Environmentalism, storytelling and community building all came together this spring in a new First-Year Writing Seminar, "COVER Stories: Community Building and the Environment," which gave students the opportunity to escape the classroom and interact with Upper Valley residents, according to Terry Osborne, an English and environmental studies professor who taught the course. Students will deliver their final presentations for the class in which they will discuss their collaboration with the local non-profit organization COVER Home Repair in Collis 101 on Thursday, Osborne said.
The class features a combination of lectures delivered by Osborne and guest speakers, and students are required to attend a home-build and visit homeowners at least one weekend in the term, according to Osborne.
COVER's mission is to "build community" and "foster hope" through cooperation between homeowners and volunteers, Rob Schultz, the organization's executive director, said. COVER began as a student-based organization through the Tucker Foundation in the early 1990s and became an independent non-profit in 1998, Helen Damon-Moore, the William Jewett Tucker Foundation's director of service and educational programs, said.
During the term, students interacted in the classroom and participated in a "hands-on" home repair project, Osborne said. Students interviewed COVER homeowners and volunteers in order to write final responses that Osborne calls "COVER Stories."
"[COVER] completely embraced this class they didn't have to do this," he said. "The course added things to their plate that was already overfull, but they embraced us."
Homeowners' involvement in COVER gave the course an element of "reciprocity," according to Neil Bhatt '14, a student currently enrolled in the course.
"You go in thinking your job is to help someone, but you come out realizing you have been helped more in the process," he said.
Osborne was "blown away" by students' engagement with and enthusiasm for the project, he said. The quality of their understanding regarding "what it means to be in a community" was also impressive, Osborne said.
Students enrolled in the course came from diverse places, ranging from many different states and countries, which allowed for a much more open and honest working environment, according to Osborne.
"Everybody was bringing such different perspectives, I actually think it made the class much more effective because the students were thrown into this community, learning and experiencing right from the start," he said.
College officials have not yet decided whether the course will be offered again next year, Osborne said. The decision largely depends on how worthwhile representatives of COVER felt the experience was for their organization, he explained.
The College seeks to promote community-based learning that utilizes resources beyond the classroom and integrates community activism into students' Dartmouth experience, Damon-Moore said.
Schultz said that he would like COVER to continue working with the course in the future.
"[COVER Stories] feels like one of the best pieces of community engagement that I have seen happen at Dartmouth since students are both thinking about the issues and working in the field directly dealing with them," Schultz said.
The course has enabled students to grow as individuals, according to Bhatt.
"This has been my favorite class at Dartmouth and in my life because I was able to apply what I learned to the real world," he said.
Although students initially struggled to connect the themes of environment, community and storytelling, the course material came together nicely by the end of the term, Bhatt said.
It has been logistically difficult to organize the class because it is partially based off campus, Osborne said.
"One of the things I didn't expect in creating a course like this was that much of the time I felt more like a manager than a teacher," Osborne said. "This teaching experience has been much more dynamic for me I've had to be much less in control of the course than I usually am or that I like to be, but I have grown a lot as a teacher."
Jan Tarjan '74, COVER board member and former senior program officer for local service at Tucker, and Nancy Bloomfield '99, who serves on COVER's advisory board, were "pivotal" in bringing the course together, Schultz said.
Staff writer Clare Coffey contributed to the reporting of this article.
