Why It's So Hard for  White People to Talk about Racism published this op-ed about White Privilege.  Here is a journal article about White Fragility.


Here is an example from Sociological Images of how white privilege shows up even when discussing racism.


Listen to comedian Hari Kondabolu's example of white privilege and  microaggressions from the website Colorlines.





Here is a great story from This American Life (episode 362: Got You Pegged, Act 1) illustrating what happens when 2 cops see a black man riding a bike with a white kid. It is a funny story but it illustrates white privilege because I think the story would be very different if both of the people were white. Listen to the story and then tell me what you think.


Here is another story from This American Life (episode 475: Send A Message) about how eliminating an implicit racial bias can make a big difference in a young child's life.

Chicago Public Radio aired a story about Global Girls, an organization working to develop African-American girls’ self esteem. The girls at the organization know firsthand how difficult it is for their peers who are poor and black and pregnant. They developed a performance piece to help show their feelings and how white priviledge helps to favor white girls (especially wealthy) in the same predicament. Listen to the full story here. What do you think the reaction would be if one of Obama's girls was old enough and pregnant with a baby of her own? How does this privilege affect you? How might it affect minorities in other ways? What is your reaction to Tim Wise's analysis of the 2008 election? Noting that this is a difficult challenge ahead of Palin, what are the advantages that she might have being who she is? How might pregnancy affect a poor person differently than a wealthy person? How might pregnancy affect someone with power like a governor's daughter or Vice-president's daughter differently than the daughter of someone with less power/clout?