WRITING ASSIGNMENTS

(page under construction)

This page contains links describing how to gain access to field experiences required as part of Sociology 239 as well as descriptions of the observing and writing assignments that go along with the various field placements. For fuller descriptions of the field sites, consult the field sites page on this web site.

Click here for general instructions about writing assignments related to field experiences.

Auctions (available for 2012)
Finding Auctions
Writing about Auctions

West Branch School (available for 2010)
Making Contact with West Branch School
Writing about a West Branch School Visit
Directions to West Branch School

North Central Secure Treatment Unit (available to some students for 2012)
Writing Assignment #1
Writing Assignment #2
Writing Assignment #3

Hospital Emergency Rooms (available for 2012)
Visiting the Williamsport Hospital ED

Visiting the Union County Court System (available for 2012)
Shadowing the Public Defender or the District Attorney

Visiting Religious Communities
Writing About the Plain People: Visiting the Amish or Mennonites

AIDS Projects (available for 2012)
AIDS Resource Alliance
AIDS Programs at Bucknell

Foodshare (available for 2012)
To participate in Foodshare as a field experience in SOCI 239, Fall 2009, contact emeritus faculty member Dick Ellis or contact the Baptist Church on 3rd and St. Louis St.
Writing about Foodshare

Job Shadowing (available for 2012)
Writing about Job Shadowing

Football (available for 2012)
Writing about a high school football game

Nursing Home (for students who can make their own arrangements)
Writing about a Nursing Home

Mental Hospital (for students who can make their own arrangements)
Writing about a Mental Hospital

Attending a Conference (for students who can make their own arrangements)
Writing about a Conference

Writing about Rehab or Alcoholics Anonymous (for students who can make their own arrangements)
Writing about AA
?Hope4Life?

Writing about Television or Newspaper Reporting (for students who can make their own arrangements)
Writing about Newsmaking

Attending a Livestock Auction or a Fair (for students who can make their own arrangements)
Writing about a Livestock Auction
Writing about a Fair

Haven Ministries Overnight (available for 2012)
Writing about Haven Ministries

AUCTIONS

Auctions are regularly held at the homes of elderly people who have died, moved into a nursing home, or otherwise decided to leave the place they have lived for many years. Generally the auctions take place at the home, although in bad weather and in some circumstances auctions take place at auctioneers’ places of business. For this project, you want to go to one of the auctions that take place at a home in a community within fifty miles of Lewisburg.
Generally, auctions go on for most of the day. They start about 9 or 10 in the morning and end about 3 in the afternoon. Everything in the house is auctioned off from salt and pepper shakers up to the building itself. Auctioneers call out the items being sold and they have a staff of people who organize the materials, bring them up for the auctioneer, who keep track of who bids for items, and who collect payments. Usually there is a food booth run by local church women.
In general, your auction will be more interesting if you find a remote small town. However, some auctions are held in Lewisburg and other nearby towns and they are easier to reach for students who do not have transportation.
Although auctions are advertised in local newspapers on Thursdays and you often will see handbills advertising auctions posted in town or in local stores, the easiest way to find local auctions is to use the Auction Zip website.
To use the Auction Zip website, enter the Lewisburg Zip Code (17837), select the radius distance you prefer (30 miles is the default distance and that makes sense, although the system is not very accurate in terms of determining distances), and choose the type of auction you want to search for. Choose the one that is for antiques and housewares since this is most likely to give you a listing of the farm auctions that are the focus of this assignment.
As you look through auction listings, be aware that there are many types of auctions and many of them are not relevant to our purposes (farm equipment auctions aren’t for us, for example). Also, AVOID AUCTIONS HELD AT AUCTION HOUSES. Some of these, actually, are very good for our purposes. Most of them, however, take objects from the original homestead, bring them to a central location far from the owner’s home community, and set up sales intended mainly for professionals. Since our intention is to use auctions to see community in action it does not fit the assignment simply to visit an auction in an auction house.
Picking an appropriate auction and making an effort to travel to an interesting place is part of the assignment. If you pick an auction simply because it seems easy to reach or seems to be not threatening, the result will show up in your writing. Your grade may well be lowered if your selection of an auction shows either that you have not put in much effort or you have not read the directions provided here.

Finding Auctions
(revised September 1, 2010)
Auctions are regularly held at the homes of elderly people who have died, moved into a nursing home, or otherwise decided to leave the place they have lived for many years. Generally the auctions take place at the home, although in bad weather and in some circumstances auctions take place at auctioneers’ places of business. For this project, you want to go to one of the auctions that take place at a home in a community within fifty miles of Lewisburg.
Generally, auctions go on for most of the day. They start about 9 or 10 in the morning and end about 3 in the afternoon. Everything in the house is auctioned off from salt and pepper shakers up to the building itself. Auctioneers call out the items being sold and they have a staff of people who organize the materials, bring them up for the auctioneer, who keep track of who bids for items, and who collect payments. Usually there is a food booth run by local church women.
In general, your auction will be more interesting if you find a remote small town. However, some auctions are held in Lewisburg and other nearby towns and they are easier to reach for students who do not have transportation.
Although auctions are advertised in local newspapers on Thursdays and you often will see handbills advertising auctions posted in town or in local stores, the easiest way to find local auctions is to use the Auction Zip website.
To use the Auction Zip website, enter the Lewisburg Zip Code (17837), select the radius distance you prefer (30 miles is the default distance and that makes sense, although the system is not very accurate in terms of determining distances), and choose the type of auction you want to search for. Choose the one that is for antiques and housewares since this is most likely to give you a listing of the farm auctions that are the focus of this assignment.
As you look through auction listings, be aware that there are many types of auctions and many of them are not relevant to our purposes (farm equipment auctions aren’t for us, for example). Also, AVOID AUCTIONS HELD AT AUCTION HOUSES. Some of these, actually, are very good for our purposes. Most of them, however, take objects from the original homestead, bring them to a central location far from the owner’s home community, and set up sales intended mainly for professionals. Since our intention is to use auctions to see community in action it does not fit the assignment simply to visit an auction in an auction house.
Picking an appropriate auction and making an effort to travel to an interesting place is part of the assignment. If you pick an auction simply because it seems easy to reach or seems to be not threatening, the result will show up in your writing. Your grade may well be lowered if your selection of an auction shows either that you have not put in much effort or you have not read the directions provided here.

Writing About Auctions in Sociology 239
(revised September 1, 2010)
This writing assignment relates to the film we will view in class on Wednesday, September 15, and our Blackboard readings for that week, Hunter and Milofsky, Chapter Three, E. Klinenberg, “Race, place, and vulnerability”, and R.D. Putnam, “Bowling alone.”
This assignment must be turned in via e-mail or in class by Wednesday, September 15. You ought to do this writing assignment as soon after you visit your auction as possible although you might want to wait for our class on September 13 when we discuss auction experiences to write your final draft. Feel free to turn it in whenever you finish it. I intend to grade these and have them back to you within a couple of weeks and the ones that come in first will be graded first.
In this assignment you are asked to locate and visit one of the many small town auctions that are held in summer and fall in Central Pennsylvania. You should have looked at the “Finding Auctions” link on this website which provides you with a description of what they are and where to find them. It would be helpful for you also to look at (and perhaps respond to) the reading discussion questions given for September 8, 13, and 15.

This assignment has two objectives:
1. To place you in an unfamiliar setting where there are many social activities and relationships to observe, where many kinds of people are interacting, and where values we each hold and that the people we are observing manifest all come to the surface. This is an exercise to demonstrate the richness of social life that can lead to classroom discussion. This is the first step in an understanding of what sociologists and anthropologists try to do when the do ethnographic observation. Your paper ought to provide a description of the rich social scene you encounter and discuss your feelings and the reactions you have to the things you see and experience.
2. For you to look for and describe social structure in community life. Social structure includes distinct social roles you see participants at the auction playing. It includes dimensions of difference in terms of social class, social affiliation and community involvement. You are likely to notice difference from your own background in terms of the wealth and social style of the people at the auction. You are likely to learn some things about the person whose goods are being sold. You may notice differences among the people attending the auction, especially the many different roles they play. Count the number of people you see; list the roles you observe; note down the possessions on sale that interest you and tell what they represent. Any single auction represents the life of one person (the person whose goods are sold) and the presence of a collection of groups. You need to be mindful of the fact that the groups and roles and relationships you see are relatively permanent, ongoing parts of the community that you are visiting. An auction brings permanent aspects of community structure into view. Talk about this in your paper.

What to Do
Your paper ought to be short. Write the length you want to write, but you can do this assignment in 3 or 4 pages. As you get ready to write, think about specific things that you found most noticeable, interesting, and intriguing. Often these things involve contrasts to things you are used to from home or from the cultural groups you are part of. Concentrate your paper on these things. Avoid taking up all the space in your paper by describing the overall scene, how you got there, and how comfortable or uncomfortable you and your friends felt in the scene.
When you talk about the interesting aspects you have identified, describe things in as much detail as you can. Be mindful of the way that specific actions often have multiple meanings to the people who are part of this setting. Can you see evidence of these multiple meanings and describe them at work? Try to tell what you expected, and how what you saw differed from your expectation. What sense do you make of the difference between your expectation and what you saw?
In addition to describing particular aspects of the scene, talk also about aspects of community that you saw. When you do that, it helps to “position” the people or the events or the scene in relationship to the structural aspects of community mentioned above, given in our reading, or discussed in class.
I have suggested lots of things to look at and write about. You don’t need to attend to all of these suggestions in your paper. I really mean it that you should write 3-4 pages. The important thing is to concentrate on a few events that you found particularly interesting.

WEST BRANCH SCHOOL

(current status: Confirmed for 2012.)
Williamsport, PA

West Branch School is a nontraditional, K-6 grade ages elementary school that is nongraded and that uses creative approaches to teaching. It also is a parent-teacher cooperative so there is a lot of parent involvement, a complicated governance structure that is worth trying to understand, and some important out of school events that are good things to participate in.

Contact Natalie Prindle (570-323-5498; westbranch@comcast.net) who is the office person for the school. You should also contact my wife, Sandy Elion at 570-523-3853, who was one of the teachers at the school for many years. She also is an assistant swim coach at Bucknell so she will be on the Swim Pool deck most days 5-7, although you’ll have trouble getting in the door of the pool and she’s busy when she’s coaching. Still she’s there and you might be able to make contact.

The school is located at 755 Moore Ave., Williamsport, PA 17701

You need to make your own arrangements with Natalie for when to visit. Student visitors often spend a morning at the school, arriving about 8 am in time for the morning meeting and then they help out with tutoring and supervising play groups until noon. Students may also be interested in attending committee meetings that involve parents and are held in the evenings. Since this is a parent/teacher cooperative school all of the work is done on a volunteer basis except for the teaching. This plus the general philosophy of the school will make this a surprising and different experience for most Bucknell students.

Visiting West Branch School

You should have read the materials in the syllabus by Kozol and Bryk et al and you also should have viewed the PBS Video, School, and the video on the charter school hearings concerning West Branch School. The video West Branch School has prepared helps explain what the school is about, what there is to see, and what to expect if you visit.

The people at West Branch School are very open to having visitors and there are many times that you can schedule visits. Our contact person is Sandy Elion who is a teacher at the school and who also is the Assistant Swim Coach at Bucknell. You can call the school at 323-5498. If you do that, you’ll probably reach the Office Person, Peg Furst. If you tell Peg who you are and why you are calling she will be friendly and helpful. If you call during lunch hour (about 12:30 to 1:00) or shortly after school ends (about 3:15 to 3:45) it is likely to be a good time to talk to Sandy. You can also find Sandy on the pool deck. She usually does the late practice (7 to 9 at this time of year, 5 to 7 after the Water Polo season ends) as well as a Sunday afternoon practice. Be mindful of the fact that she will usually be working when you get in touch with her and may have to pay attention to other things that are going on around her. So be patient.

When you try to reach our field experience sponsors like Sandy, be mindful that these are busy people. Although they want to help and will be friendly, they are busy and are not likely to find it easy to call you back. Responsibility for making the contact rests on your shoulders, so you may have to call back several times and do that within a short period of time (over a couple of days). Saying “I could not get hold of them” or “they never called me back” does not work as an explanation for your inability to make contact. You must make sure the contact happens. You also have to be nice always. Don’t get or act frustrated. It is just part of the drill for the contact to be hard to establish.

It is important for you to think ahead of time why you want to look at West Branch School and what it is that you would like to see. Different aspects of the School experience are relevant to different parts of our course. If you want to see how West Branch School operates as a community and extended family, you might want to see some activities that involve parent committees, school festivals, or community projects (like a school cleaning and repair day). If you want to see how it structures teaching and learning and how that differs from a public school experience you’d want to be there when teaching is going on (probably the morning). If you want to think about social control, and how public schools and West Branch School differ in the way they handle conflicts and discipline problems, you might want to ask about “Small Meetings” (which are depicted in the Video). You may not be able to see these, but Sandy and others can explain them to you and kids can tell you about their experiences. If you go into the school with some specific questions and objectives, people there can help you shape your visit to serve your needs.

Writing About West Branch School

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

(1) Encourage you to think about readings and class topics and to use those materials in your discussion of the field experience;
(2) Raise issues for you about participation in community life and political activity and to discuss how engagement and social responsibility, or disengagement and social irresponsibility happen;
(3) Give you field experiences to prepare you for other courses that will have more intensive field experiences, like Anthropology/Sociology 201.

Your paper is not meant to be long. Three or four pages is enough. You also should not try to write about all of the themes given below. Pick your focus, state it, and give lots of description and detail to develop your points.

One of the most important things about the time you spend observing is that you should not be passive. Be involved in activities and, most importantly, talk to people. Try especially to meet people other than the hosts who bring us into the settings. In addition to the main participants in the program (the kids in a school), seek out and talk to some of the people who are more in the background—office people, family members, custodial staff. Look at the questions given for each assignment and ask people in the setting what they think about the issues that are listed.

Asking you to visit West Branch School has three objectives.
1. The first is to encourage you to think about what education is for. You have gone through a primary and secondary education experience, and you presently are immersed in another sort of intensive education at Bucknell. You also know lots of other people who have had educational experiences of various kinds, and from this you have internalized a variety of ideas about what education should do and be. As you observe at West Branch School, pay attention to what stands out for you about what education means at this school. How are these things different from or similar to what you have experienced in the past. It is important for you to be descriptive and specific as you tell about things that catch your attention at the school. Do not just make broad, general statements.
Some of what you want to write about will just be describing your personal response to this trip. Try to step back from the experience and think about values or general purposes and principles. For example, in class people wondered about how WBS kids would do once they entered the impersonal world of public schools. To ask the question this way implies that you have some ideas about cause and effect that are played out in public schools. They are impersonal, bureaucratic, objective, and not-family places. You might want to argue (as Robert Dreeben does in On What Is Learned in School) that one of the major functions of the lower elementary grades is to teach children how to function in an impersonal, non-affectively intense environment. The home is the opposite—it is personal, affectively intense, and made up of a particular cast of characters, not of objective roles like “teacher”. West Branch School’s operating philosophy seems at odds with Dreeben’s, and maybe that is related to our class members’ suspicions that WBS kids would not adapt well to public schools once they leave. Having visited the school, what do you think?
2. The second objective is for you to think further about whether West Branch School should be a charter school. I’d really prefer that you NOT make this your focus, because we have already talked about this theme. However, you may run into some things that make you want to revisit our earlier discussion. Kozol argues that exclusive arrangements allow energetic, intelligent, involved families to keep themselves separate from public schools, or from the parts of public schools that are most troublesome. We need energetic families to stay in the public schools to act as advocates and to be vanguards of reform and change.
Bryk says that motivated low-income families should have quality educational opportunities for their children and should not have to be dragged down by unmotivated and negative other students. Bryk also says that schools should be oriented to the whole lives of children, that they ought to involve families, and that teachers should be motivated by a passion for teaching and engaging with students. He says that does not usually happen in public schools, but it does happen in the Catholic schools he observed.
We might add to these opposed concern a question about whether private schools like West Branch have energy in part because they are private. Is the public system so bureaucratic that it would force West Branch to give up the things that make it energetic and inclusive? Maybe one of the things that makes West Branch work is precisely that it is so hard to find funding and to keep it going.
3. The third objective is for you to notice and learn about how discipline and social control work at West Branch, being mindful of how you think it operates in other schools. Later in the term we will be talking about how discipline and social control in schools relates to delinquency. You might look at the readings for Nov 14, Nov 16, and Nov 19. The movie Stand and Deliver scheduled for after Thanksgiving is also relevant. We see two things. One is an attitude by school officials that they are supposed to lay down rules, expect kids to obey, but not expect kids to be enthusiastic, involved, or supportive of school demands and discipline. The other is that kids are slightly disengaged and that this is linked to an attitude of resistance and sometimes of hostility on the part especially of lower income and minority kids.

Watch out for instances where teachers or other adults exercise disciplinary authority, where kids relate to discipline, or where conflicts occur and are dealt with. Be on the lookout especially for a “small meeting”. You might look back at the West Branch video for an explanation of the small meeting.
How do the attitudes of teachers and students with respect to discipline differ from what our other sources tell us prevails as the dominant mode of discipline in schools? Why does this difference matter?
On this last point, you might compare West Branch’s system of discipline and control to that prevailing at Bucknell. Are they similar or different? What effects do you notice flowing from each system?

Directions to West Branch School
West Branch School is in the Newbury section of Williamsport, on the western end of town. It is just beyond Route 15 northbound, which is a four lane highway at 755 Moore Avenue, which is parallel to and between Third Street and Fourth Street. The phone number is 323-5498 and the office person is Peg Furst.
The most direct way to get to West Branch School from Lewisburg is to take Route 15 north to Williamsport. When you go over the Susquehanna River bridge, STAY IN THE LEFT HAND LANE and continue straight onto Market Street, the main street in Williamsport. (If you get in the right hand lane on the bridge, you will be forced down to the access road which continues Route 15 north. This is not fatal, but it’s a more confusing route to the School).

Go to the second light on Market Street and take a left on that westbound one-way street: Fourth Street. From that intersection, continue 2.6 miles. You will pass a park on your right with a minor league baseball park in it and then go under the Route 15 overpass. Take the second left (the first left is an on-ramp to the highway) which comes quickly after the highway bridge. Go to the end of that street. West Branch School is the red building at the corner on your right.

(If you end up going right off the river bridge and down onto the access road do the following. Continue on the access road about five blocks until there is an on ramp to the highway (Interstate 180/U.S. 220/U.S. 15) going west. Take the Route 15 north exit, which is about the third exit up and is a major highway exit. IMMEDIATELY as you go up the Rte 15 ramp, exit to the right to Third Street. Turn left at the stop sign at the bottom of the ramp onto Third Street. Continue to the stop light at Arch Street and turn right on Arch. Continue about two blocks to Moore Avenue and take a right on Moore. WBS is two blocks up on your left.

NORTH CENTRAL SECURE TREATMENT UNIT

North Central Secure Treatment Unit (Available for advanced interns 2012).
This is the maximum security incarceration facility for teen aged men and women in Pennsylvania and it is located on the grounds of Danville State Hospital (a mental hospital) in Danville about 20 minutes from Lewisburg. It is one of the few prison facilities available to Bucknell students. It is a fascinating, complicated, and intense place to visit but being there also carries some risks. In past years we had SOCI 239 students work there but do not offer it routinely now. We do have an advanced student intern working there in Fall, 2012, and we might be able to make it available for highly motivated and appropriate students.

To participate in this setting you must gain approvals from the Pennsylvania State Police, the Department of Public Welfare, and the F.B.I. Gaining these approvals will cost about $60 and they can hold up your field placement. To work at the North Central Secure Treatment Unit, you will have to plan on visiting the facility once a week over most of the semester. Thus, choosing this field experience will mean you do not have to visit other settings and you can do all of your papers on this one place.

To learn how to secure clearances, to the the following website: http://www.csiu.org and on the left side of the page select clearances. You will fill out forms provided through website links and pay using a credit card. Then you must print out the results of this transaction and take it to the U.P.S. store across from Walmart where your clearances can be worked through.

(Formerly Danville Center for Adolescent Females.) Three writing assignments go with this setting: Assignment 1; Assignment 2; Assignment 3.

This is the maximum security detention facility for teen agers, both men and women under 18, drawn from the entire state of Pennsylvania located on the grounds of Danville State Hospital. When we have used this site in the past, students spent a day visiting a class in the high school and talking with teachers and students. The students have mostly been involved in criminal activity that requires this sort of extreme detention.

Bucknell students who participate as interns for this course at the North Central Secure Treatment Unit must secure clearances from the Pennsylvania State Police ($10), the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare ($10), and the FBI ($40). Gaining clearances takes time so it’s essential that students start securing these clearances early. To get directions on securing clearances go to the website of the Central Susquehanna Intermediate Unit (http://www.csiu.org/) and click on the clearances button on the main web page or use this link.

To get there, take Rte. 54 off I-80 to the intersection with Rte 11. Turn left on Rte. 11 and continue straight about two blocks until the road forks and take the right fork. Continue on Rte. 11 past Dunkin Donuts (on your left) and you’ll come upon an intersection where you’ll see Danville High School on your right. Turn right on that road, continue past the high school and in about a block you’ll come to an intersection with the hospital complex straight ahead. Turn right and then take the next left, following the sign for DCAF. Going ahead about a block you’ll see the main building of Danville State Hospital on your left and the North Central Secure Treatment Unit boys building is on your right. There are about four separate buildings that serve different youth groups and the girl’s unit is about a block or two away. When you come up to the front gate of the North Central Secure Treatment Unit, you may need to call to the office on the phone to get through the gate. If the gate is open, you still will have to call to get buzzed in the main door. You will have to go through a metal detector so it will work best if you wear clothes that have minimal metal (including in your underwear) and also if you do not bring along metal jewelry and other things that you’ll just have to take off.

It would involve more work to do this and we’d come up with different assignments. However, it’s a fascinating place.

For students planning to embark on this placement, the first step is to call Dan Clark to arrange a meeting. At that meeing you will work out times when you will come over the course of the semester. It is OK for students to go to this placement in groups. When you are there students will be assigned to different teachers and are likely to work with students as tutors. Your academic skills will be sufficient for you to help the students in any of their subjects. You should also learn about the students lives and about general issues at the school as you work with teachers and students in particular classes.

Contact information for Dan Clark:

Dan Clark, High School Principal
North Central Secure Treatment Unit
(formerly Danville Center for Adolescent Females or DCAF—signs on the property still give these letters)
CSIU Education Program
271-4752
CSIU@dcaf
dclark@csiu.org

Writing About a Hospital Emergency Room

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

The Objective of Visiting A Hospital Emergency Room

Professional Orientation.

Meeting Emergency Department staff, you will have an opportunity to learn how these professionals view their work. It is important for you to be exposed to their philosophy of work and to learn what they do. We have talked about how institutions create morality. Spending time with these people will give you information of how value-driven and moral emergency room work is.

Division of Labor

Emergency rooms have a highly efficient division of labor both internally and in their relationships with outside services, both in the area of what is called prehospital care and in relationship to the inside wards of the hospital. Who are the role players in the division of labor?

Authority

Emergency rooms like all intensive medical systems are hierarchical systems run by physicians. While it is tempting to say that doctors “run” the emergency room you will find that it might be more accurate to say that the emergency room runs itself. This is the subject of the article by Vosk and Milofsky given as suggested reading with this field assignment

What to Write About

In all of our writing assignments, one task for you is simply to tell about your experience. Write about what you did, what happened, who you talked to, what caught your attention and what you learned.
Be respectful of staff, patients, and families and be sensitive to their needs. Emergency room visits are often crises and involve life-changing or frightening experiences. Confidentiality is essential. When you write, do not use names. While evocative descriptions are important, do not describe people—especially patients—in ways that would allow their identities to be easily recognized.
In more focused terms, it is important to pay attention to who is a player, who is a bystander, and what people do in the emergency room. One way to capture this is to describe the people who work on one or two cases. Doing this would allow you to describe the division of labor, including the pre-hospital phase and the admission-to-the-hospital phase.
Talk about how authority works in the emergency room. What signs to you see of people supervising or directing others? Pay attention and describe situations where people who are seemingly of lower status take charge of a case and give direction to their superiors (nurses structuring the case for doctors or paramedics structuring cases for emergency room staff). What surprises you about these authority relations? Do you see the relationships described in the Vosk and Milofsky article played out in your ER observation experience?

Williamsport Regional Medical Center Emergency Department (part of Susquehanna Health Systems)
(current status: This is available for 2010. Contact Prof. Milofsky if this opportunity particularly interests you.)
Williamsport Hospital and Medical Center in Williamsport (about 30 miles north of Lewisburg) is willing to host students from our class for up to an eight hour experience in their emergency room.
Students who participate in this setting must watch a video and take a short quiz on HIPAA regulations before they will be allowed to visit the ER. This is in addition to the security clearances and CITI protection of human subjects certification that are required for the course.
The directions in the next paragraph give you contact information for our contact person, Sherry Hyland. However, in many ways it works best if we get a list of interested students during class and set up a schedule for visits and for going through the HIPAA training. Contact Milofsky so he can plan the group experience.
Once you let your instructor know this is a placement you want, scheduling is your responsibility. To schedule a visit, conrtact Sherry Hyland, Clinical Nurse Educator of the Emergency Department. of the Williamsport Hospital and Medical Center. Her office phone number is: 321-2250 and her email is: shyland@susquehannahealth.org.
Williamsport Hospital is what we call a “secondary” medical care facility, which means that although it is a most specialized and high technology center, the most extreme medical cases will be transferred elsewhere, probably to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville. Their emergency room is the primary facility for the largest metropolitan area near here and so it is quite busy—some years it has more cases than does Geisinger Medical Center.
In past years we have had students serve as interns at the Williamsport Hospital ER as well as at other hospitals in the area like the Geisinger Medical Center and Shamokin Hospital and students have had very meaningful experiences.
What we’ve arranged is for one of the nurses in the ED to act as your host and guide. This means that you�ll have a contact person you always can check in with when you are on the unit and if, perhaps you got involved in some other activity and want to reconnect with a supervisor who can give you new directions. Usually the nurse host will give you a tour of the facility and also will make a point of introducing you to new activities or settings.
Understand, however, that while your nurse supervisor will help you out an emergency room is a busy place and your nurse contact has a job to do. She or he may have to quickly become intensely involved in the case of a patient. Your responsibility then is to find a place that is out of the way and observe what is going on. You may ask where to stand and in some cases you may be asked to wait outside of the booth, room, or treatment area since issues of privacy and confidentiality may come up.
Your time in the ED will be more interesting and more socially comfortable if you offer to help out with simple tasks. Your nurse supervisor may give you some tasks to carry out and you should be grateful when that happens. It takes work for the staff to have you present and it is a good thing when we as observers can be outgoing about volunteering to help.
That said, Bucknell does not want you to be involved in medical procedures where you may make physical contact with patients, come in contact with bodily fluids, or where you give out information you are not competent to provide. Be aware that you must minimize risk to yourself. Understand, however, that your host nurse and the medical staff also are keenly aware of what would be risky for you or for patients. If medical staff asks you to complete a task (perhaps removing paper waste from the setting where a medical procedure is going on) or asks for help that involves contact with a patient (perhaps holding a child�s hand steady while a doctor sutures a wound) follow their guidance and your own good judgment.
Most of the time emergency rooms are quiet places despite expectations to the contrary. We have images of ERs being places with lots of drama and of wounds and medical procedures that can be upsetting to a newcomer. Be prepared for such events to happen. If you feel light-headed SIT DOWN! If things happening in a treatment space upset you, leave the room!
You are more likely to be surprised and puzzled that staff members will treat you as a colleague and as such will take you �back stage� so that you learn about the contents of medical records, you are included in patient interviews that include confidential material, and people take time even when busy to explain physiological signs and symptoms to you. Do not question the professional competence of staff members when they do this. They treat your presence as part of the medical education responsibilities of the hospital and as such staff will treat you as medical professionals in training. Everyone must start their education somewhere and direct experience is an extremely important part of learning to be a health practitioner. Be very aware that your visit is a privilege and that it carries with it responsibilities to follow the HIPAA and IRB rules.
You may carry out this experience either as one eight-hour day or as two four-hour visits. Emergency rooms are most active on Sunday through Tuesday nights and so you might want to set up two of them. However, the emergency department is a busy, active, and interesting place and you will find plenty to see if you visit during the week. At night and on weekends things are slower because the rest of the hospital is closed. One of the reasons the emergency department is interesting is because about 1/3 of all hospital admissions originate there. Working in the ED allows you to see other parts of the hospital as well, especially if you’re there during the regular workweek.
I will post two reading assignments on Blackboard. One is titled “The Sociology of Emergency Medicine” written by Dr. Arno Vosk and myself based on our observations in the Williamsport Hospital Emergency Department in the early 1990s. The second is an article by Erving Goffman titled, � �.
There are many directions to go in terms of an observation and writing assignment, since the experiences of sick people and those involved in serious accidents (organ transplantations usually start in the emergency room) offer much to think about. However, the most important thing for you to see and learn about is the variety of people and roles in action in the ER and the way the division of labor of that setting functions and how coordination is achieved both inside the ER and with professionals and departments elsewhere in the medical system. That is the focus of the article Vosk and I wrote.

VISITING UNION COUNTY COURT SYSTEM

Writing About Public Defender Visits

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Visiting the Public Defender

The Public Defender is employed by the county court to provide legal defense for those accused of crimes who cannot afford to pay for an attorney. Eligibility for this program is determined through what is called a “means test”, where the attorney asks the defendent questions about his or her income and resources and then uses a set of standard criteria to determine whether the person is eligible for publicly provided legal help. In this experience, you will have contacted the Public Defender and arranged to spend part of a day with that person. The Public Defenders should have picked a day for your visit when interesting things are expected to happen. Often these will be days when sentencing hearings are held. Generally the trial will already have been held and most of the offenses involved are relatively minor, of the sort that the District of the Peace hears rather than the higher ranking judge who also sits in the courthouse. The Public Defender will explain the case or cases that are happening that day, then you will attend the hearing, often meeting with the judge and the other attorneys and parole officers involved in the case, then the Public Defender will meet with you again to year your questions and discuss the case.

This visit is most relevant to the readings in SOCI 239 around the subject of law enforcement that we will do on December 2 and December 4. You will probably visit with the Public Defender earlier in the semester and it would be good for you to look at these readings before you spend your time with him. Particularly relevant are John Irwin’s “Managing Rabble” and Abraham Blumberg’s “The Practice of Law as a Con Game”. You will see aspects of the criminal justice system at work that bear directly on those two articles.

Objectives of the Visit

Settings we observe are chosen because a lot is going on. In some of the settings we are observing a small group of people but we think about lots of connections within our own lives. In other settings there are many different kinds of people, doing different things, suggesting different meanings to us. Your visit with the Public Defender will offer both of these qualities. You will meet significant people and hear surprising things. One objective of this visit is for you to recognize the number of different things that are going on simultaneously in this setting.
You will have a chance in this setting to see how the courts and the legal profession operate behind the scenes. Blumberg’s article points out that attorneys, judges, and parole officers work together day after day on different cases. Although the system is supposed to be adversarial and attorneys are supposed to be advocates for their clients, attorneys are also working in a cooperative system with people in other legal roles. The Public Defender is happy to talk to you about how the cooperative relationships in the court house affect the way cases are developed and handled. One objective of this exercise is for you to think about the model of the criminal justice system you brought with you when you came to the court house and how what you see challenges those prior expectations.
As you talk to people in the courts you may realize that the individuals who are supervised by the court have long term relationships with the officials of the court. You may also learn that other people in the families of these individuals have been supervised by the court. You can talk to the Public Defender, the Justice of the Peace, and others about the circle of families and individuals who have ongoing relationships with the court. Most of us do not have these ongoing relationships; only some community members enjoy this kind of ongoing involvement. If you read Irwin’s article, “Managing Rabble”, you get the sense that an important function of police and the courts is just to keep troublesome people in the community from bothering everyone else. This exercise lets you see this process at work and allows you to reflect on the consequences of that reality.

What You Should Write

In all of our writing assignments, one task for you is simply to tell about your experience. Write about what you did, what happened, who you talked to, what caught your attention and what you learned.
This is a course in Human Services meant to focus on broad issues so you want to think about the broader implications of what you see. In particular, talk about what the law is, how the process of criminal hearings ought to work, and how what you saw relates to your expectations. You are likely to witness plea bargaining and you may see court hearings where the results seem to be set before the hearing happens. Does what you see fit your model of a just trial system?
One thing emphasized in our class is that often there are several ways to view specific events. In the court system, we often encounter different ways to frame why it is that someone has broken the law. Some people will present law breaking as bad behavior and as a moral violation. Some people will talk about law breaking in terms of an individual’s need for education and rehabilitation. Some people will talk about an individual’s law breaking in essentially medical terms, as a manifestation of mental illness or addiction. Defendents may talk about their lawbreaking as a simple misunderstanding or misadventure. Pay attention to the way different individuals you meet explain law breaking and contrast those explanations. Do you find them mutually consistent? How do you account for any inconsistencies you notice.

Public Defender’s Office (current status: ?This is available. Call to make arrangements for your visit.)

Brian Ulmer
Union County Public Defender
Union County Courthouse, 2nd and St. Catherine Streets, Lewisburg.
Pub Defender’s Office 524-8780
Ulmer’s law Office: 522-1092

After you register with the instructor, you are responsible for contacting Mr. Ulmer and making arrangements for your visit. You are free to make contacts and to visit public defenders in other counties if that is more convenient for you. Use the writing assignment to guide your observations. We will be observing preliminary hearings. Preliminary hearing days are Thursdays. Students may observe for a morning, an afternoon, or all day. Mr. Ulmer will meet with people before the day begins to explain the rough format of how hearings will develop. However, the hearings themselves are individual and follow their own course. At the end of the morning or afternoon, Mr. Ulmer will meet with students to answer questions and clarify what happened.

There is a limit of 2 students per day and no more than 20 students total can participate in this experience

VISITING RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES

Writing About the Plain People: The Amish and Old Order Mennonites
(revised 10/11/02)

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Participating in the Amish Tour for this class has three objectives.

For you to see a unique lifestyle and describe what it is and what motivates the participants.
For you to learn about and understand the general principles of the Amish and Old Order Mennonite religious groups.
For you to notice social service activities built into these communities and to consider whether the character and structure of those services are made unique and distinctive by virtue of having been created within a faith-based community.

Writing

Write a brief account of the experience. You should both describe events that occur and things you see and learn about the Amish as a result of this tour.
Explain why the Amish and Old Order Mennonites live as they do, what the general principles of their religion are, and what things keep their community obedient and cohesive. You might pay special attention to how social control works in the community and how the status of women and men differ.
In class we discussed whether faith-based social services have anything distinctive to offer compared to secular social services. The Amish have schools and other services. Does religious doctrine or faith make these services different than they would be if they were run in a secular setting, aside from the fact that they happen within a religious community?

AIDS PROJECTS

Writing About the AIDS Resource Alliance

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

There are three objectives for participation in the AIDS Resource Alliance.

To observe and participate in a community volunteer organization.
2. To learn about how the government and other entities organize funding and program assistance for AIDS and to think about how a program like the AIDS Resource Alliance relates to the politics and policy-making around AIDS in Pennsylvania and in the U.S..
3. To meet and work with people with AIDS.

Writing

After you participate in AIDS Resource Alliance (ARA) experience, write a brief description of the experience. You want to describe things in specific and particular ways. You do not need to describe everything that happened. The emphasis should be on specific things that caught your attention and that you found surprising. Reflect on why you noticed these things and what you learned.

Some students are visiting ARA several times. Other students have taken SOCI 201 or another course where they are required to write field notes. In either case, if you keep a diary or log about your experience in the program you are likely to generate more writing than is required for this assignment. You may hand in everything that you have written if you wish. I would prefer, however, that you hand in writing that concentrates on a few striking or important experiences. You should write about these in as much detail as you can. Avoid providing a general overview description except as a way to introduce your reader to the setting. Your description of experiences should be specific and detailed and should tell about something that surprised or interested you.

If you participate in an outreach experience you will want to talk about how people responded to information provided about high risk behavior. Since experiences will be diverse it is hard to tell you in advance what to look for. In some settings you may find the setting unusual and interesting. In others it may be difficult, uncomfortable, and strange to approach people to have these conversations. In other situations you may encounter school populations where the whole discussion of sex is a bit uncomfortable. Tell about how the message was given, how it was received, and what you learned about how people orient to high risk behavior.
If you participate in an ARA fundraising event most of your contacts will be with staff and board members and their social circle. One of the important things you are likely to see is that the ARA is the major charitable project for certain communities you probably do not normally encounter. You may find yourself in a gay community event or in a community even of recovering substance abusers. Your task is to write about the importance of this charitable event for people in these communities. Ask people why they participate and what ARA means to them.
In some ARA experiences you may be introduced to some people with AIDS. If the opportunity allows and if you feel comfortable with this, be outgoing, get to know people, and see if they will talk about their experience with the disease. The objective of these questions is not to get detailed information about their personal biography but to hear what one experiences having a highly stigmatizing disease in a small town like Williamsport. You may also talk to them about they experience living with a serious chronic disease and facing death. People you meet may talk freely about these subjects. If they do not and if the setting does not allow for this sort of conversation, you may instead talk about how ARA staff members relate to their clients and what you perceive about the experience of living with AIDS based on meeting these clients.

Writing About the AIDS Programs at Bucknell

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

There are three objectives for participation in AIDS programs at Bucknell.

To learn about people with AIDS and to consider how you feel about sickness, death, loss, and grieving.
2. To learn about social and political movements related to AIDS. Pay special attention to the article in our syllabus about the AIDS activist organization, ACT-UP, and look at that organization’s web site. As you participate in AIDS events, think about the importance and relevance of activism around AIDS, particularly with respect to the development and funding for government programs related to this disease.
3. To consider high risk behavior among students at Bucknell and to consider the costs and benefits of being safe and careful.

Writing

After you participate in an AIDS experience at Bucknell, write a brief description of the experience. You want to describe things in specific and particular ways. You do not need to describe everything that happened. The emphasis should be on specific things that caught your attention and that you found surprising. Reflect on why you noticed these things and what you learned.

If you participate in the Quilt activities your thoughts will be drawn to the lives of those who died and the loss that comes when young people are struck down. You may or may not feel a strong personal emotional response to the quilt. If you do, spend some time thinking about how you feel about sickness, disability, and the possibility of catastrophic illness or injury. You might want to reflect on friends or family members.

I relate theseAIDS experiences to the Gift of Life, organ transplantation, experiences in the sense that many of us feel very uncomfortable when we must confront and acknowledge serious illness, death, grief, and heroic gestures made by loved ones in a time of pain and grief. I’d like for this experience to help us all to look directly at these experiences, submerge ourselves in the activity, and make ourselves available to others in such settings. This kind of emotional stability is necessary for anyone working in health care settings where serious health problems are dealt with.

If you participate in fundraising and volunteer activities around the Bucknell campus, pay attention to the ironies involved when students give money and their time to help AIDS while also engaging in high risk behaviors.

High risk behaviors are fairly common on campus. Think about why people engage in high risk behaviors. Also think about why people want to help when they may also engage in high risk behavior. I do not mean to be judgmental of others. Rather, think about situations where we make gestures to help or to support social change when we also contribute to the problematic behavior that creates the social problem we are concerned with. Why do we do that? I mean in particular to have you think about themes in our class about the interplay of a political or larger social consciousness with the activities of our daily lives.

FOODSHARE

Eastern Union County Foodshare
(status: although this has not specificlly been set up for 2012 the program is ongoing an should be available. If you are interested in food distributions and this one is not available, there are others nearby you can experience).
Eastern Union County Foodshare is a food distribution program that operates out of the Baptist Church on 3rd and St. Louis Streets in Lewisburg. Your work in the program would involve helping to prepare food packages and helping to hand out food and other necessities to people who come to receive them on distribution days. In your work you will get to know other volunteers as well as those people who receive assistance. Encountering low income people is often an eye-opening experience for Bucknell students. It also is interesting and useful to meet people who take the time to volunteer for this kind of activity. The setting is close to campus so it is one setting available to people without transportation.

Held the 1st and 3rd Fridays of the month, 1:15pm. They could use one or two students each time. Contact the director Richard Ellis (a retired Bu prof) at rellis@bucknell.edu or 524-4740 at least a day or two ahead of date you would like to assist.The foodshare operates out of the Baptist Church basement on 3rd and St. Louis St. refer to the field experience reference sheet for details.

Writing About Eastern Union County Foodshare 2003

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

There are three objectives for participation in the Foodshare.

To observe and participate in a community volunteer organization.
2. To learn about how the government and other entities organize food assistance and to think about how a program like Foodshare relates to the politics and policy-making around hunger and food in Pennsylvania and in the U.S..
3. To meet and work with low income people.

Writing

After you participate in Foodshare, write a brief description of the experience. You want to describe things in specific and particular ways. You do not need to describe everything that happened. The emphasis should be on specific things that caught your attention and that you found surprising. Reflect on why you noticed these things and what you learned.

Some students are visiting Foodshare several times. Other students have taken SOCI 201 or another course where they are required to write field notes. In either case, if you keep a diary or log about your experience in the program you are likely to generate more writing than is required for this assignment. You may hand in everything that you have written if you wish. I would prefer, however, that you hand in writing that concentrates on a few striking or important experiences. You should write about these in as much detail as you can. Avoid providing a general overview description except as a way to introduce your reader to the setting. Your description of experiences should be specific and detailed and should tell about something that surprised or interested you.

Participating in a food distribution, Bucknell students are usually surprised about the people who show up to receive food. Who are the food recipients and how do they affect the way you thought about who were the poor and the needy?

Based on your volunteer experience, how satisfied are you with the way hungry people in America have their food needs met? Would you change things and if so how might that change happen?

JOB SHADOWING

We are fortunate that executive directors of some important local organizations are interested in having SOCI 239 spend a day with them going to meetings and learning about the work they do leading a large organiztion. When you visit the likelihood is that you will not know much about the organization this person leads, what programs or acitivities go on within it, how it gets the resources it needs to operate, or who it serves. You also probably have not thought much about being a leader or what leadership involves, much less what kind of work a person does if they are the head of an important organization.

Visits we have lined up involve a hospital and the local United Way. For the hospital case, you will want to read course material on corporate influences on health care, the evolution of the professional model of patient care, and the difficulties low -income people have securing health care. Anticipate that the CEO of a hospital will be aware of these criticisms, on one hand, but that he will not think they are fair to his organization or that they relate to the positive aspects of his work. You will want to bring a balanced perspective to your observations.

The United Way CEO will have important things to say about the work of fundraising in the community since the United Way is an organization that receives contributions, mostly from people who donate at work. The United Way then allocates money to social welfare organizations in the local community, so you can learn things about how decisions are made about funding these agencies and you will have a chance to learn about the entire array of organizations that exist in a community. The United Way also is close involved in community life. This is partly because community members must believe that the United Way Fund serves important needs. However, the United Way in recent years also has taken on the responsibility of continually examining needs that are arising in the communities they serve. As needs change, the activities the United Way funds should change. The CEO must be continually involved in community dynamics and processes. For this reason, our readings on social capital and community structure that we covered early in the semester are important for you to pay attention to.

Objectives of the Visit

Settings we observe are chosen because a lot is going on. In some of the settings we are observing a small group of people but we think about lots of connections within our own lives. In other settings there are many different kinds of people, doing different things, suggesting different meanings to us. Your visit with an organizational CEO will offer both of these qualities. You will meet significant people and hear surprising things. One objective of this visit is for you to recognize the number of different things that are going on simultaneously in this setting.
You will have a chance in this setting to see how a large and important organization operates behind the scenes. Be aware that every organization has a political process that involves people from a variety of professional backgrounds and competing economic interests and value commitments. The CEO often is the person who has to work out these differences of opinion nad who also may have to change the organization to resolve these economic and philosophical differences. You should be interested in what some of those complex interactions are about, but also talk to the CEO about how he or she views and manages the politics and conflicts that arise in the organization.

What You Should Write

In all of our writing assignments, one task for you is simply to tell about your experience. Write about what you did, what happened, who you talked to, what caught your attention and what you learned.
This is a course in Human Services meant to focus on broad issues so you want to think about the broader implications of what you see. In particular, talk about what we mean when we talk about something being an “organization”. Your day with a leader will probably involve moving from one meeting to another and watching your CEO play the role of “leader”. Probably your CEO will want to explain to you in a philosophical way what he or she is trying to accomplish and also what it means personally for him or her to be in this role. Your CEO will probably also want to explain to you what the organization does and what are some current pressing issues they are facing. Try to understand these issues and try to briefly explain them in your written report.
One thing emphasized in our class is that often there are several ways to view specific events. Try in your field visit to allow opposing viewpoints to co-exist in your mind and let these clashing frameworks play out in your writing. This would be especially easy in a hospital CEO visit since we have readings that are strongly critical of the institution and you will be visiting someone who is personally invested in the morality and importance of the organization. The United Way is not so easy to view from multiple perspectives, except that the CEO is likely to be somewhat distant in involvement terms from actual community programs and services. We sometimes see a clash between an elite, “top of the institution” view (which is where the CEO sits) and the social capital and rich community dynamics that happen on the ground. Historically also, the United Way has been a representative of the status quo, in the sense that it funds and speaks for established agencies that do not necessarily want to hear about new and critical problems. Explore these contrasting perspectives with your CEO and report on the different perspectives you have come to recognize through your visit.

Job Shadowing (Available for 2012)
We are fortunate that the executive directors of two important organizations are willing to have students from SOCI 239 spend a day shadowing them at work. Students need to sign up for this experience well in advance by contacting Prof. Milofsky and coordinating with him to set up contacts with the individuals involved. We will need to make scheduling arrangements so that these individuals can choose a day for the visit when they have many interesting meetings scheduled. Both of them have lots of experience working with Bucknell interns and they are eager to share their work with you.

Keri Albright, Executive Director, Greater Susquehanna Valley United Way.

Ms. Albright lives in Lewisburg but her office is in Sunbury. In fall much of her work is focused on the United Way fundraising campaign and with the complexities of managing her office. Albright also is involved in local leadership networks and she also is instrumental in helping to organize coordinating groups like the Leadership Susquhanna Valley instructional program and the local day care network. She partners with those of us at Bucknell on a variety of projects.

Bob Kane, CEO of the Divine Providence Hospital campus of Susquehanna Health in Williamsport.

Mr. Kane is a Bucknell alum who for many years has partnered with us on research and action projects involving health care in Williamsport and research on the two hospitals in that community. Kane is one of the main people who helps set up internship and field placements related to health of all kinds in the Williamsport area. For this experience, he would like to have Bucknell students, one at a time, spend a day with him on days when he has a variety of important meetings to attend.

Writing About Job Shadowing Visits
Created 11/27/2012

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

The Objective of Visiting a High School Football Game

Sports and Community.
In this response you must combine observations you make in this field experience with an interpretation of the discussion of the relationship of social capital and civil society in our readings. You may want to draw on the discussion of social capital in Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone” which you can find on the ERES as well as in Coleman’s discussion of social capitl. The football game you visit ought to manifest lots of social capital—the opposite of what Putnam talks about.

You want to talk about what you see and what evidence you think exists showing that social capital exists or does not exist. You will want to do this by describing particular people, particular incidents or events, and a detailed rendition of conversations that are relevant to your theme.

High School Homecoming (available for 2012)
This almost always turns out to be a fascinating experience that is easily accessible for many student. You need to go home for this one and attend your high school’s Homecoming football game. The assignment is for you to observe your home community and particularly social capital that is evident as people participate in this event. Community participation probably is not something you were strongly aware of when you were in high school but it is likely to be something you notice very much coming back having moved on beyond your high school years. Do not choose this one just because it is easy. It is a good experience if there actually is an outpouring of community involvement at your high school.

Writing About Visiting a High School Football Game
Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Writing About a Big Time Football Game
Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:
(1) Encourage you to think about readings and class topics and to use those materials in your discussion of the field experience;
(2) Raise issues for you about participation in community life and political activity and to discuss how engagement and social responsibility, or disengagement and social irresponsibility happen;
(3) Give you field experiences to prepare you for other courses that will have more intensive field experiences, like Anthropology/Sociology 201.

NURSING HOMES

There is a writing assignment for students visiting in nursing homes since students experience them visiting friends and relatives. If you wish to visit a nursing home in the Lewisburg area we can set this up. The danger is that if you just go to the volunteer office of a nursing home on your own that they will have you do a project with high functioning residents that involves art or some other activity that is not threatening or difficult. Nursing homes a very interesting places if you have the chance to meet and help some of the lower functioning residents or some of the caregiving staff.

In the past, some students have wanted to visit settings where grandparents or other friends reside. This is a good idea to pursue but check with the professor first.

Writing About a Nursing Home

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Asking you to visit a Nursing Home has three objectives.

The first is to encourage you to think about what nursing homes are for.

Many of us hold stereotypes about nursing homes and people in our families may have strong feelings about living in nursing homes themselves or allowing family members to live in them. It is important to recognize that to some extent these feelings have more to do with how our day-to-day lives have become disconnected from our communities and our families than they do with the realities of nursing home living. Think about who is actually in nursing homes, what problems the homes address, and when this kind of living arrangement is really necessary. One side of the nursing home scene is that people who are very sick or disabled are there and we have no good way of caring for them except in this kind of facility. Maybe our difficulty has to do with our unwillingness to deal with sickness and death rather than notions we share about warehousing old people as they wait to die.

A second objective is for you to think about alternatives to nursing home life and to consider why these facilities exist as successful businesses.

People working to create more independent lives for the disabled argue that nursing homes are supported and legtitimated by business interests and that they do not actually have the best interests of residents at heart. Indeed, many people could be supported in the community effectively if the same amount of money were spent for the care in the community as is spent on their nursing home care. You might think about the limitations on the lives of residents that nursing homes impose and you might also think about the societal interests that limit the independence of disabled people.

The third objective is for you to think about nursing homes as places for living and how you personally relate to the kind of people who are there.

Many students find it difficult to be around elderly people and especially the disabled elderly we find in nursing homes. A valuable thing to do when you visit is to be involved in helping people eat or helping them to move around the facility. Pay attention to the reality that interaction often is not cognitively lucid but that there still is a strong emotional connection you may have with residents. Pay attention to the sources of your own discomfort being with the elderly. Think about what it is like to live in a place like this. We focus on negative aspects like people shouting out or people sitting in chairs, disconnected mentally from their surroundings. Pay attention to the variety of people who live and work in a home. Pay attention also to the character and quality of relationships residents have with each other and with staff. Be mindful that those relationships often are not placid, without conflict, or minus political aspects. This is a rich and intimate setting that one can penetrate if you take the time to talk to people and see them as whole and valuable human beings.

MENTAL HOSPITAL

Writing About a Mental Hospital
Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:
(1) Encourage you to think about readings and class topics and to use those materials in your discussion of the field experience;
(2) Raise issues for you about participation in community life and political activity and to discuss how engagement and social responsibility, or disengagement and social irresponsibility happen;
(3) Give you field experiences to prepare you for other courses that will have more intensive field experiences, like Anthropology/Sociology 201.

Asking you to visit a Mental Hospital has three objectives.

The first is to encourage you to think about what mental hospitals are for.

There are many stereotypes about mental hospitals and one of your tasks is to think about the expectations you had and how the reality differs. Some people in mental hospitals are affected by chronic mental disease and have extended stays but today many people come to the hospital for short periods of time to deal with acute episodes or for diagnostic purposes. To the extent you can do so find out why people are in the hospital, what their hospitalization is supposed to achieve, and from this give an explanation as best you can of the need and value of the institution.

A second objective is for you to think about the personal experience of becoming resident in a hospital and how it would affect your sense of identity.

Visiting a total institution like a mental hospital one tends to emotionally distance oneself from the residents. One of your tasks is to get to know the residents as people and think of how it would be yourself to be in this setting. One of the elements to consider is what transformations of self might accompany being a resident. Erving Goffman talks about this in terms of a “moral career”. What can you say about the transformation of self that happens as one becomes a resident and what effects do you think this transformation might have.

A third objective of this visit is for you to think about and understand the nature of a total institution.

Total institutions are residential facilities where the staff comes and goes but where clients, inmates, or patients remain confined so that their freedom is restricted and they cannot leave the facility. One consequence is a sharp difference in status and outlook between the inmates and the staff which usually is manifested in power and hierarchical relationships. Inmates tend to have radically restricted rights to exercise power and autonomy and so observers talk about how “deviant” behavior is sometimes an effort to exert power by the powerless. A second consequence is that institutions develop an informal system of exchange that allow inmates to enjoy conveniences or acquire commodities that are technically forbidden. This exchange system is call the “underlife” of the institution. What evidence do you see of the institution’s underlife? Look on ERES for a chapter on the hospital underlife.

ATTENDING A CONFERENCE

Writing About Traveling to a Conference

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Asking you to write about visiting a conference has three objectives.

The first is to encourage you to think about the nature and purposes of the human service institutions the conference serves.

Most of the conferences we attend related to Bucknell in some way relate to the general purpose and mission of research, teaching, or service work in higher education. It is important as you attend the conference and immerse yourself in that experience to think about the larger institution and what the conference tells you about that institution. Under this heading the idea is to think about what it is all for, what message is being conveyed, what activities or behaviors are held up as positive or negative examples, and how the substance of the conference gets you to think about the underlying activities that make up the institution.

A second objective is for you to pay attention to diversity among the institutions represented at the conference and perhaps diversity among the people there.

One of the things that always strikes me when I am at a conference are differences in the openness and academic freedom present on different campuses, differences in ideas people have about how teaching ought to work, and differences in the centrality of research and the concept of research people have different places. This is valuable partly just to help map out the contours of the institution. But what gets me thinking more is how these contrasts bring into sharper focus what Bucknell is and what it has to offer. I am a bit ambiguous in the heading for this section about diversity of people. That’s simply because under this heading diversity among people might shed light on how the institutions are diverse—in terms of the racial composition, age composition, international orientation, residential character and so on.

The third objective is for you to think about conferences and their environments as events or as places for being, experiencing, and existing.

An important part of field writing is simple ethnography—taking in the things you see and experience and writing thoughtfully and reflectively about those things. At a conference you notice characters, events, odd behaviors and so on. You also notice the setting of the hotel or conference center and the kinds of people who are around and who may not be part of the conference. You might be struck by the urban context of a conference or conversely by a rural setting. When you write, pay attention to the things that surprise or unsettle you. These usually relate to expectations you had that were upset or challenged. Pay attention to the things that challenged you and think about why your expectations were so different from the reality.

Writing About H.O.P.E. for Life

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Be sure to view the video, “Bad Dads” before going to the prison on October 29.

There are two objectives of the H.O.P.E. for Life visit.

One is to examine and think carefully about family relationships as altruistic interactions. We want to look closely at how and why family relationships are important. We want to think about the gift of being a parent, and what gifts are involved in being a child. We want to think about why gifts of love are offered, what happens when they are not, and the challenge of giving love when someone has hurt us.

A second purpose is to collect information about how hurtfulness is related to emotional repression and, in turn, to the inclination to hurt others. H.O.P.E. for Life is based on the premise that criminality is anchored in personal abuse suffered by offenders as children and that overcoming the inclination to commit crimes requires confronting and overcoming the consequences of this early pain. It is important for us to recognize this dynamic and to see that it shapes the lives of successful people like Bucknell students and professors just as it does the lives of the offenders we will meet.

Before you go to your H.O.P.E. for Life group meeting, read the goals and mutually accepted responsibilities of group members summarized on another page in this section of the web site on field experiences.
Before you go, write a brief autobiography particularly reflecting on aspects of your family life in which something you could call abuse occured. This is an assignment that has been given to all group members, and people are expected to tell about what they wrote when they arrive at group. Since it is a large group, you may or may not be asked to present but make this part of the writing you hand in. Your response will be kept in confidence.

Many Bucknell students do not think that they have experienced abuse and that therefore they cannot respond to this writing assignment. I asked the group leaders about this and their comment was that everyone has abuse in their families. It is the case that when we spent an extended time talking about abuse in my summer school capstone, eventually everyone did find real instances although in some cases it involved cousins rather than immediate family members. Some of the reluctance to acknowledge abuse is that this is something Bucknellians are likely to want to hide or may not even acknowledge to themselves. One way to approach this is to think about how “abuse” may be defined in terms other than when someone beats someone else up. Consider emotional abuse or abuse of identity or abuse of freedom to develop and express one’s inner desires.

After the group, write a brief description of the experience. You want to describe things in specific and particular ways. You do not need to describe everything that happened. The emphasis should be on specific things that caught your attention and that you found surprising. Reflect on why you noticed these things and what you learned.

Writing About the Lock Haven Emergency Room

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

The Objective of Visiting Lock Haven Emergency Room

Professional Orientation.

Meeting with Dr. Vosk and the other Emergency Department staff, you will have an opportunity to learn how these professionals view their work. It is important for you to be exposed to their philosophy of work and to learn what they do. We have talked about how institutions create morality. Spending time with these people will give you information of how value-driven and moral emergency room work is.

Considering Institutional Selfishness

We have read a lot about financial pressure on medical care and economic self-interest of major players in the health care system. Having close exposure to the health care system through a unit like the Lock Haven ER will show you that this “institutional selfishness” is not so easy to see up close.

Organ Donation

The reason I first thought about having students in Sociology 239 visit the emergency room is that it is the origin point of cases that result in organ donation. When people have terrible accidents that result in brain death, as we saw with the Armando Dimas case, they are likely to begin at an ER like that in Lock Haven. How are such cases viewed in this kind of small institution and how do ER personnel relate to families in lethal situations?

What to Write About

In all of our writing assignments, one task for you is simply to tell about your experience. Write about what you did, what happened, who you talked to, what caught your attention and what you learned.
In more focused terms, one thing to gain from talking to Dr. Vosk and experiencing his tour of the emergency room is that he views his work in highly moral terms, even if he is does not anchor that sense of commitment and higher purpose in religious values. Using your conversations with Dr. Vosk as a base, what does it mean to say that medicine or emergency room work is moral in character? In discussing this, think about whether the contrast of “moral work” with “economic utilitarianism” is visible and clear to you as a contrast. What would it mean for a physician to present an economic view of his or her work?
You may or may not learn about the nature of the emergency response system. The system as it relates to the hospital has two parts. One has to do with the coordination of work within the hospital and the other has to do with the community emergency response system. To the extent you can, learn how each of these systems of emergency response works and describe it.
Dr. Vosk is one of the physicians Linda Potter works with in the Gift of Life Foundation program of organ donation. I wanted students to understand something about the culture of the emergency room so that the “downstream” culture of the organ donation system would be more clear. You will hear important things if you talk to Dr. Vosk about how he views mortally injured patients and how he views and relates to their families. Ask him his views, report what he says, and reflect on his responses.

Writing About M.I.T.T.S.

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Asking you to visit MITTS has three objectives.

The first is to encourage you to think about the pervasiveness of family violence.

We all have stereotypes about what kinds of people are criminals, where they come from, and we tend to think that they are different from ourselves. Learn about the socioeconomic and professional backgrounds of the men who are involved in the discussion groups. Consider the likelihood that family violence is part of the lives of Bucknell students. Consider also the ways that interpersonal abuse are part of life on campus.

The second objective is for you to think about your own emotional responses and behavior patterns.

MITTS is an educational program as well as a counselling program. It uses a highly structured curriculum based on examining the character of our own emotions, the things we respond to, and the ways our emotional responses connect to actions directed at others. Many of us engage in aggressive actions towards others that we do not recognize. Some of us are targets of aggressive actions, maybe because we provoke it unintentionally. MITTS provides a system for examining these things.

The third objective is for you to learn about how a community based social intervention program works.

MITTS was created in response to a double murder/suicide in Lewisburg based in family violence. This year there have been more than five murders in the local area rooted in family violence. This program is unusual because members of the local community center started a movement to intervene on violence, sought training to work with abusers, gained support from the courts and other community leaders, and found funding to build the program. It is important to learn how communities respond to difficult social problems.

Observing MITTS

When you meet with Sue Alberti, she is likely to give you an assignment to complete before meeting with a group. What you write is confidential, but do hand it in as part of your writing assignment.
You are expected to attend three meetings of a single group. Tell who is participating in the meeting, what their backgrounds are, and how they characterize their abusive behavior. In providing this description, DO NOT USE NAMES AND DESCRIBE PEOPLE IN A MANNER THAT WOULD NOT ALLOW THEM TO BE IDENTIFIED. IF BUCKNELL PEOPLE ARE IN THE GROUP, OR PEOPLE WHO YOU THINK MIGHT BE IDENTIFIED BY THE INSTRUCTOR OR OTHERS IN CLASS, DO NOT INCLUDE THEM IN THE DESCRIPTION.
Briefly tell what you found interesting or surprising about the group and its process. Be concrete and specific when you relate events.
Briefly tell what personal relevance you find in the methods of the MITTS approach or in the experience of being part of this group.

Writing About Public Safety

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Asking you to visit Public Safety Ride Alongs has three objectives.

You will have the chance to see student behavior from the other side, opposite to the view you normally have of social events as a student participant.
We want to think about Bucknell as a community and how order, deviance, and social control relate to the success of our community.

One aspect has to do with how student partying relates to the rights of the whole spectrum of people who make up the community (the partyers who have a legitimate right to have fun, people at the party who may be abused, bystanders who may be bothered by noise and other noxious behavior, and the university as a legal corporation that has liability). Related to this is how we define what is and is not deviant at Bucknell, including how peers should relate to people who are dangerous to self and others. Finally, there is a question of whether the way security and the Dean of Students Office relates to student partying represents a unilateral imposition of power on students or whether those officials represent some sort of consensual view on campus about how to protect the rights of everyone.

This experience will let you learn and hear about the life of a law enforcement officer and this is relevant to many settings we will discuss in the course.

Writing

Write a brief account of the experience. You should both describe events that occur and conversations you have with the officer who is your host.
Seek aspects of your experience that relate to what social order means in terms of the Bucknell community. You will want to tell what the example is—it may come from events or from conversations. Then you will want to tell what sort of threat to order is involved. You will want to talk about enforcement as represented by the Public Safety intervention or the officer’s point of view. You will want to talk about the issue of order from your own student perspective and perhaps from the perspective of other students.
We perceive that there is a conflict of viewpoints between students as a general group and those university officials charged with maintaining order and enforcing the rules. Does the conflict exist and how do you evaluate the university position in light of this visit?

Writing About a Hospital Community Meeting

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

The Objective of Visiting a Hospital Community Meeting.

The Hospital as a Community Institution

Hospitals often are the largest employers and among the richest businesses or institutions in a community. As such they have their own internal dynamics and professional priorities. But they generally have been created through community philanthropy and they have historical obligations to serve the community. They also play an important role in efforts by communities to gauge the healthiness of the community, identify concerns and prominent issues, and to launch community action related to health. Appreciate that there are cross-cutting interests or orientations at work here. What is present in the meeting.

Who are the Players?

Community meetings tend to be odd events since they do not usually excite passion. The people who show up are not a random distribution of the community. So who is there at the meeting? Often community board meetings of major institutions include people who have to be there, like certain staff, people who are elected or appointed to offices that require that they be there, and people who think they have something specific to gain from being there. It is worthwhile to make a specific count of who is in attendance and to talk to people to find out who is in attendance. What you want to figure out is whether this meeting is actually a community meeting (where a relatively broad spectrum of residents would be present) or whether there really are ulterior motives or external requirements that drive the meeting. If a hospital office is required by the terms of a grant to have a community meeting, they could hold a meeting that is devoid of content and meaninful to no one. Sometimes the meetings they hold will be empty and meaningless but at the same time having the meeting legitimates some action the hospital wants to take that will have important consequences for the community. So what’s the hidden agenda?

Community Health

Aside from the organizational and community dynamics at play in the meeting you ought to learn some things about health problems and priorities in the community. What are they? To the extent you know the community, are they an accurate reflection of “real” health priorities in the community?

What to Write About

In all of our writing assignments, one task for you is simply to tell about your experience. Write about what you did, what happened, who you talked to, what caught your attention and what you learned.
In more focused terms, recognize that the hospital is a “community decision maker” with a huge amount of influence setting the health agenda for the community. In setting that agenda, there are issues of how the institutional self-interest of the hospital and the professioanl self-interests of the physicians relate to the actual health needs of the community. Talk about whether the hospital is a fair and “civic-minded” decision maker for the ocmmunity or whether some orientation towards control and domination seem to shape and color the meeting.
What is the meeting for? You might deal with this in “a”, or in “b”. But there might be value in talking about the meeting, why it was held, and what was accomplished simply in its own terms, speaking of the event as a community meeting. What is the community, how is it given a presence in the meeting, and what did you learn about the community? How does health relate to this understanding you develop of the community?
You might have some ideas about health needs in the community and you might come away from the meeting feeling that they were addressed in interesting and exciting ways or that they were ignored or that an action was taken that relates but that you find unclear in terms of its effectiveness. What is community health and how did this meeting relate to it’s improvement?

Writing About Bowling for Columbine
(revised 12/4/02)

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Viewing Bowling for Columbine for this class has three objectives.

For you to gain information about violent use of guns in the United States.
For you to consider alternative explanations for gun violence and evaluate the evidence that several of the most familiar explanations do not seem to fit comparative international data.
For you to understand the symbolic character of fear of crime and to understand it’s relationship to actual crime and to public policies related to violence.

Writing

Write a single essay that covers the following points:

Write a brief summary of the film telling what you think is its major point and its major argument.
Discuss the importance of fear in the film and explain the sources of fear according to Michael Moore.
Do you agree with the argument of the film? Explain your response.

Writing About Public Demonstrations
(revised 12/4/02)

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Participating in Public Demonstrations for this class has three objectives.

Writing

Write a single essay that covers the following points:

Write a brief summary of the events you experienced.

Small Church Conference 2003

Trinity Episcopal Church, Williamsport, PA, Saturday, September 27, 2003, 9 am to 3 pm

The Small Church Conference is a joint project of the local Episcopal and Lutheran churches to encourage members of small congregations to meet each other and to provide them with opportunities to meet with a national consultant and discuss challenges and opportunities common among churches with fewer than 75 members. The conference is organized as a joint effort between two Episcopal Diocese and four Lutheran Synods that together have about 1000 small churches throughout Pennsylvania. In 2003 the consultant is Tony Pappas who has written Vital Ministry in the Small-Membership Church along with other books. He serves as a member of the consulting team of the Alban Institute in Washington, DC. For more information about the conference look at the Conference Web site.

Planning will begin at 9 am on Saturday, September 27 with the actual conference beginning at 10. To get to Trinity Church, head north from Lewisburg on Route 15. Go over the Susquehanna River bridge into Williamsport staying in the left hand lane. Continue straight into downtown Williamsport on Market Street. Turn left on Fourth Street (that’s the second light). Continue going west on Fourth Street for about one and one half miles. One block past the point where Fourth Street becomes a two-way street you’ll see Trinity on your right. It is the church with the tall steeple. You can park behind the building. The conference should be happening in the parish hall on the first floor. Students who have signed up will be registered so you should get name tag and they’ll provide you with lunch.

The conference will begin with a short church service and there also will be one at lunch. If you are comfortable with Christian services just join in. If you are not a Christian or not a regular church goer, people will not be offended if you do not participate in these services. Simply be quiet and respectful.

The schedule for the day is that, first, Tony Pappas will give an opening talk for about 45 minutes beginning at 10 am. His talk will present the notion that in small congregations members engage in certain common interaction patterns that often are troublesome. He calls these patterns “games”. After he describes the games, a group of experienced conference participants will role play each of the games. When this is done members of the conference will break up into groups, hopefully with people from the same church participating in different groups. They will meet briefly to introduce themselves and then break for lunch. After lunch, the groups will reconvene and each group will be given one game to discuss. Group members will give examples from their home congregations that illustrate the games. When this is done, groups will report back to the whole conference membership. There then will be a final wrap up discussion.

One of the important things our students will do for the conference is to video tape what goes on and take digital pictures of the events. The conference organizers would like to produce a video tape presenting the conference so that those who cannot attend can see what happened. Our job is to produce that tape. In order to do so, we will bring five video cameras and one digital camera. Students will be taking digital and still pictures. We have a person who is an experienced video film person who can help. We have five cameras so that we can have a camera recording as many of the discussion groups as possible. Although we have been asked to do the videotape you will have to ask group participants to give their permission to be filmed and filming the group may be a little uncomfortable at first.

While we will be taking pictures and serving a function for the conference, students also will be expected to participate as best they can. If you have experiences in church you could share your personal experiences. If do not have experiences, do expect to be friendly and outgoing. Ask people about their own experiences and appreciate that they will be very happy to have you there and interested in your experiences in college and in your feelings about church and religion. Be respectful, frank, and curious. This will make them happy to have you at the conference. It also will allow you to better complete the writing portion of your assignment, since every for field experience you must respond to a writing assignment that reflects on issues raised in our course, Sociology 239.

Writing About the Gift of Life Foundation

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Be sure to view the video, Hopkins 24-7 before going to the Recognition Day Event you visit.

There are three objectives of the Gift of Life Foundation visit.

One is to pay attention to the experiences of the people who have received organs and those families who have given the organs of lived ones in the midst of a time of great personal trauma for themselves. These are huge moments in people’s lives, and it is important simply to take that in.

A second purpose is to reflect on the challenges involved in giving in this situation and in our lives generally. Talk to our contact person, Linda Potter, about how difficult it is to talk to families and to convince them to make the gift. Think about what makes the gift difficult and why one might want not to make it. Think about gifts we are encouraged to make or that we choose not to make in less extreme situations. Blood donation is one familiar example. But becoming involved in volunteering or a political movement or in doing work for a fraternity, sorority, team or other group also involve gifts. Think about people you know who choose not to make gifts. What makes us reluctant to give time, energy, or resources that would challenge us emotionally or in terms of our possessions. Why do people give and why do they avoid giving? This experience puts the spotlight on that issue.

A third purpose is to meet professionals whose work involves securing organ donations and overseeing the medical work of keeping brain-dead individuals in good shape so that organs can be successfully transplanted. What do you think about doing that sort of work, and what sustains those who do it?

This activity has two parts that will be coordinated by our field sponsor, Linda Potter, area coordinator for the Gift of Life Foundation. Linda will be in class on Wednesday, 1 October.

The first part of this experience involves attending a hospital in-service training experience run by Linda Potter. The second part will be to attend a donor recognition event in either Harrisburg or Allentown. We will set up some role for you to play at the event so you do not feel totally as an outsider. In most cases, Linda is willing to give you a ride to the setting and the car time with her is an important part of the experience.

Three hospital in-service events are available. They are: at Lock Haven Hospital, Thursday 9 October, 10 am; Williamsport Hospital, Tuesday 21 October, 7 am; Jersey Shore Hospital, Thursday 20 November (I don’t know the time). The Recognition Events (for donors and recipients) is in Allentown on Sunday 9 November and in Harrisburg on Sunday 23 November. We’ll coordinate with Linda about transportation. Since we have a small number of people interested in this experience you probably should plan on riding with her. However, that would mean that the experience will take up most of your day (probably leaving at 9 or 10 in the morning, returning about 5 pm).

After the visit, write a brief description of the experience. You want to describe things in specific and particular ways. You do not need to describe everything that happened. The emphasis should be on specific things that caught your attention and that you found surprising. Reflect on why you noticed these things and what you learned.

Writing About The Small Church Conference 2003

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Your paper is not meant to be long. Three or four pages will be enough. You also should not try to write about all of the themes given below. Pick your focus, state it, and give lots of description and detail to develop your points.
Before participating in the conference, you should look at the book/handout by Anthony Pappas, the guest speaker, titled Health Esteem: Vital Ministry in the Small-Membership Church (Nashville, TN: Decipleship Resources 2002)

There are three objectives for participation in the Small Church Conference.

To understand how church denominations and the conference itself are organized.
2. To learn about small congregations as social systems similar in structure to small groups or families.
3. To consider how congregations function as social service organizations, assisting individuals in addressing pressing personal problems.

Writing

After you attend the conference, write a brief description of the experience. You want to describe things in specific and particular ways. You do not need to describe everything that happened. The emphasis should be on specific things that caught your attention and that you found surprising. Reflect on why you noticed these things and what you learned.
As you write, think and talk about the idea that “games” are a useful metaphor for describing congregational life. Describe how individuals from small congregations talked about specific games as they have been played out in their churches.

Visiting the H.O.P.E for Life Program

The Helping Offenders Pursue Excellence (H.O.P.E.) for Life Program is a joint undertaking between the Bethesda Family Services Foundation and the low security Boot Camp program at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. Bethesda is an organization that operates educational and counseling programs for troubled teens in communities throughout Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the country. It has a school and treatment facility in Milton about ten miles north of Lewisburg where we often have Bucknell students working as interns. Young people from that site participate in this program along with inmates from the Boot Camp.

H.O.P.E. for life is a program that teaches parenting skills to inmates and helps teen agers better understand the lives of convicted offenders. Since most of the young people are at Bethesda because they have had problems with the law or with school officials, meeting inmates is a good way for them to understand where continued misconduct can lead.

However, the main objective of this program is to help the participants to see how abusive and destructive patterns in their personal family histories are related to their own aggressive, destructive, and hurtful behavior patterns. Bethesda’s philosophy is that people act in hurtful ways because they have not fully recognized, come to terms with, or resolved past hurtful experiences in their families of origin. The group asks people to talk about their personal histories, sets up role playing relationships between the children and the inmates so they can model family relationships, and asks participants to actively reach out to change their family relationships.

A good presentation of this program is provided in the video Bad Dads which is on reserve at the Bucknell Library. It also would be a good idea to reread the selections from Michael Paymar, Violent No More: Helping Men End Domestic Violence (Alameda, CA: Hunter House Pub., 2000), RC569.5 .F3 P38 2000, which we read to prepare from the visit by Sue Albert of MITTS.

Bucknell students who visit this program are expected to be full participants in group discussions. It is very important to the program organizers that inmates and Bethesda youngsters have the chance to hear how successful young people like Bucknell students relate to their families and to life in general. That means you will be expected to talk about your family backgrounds and you will be encouraged to disclose aspects of your personal history that have been difficult for you and perhaps that have led to unfortunate results. Of course, if you do not want to reveal material you can simply omit information from any account you give.

It is vitally important that you treat all information you hear in this program as confidential. That means you must not talk about any information you hear with any person outside of our class. It is most important that you not share information that could be identified with a particular person. It is wise simply to avoid talking to outsiders about this program and our visit. It is doubly important that you not share information you hear from classmates about their lives.

Writing About the Children’s Discovery Workshop

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

The Objective of Visiting the Children’s Discovery Workshop

The Role of Small Town Museums.

The Children’s Discovery Workshop is a museum for children. You will want to think about how effective it is as a place for children and families to visit. If it seems less elaborate than similar museums you have seen pay attention to the fact that there are many museums in small towns in Pennsylvania—Lewisburg has the Packwood House and the Sliefer House museums and down the street from the CDW there is a Lycoming County Museum. Why do these places exist? What are they for? What do their staff members say about their value and their nature? How would you assess their effectivness? All of this fits under the umbrella of considering museums as a type of human service institution. You might think about the array of human service institutions that exist and how museums fit into that variety.

Managing a Small Nonprofit Organization

Dave Drezner is the director of the CDW and he is a thoughtful commentator about the challenges involved in managing a small nonprofit organization like the museum so that it can survive. What are the organizational auspices of the museum and what managerial challenges does the organization face? To what extent are these challenges idiosyncratic to this particular organization and to what extent are the challenges you would see visiting small nonprofit organizations providing different services than does this museum?

Family Dynamics in Museum Visiting

Drezner has told me that one of the unexpected but important functions of the museum is that family service nonprofits use museum visits so that case workers can work with parents and children on family skills. He suggests that student visits might be coordinated with one of these agencies and with some of their family visits so that Bucknell students can learn how this family support work is done. This suggests a less formal topic for observation as well, one that involves observing and comparing different families as they visit.

What to Write About

In all of our writing assignments, one task for you is simply to tell about your experience. Write about what you did, what happened, who you talked to, what caught your attention and what you learned.
You might choose one of the themes mentioned above and make that a focus for discussion. What you would want to do is tell in abstract terms what you think is important in that topic area.
You might consider what a museum ought to do to its visitors. (Teach? Allow dialog with population subgroups? Serve as a repository for interesting objects with no particular teaching purpse? These are important issues in anthropology and in the field of art since museums play an important role in those fields.)
You might think about the challenges Dave Drezner faces as the executive director of a small nonprofit and think about the generic problems organizations of this kind and this size face. Then consider how well the CDW meets those challenges (these are the issues we address in SOCI 402). You might think of this as a sort of organizational case study.
You might not orient to the museum much at all but be more interested in how parents can be taught to parent. Why is a museum relevant, what is there to be taught, and how does you experience at CDW shed light on this teaching challenge?

Division of Labor

One of the challenges for understanding human service systems is to think self-consciously about how the organization works independently of the activity at hand. A key part of this is the division of labor and in a big sports event one of the things you can look at is who is working, what they are doing, and how the “pieces” of the event are put together to make the thing work and not fall apart. You want to work hard to see “behind the scenes” aspects of the event.

Group Behavior

Large scale sports events are compilations of many “small group” activities. How many can you see, what is happening, and what evidence do you see of organization, hierachy, and ritual among the different actors? Pay attention to both central players in the event and peripheral actors.

What to Write About

In all of our writing assignments, one task for you is simply to tell about your experience. Write about what you did, what happened, who you talked to, what caught your attention and what you learned.

b.In more focused terms, it is important to pay attention to who is formally responsible for an activity, who is actively involved as a community participant, and how the relatively uninvolved members of the audience contribute to the whole. One way to capture this is to describe the people who work in one or two key settings.

Make a list of the most interesting things you see at the event. Describe them in rich detail and tell why you found them interesting. Often they are interesting because they surprised or bothered you and if that happens tell what you expected and then tell how events you witnessed differ. You want to avoid describing the game in obvious ways—ways one could have written out without even attending. What’s interesting, surprising, and counter-intuitive?

Writing About A Livestock Auction
(revised October 26, 2005)

This writing assignment relates to livestock auctions that people may visit either as part of the assignment to visit an auction for SOCI 239 or as one of your required field experiences. Livestock auctions are usually quite different from estate auctions since they serve the farming community and usually only a part of that community on a particular day. Usually the people attend regularly and know each other. Furthermore, the interactions in the auction vary depending on what community groups are served.

This assignment has two objectives.

One is to place you in an unfamiliar setting where there are many social activities and relationships to observe, where many kinds of people are interacting, and where values we each hold and that the people we are observing manifest all come to the surface. This is an exercise to demonstrate the richness of social life that can lead to classroom discussion. This is the first step in an understanding of what sociologists and anthropologists try to do when the do ethnographic observation. Your paper ought to provide a description of the rich social scene you encounter and discuss your feelings and the reactions you have to the things you see and experience.

The second objective is for you to look for and describe social structure in community life. Social structure includes distinct social roles you see participants at the auction playing. Be attentive to the way that there is a front stage and a back stage at the auction. The backstage is comprised of the auction managers and those people selling animals. The frontstage is comprised of people actively buying animals and also the people and groups who attend. Pay attention to the nature and variety of groups that are there. Pay attention also to how the parts of the auction support and interact with each other. This is an important economic and social system for community residents. You want to understand how these things work and also you want to look for evidence that the auction supports and flows into a larger community life with elements that may not be evident in this single setting.

What to Do

Your paper ought to be short. Write the length you want to write, but you can do this assignment in 3 or 4 pages. As you get ready to write, think about specific things that you found most noticable, interesting, and intriguing. Often these things involve contrasts to things you are used to from home or from the cultural groups you are part of. Concentrate your paper on these things. Avoid taking up all the space in your paper by describing the overall scene, how you got there, and how comfortable or uncomfortable you and your friends felt in the scene.

When you talk about the interesting aspects you have identified, describe things in as much detail as you can. Be mindful of the way that specific actions often have multiple meanings to the people who are part of this setting. Can you see evidence of these multiple meanings and describe them at work? Try to tell what you expected, and how what you saw differed from your expectation. What sense do you make of the difference between your expectation and what you saw?

I have suggested lots of things to look at and write about. You don’t need to attend to all of these suggestions in your paper. I really mean it that you should write 3-4 pages. The important thing is to concentrate on a few events that you found particularly interesting.

Writing About Rehabilitation Centers and Alcoholics Anonymous

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Asking you to visit a Rehabilitation Facility or AA Meeting has three objectives.

The first is to encourage you to think about the philosophy of rehabilitation from substance abuse.

Many drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers are built around the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is called the “Twelve-Step Approach” because AA has a simple list of tasks each individual must accomplish in order to recover. The twelve steps are explained at length in documents published by AA but they also are explained in meetings, although meetings may concentrate on one of the steps. It is important for you to understand what is going on in a meeting and what its goals are. These are both goals for the particular meeting and what individuals seek to accomplish by attending. It is important for you to go beyond simply listing the twelve steps and to understand the AA philosophy of what alcoholism is, how it is manifested, what the basic problem is, and what one must do, in general terms, to overcome addiction to alcohol. What I mean is that alcoholism is seen as a disease and a condition of selfishness that one overcomes by subordinating oneself to the community—also called a higher power. You ought to show some familiarity with this system of thought in your writing. You also ought to think about the concept of responsibility and how you see it attended to on the Bucknell campus among your peers.

What are AA meetings for and how do they work?

You can broaden this if you are visiting a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center like White Deer Run since it may have a variety of group therapy meetings and other programs for residents that also are intended to further the goal of recovery. What happens? What do you see in terms of the way the process of the meeting works? When you write, try to minimize your temptation to write a program summary as though you were writing something for the volunteer services office. Your objective is to give a personal reaction to what you see and what happens. You also want to talk about the people you see in the meeting, what they do, and what things surprise, impress, or bother you.

Who is at the meeting and why are they there?

This question is a bit delicate since AA is an ANONYMOUS fellowship so you do not want to be intruding on the privacy of meeting participants or presenting them in a way that identifies them too clearly. At the same time, an important part of meetings is for people to tell their stories. It also is important for people to acknowledge that they are alcoholics (or drug addicts if you attend Narcotics Anonymous). But some people are coerced to attend and may find it very difficult to honestly subordinate themselves to the authority they perceive to exist in the meeting or the philosophy of the organization. You might learn about sponsors and their role. You might explore whether AA as a group is a “community” and whether social capital and friendship are present. To give a counter view to that, one person said he dislikes attending and does not think of the co-participants as friends. He goes because were he not to go he would die and he hates that he must go. Thus he neither thinks of it as a setting for community nor friendship but he has very high standards for what goes on in a meeting and is very devoted to the organization and to his own participation.

Writing About News Reporting
(revised 11/22/05)

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Writing about news reporting for this class has three objectives

Describe the institutional system of the news that you are observing

News organizations like television networks or newspapers are huge and complex organizations in which news collecting and reporting involves a complex division of labor. Whatever you see in your visit certainly is only a part of the whole process. As best you can, tell how a news story is generated from the time it is first conceived, through the process of data collection and writing, to the dissemination of the news through publication or broadcast. See if you can discern anything about how the method of collecting news affects the content of the news (there is a good discussion of this theme in the section of the book HEAT WAVE that deals with the news industry and why it failed to report the heat wave as a dramatic story.)

What is news?

Think about the distinction between news and “not-news”. What must be present for a series of events to be the sort of thing news reporters would want to work on and what kinds of interesting material would not become news (it might become good sociology as an alternative—why are they different)? This is partly a discussion of why news must be “sold” and what are the requirements for being able to “sell” a story. You also ought to think, however, about the way marketability shapes the “truth” of a story. During the Katrina disaster, for example, we heard a lot about looting when retrospectively it turned out not much of that happened. Why was that such a big story and why did news agencies get that story so wrong? You want to think about how news shapes public opinion, how it is a product of public opinion, and how distortion of “facts” occurs as a result.

How do the media shape significant aspects of facets of life that seem separate from the news?

Some people say we live in a world constructed by the media and that in some sense there is no reality except as it is constructed by the media. For example, some would say that our body image, our ideas about gender roles, and our thoughts about appropriate and inappropriate family and sexual behavior have to do with things we see on TV or hear reported on the news. We hear a lot about how politicians “spin” the news to enhance their legitimacy or power. Both of these examples suggest that media both shapes our perceptions and that it is manipulated by self-interested actors to enhance their own interests. Consider whether you see aspects of this in your experience with newsmakers.

Writing

Write a single essay that covers the following points:

Write a brief summary of the events you experienced.
Talk about people individually, descriptively, and personally.
Tell about the events that caught your attention, surprised you, upset you or otherwise produced an emotional reaction. Did you expect something different than what happened? How does the difference between your expectation and the actual events help you to understand the institution?

Writing About Small Shops

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Asking you to write about the life of a small shop has three objectives.

To encourage you to think about the how small shops work as organizations.

Most small shops are hard to run in a way that actually makes a living for their owners. There are things to say about the organizational strategy and tactics of this kind of operation and you might have observations to offer on that level (how one attracts and maintains competent employees might be one theme). In Lewisburg there is the additional fact that many small shops are run almost as hobbies by their proprietors. Because of this owners do not always do the things that might make their shops more successful (staying open awkward hours or beautifying the sidewalk). Support organizations complain that small shop owners resist computer or other technological improvements so there might be things to say about the pros and cons of these kinds of improvements.

To encourage you to think about how local shops relate to a build the larger community.

One aspect is how we should understand the community of shops and support organizations like the Downtown Association. More importantly, however, there is sociological writing about why residents support small shops, how important it is for there to be a sense or community in a town or neighborhood, and what shop owners do (or might do) to create civic events that help to create a sense of community. The point here is that “community” is a feeling that is socially constructed through somewhat scheming efforts by self-interested actors like shop owners (or the Downtown Association). This is not negative, it’s just a recognition that the selfless identification with community that residents might or might not feel is fostered through efforts by people who have something to gain—maybe shop keepers selling products consumers could buy more cheaply elsewhere. The downtown shops are an essential part of what makes the community truly a community. There is a dynamic at work that is separate from what the shopowners do as a group to improve their immediate business—lobbying the Borough to create more parking is one of these constant business improving activities that is different from community building activities.

To encourage you to talk about people you meet, independently of what makes the shop work or not work.

Towns have characters and they flow through the shops. Who are they and how do they use the shops? You may have an idea about sub-groups of the local population that other people might not notice since they are not part of the shop world. People often comment on seniors, for example, who make a round of the shops as entertainment ande use certain places as gathering centers. Kids tend to hang out and use particular places. Sometimes there are mentally retarded or mentally ill people who are a regular part of the scene and that shopkeepers know about or that other local residents might not notice. You might also notice a class division in town that is not so apparent to others (who uses the beauty parlor or the Dollar Store [now closed] versus the people who use the bars or the home improvement stores?

Writing About Haven Ministries

You may only write about Haven Ministries if you stay over night. Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Asking you to visit Haven Ministries has three objectives.

The first is to encourage you to think about what homeless shelters are for.

Many of us hold stereotypes about homeless shelters, who lives in them, and whether they are needed. It is important to recognize that to some extent these feelings have more to do with how our day-to-day lives have become disconnected from our communities and our neighbors than they do with the realities of homeless shelter living. Think about who is actually in these shelters, what problems the facilities address, and when this kind of living arrangement is really necessary. One side of the homeless shelter scene is that some people in the community mentally or emotionally handicapped and we have no good way of caring for them except in this kind of facility. Another aspect has to do with the realities of living in poverty, how that living standard puts families at risk, and the minimal options that are available to families when disaster occurs in their personal lives. Maybe our difficulty has to do with our unwillingness to deal with poverty in our communities rather than with irreponsibility or laziness among poor people.

A second objective is for you to think about the individuals who are poor and who live in a shelter like this so you can understand where poverty comes from and what people can do to improve their situations.

Discussions of welfare tend to emphasize poor people as being part of a long term pattern of being out of work and dependent on public assistance. You will find some people at Haven who indeed have had lives of long-term dependence but most of the people there are in a short-term situation of need and otherwise in their lives they have been self-supporting.
How have the people you met achieved self-sufficiency and what do their stories tell you about the lifestyle people have when they have low wage work. To what extent do you think things like living wage reforms would improve living conditions for people like those you meet at Haven?

The third objective is for you to think about homeless shelters as places for living and how you personally relate to the kind of people who are there.

Many students find it difficult to be around poor people and especially the retarded and emotionally compromised people we may find in a shelter. A valuable thing to do when you visit is to be involved in mealtimes and cleanups so you have a good chance to talk to people. Pay attention to the sources of your own discomfort being with the residents. Think about what it is like to live in a place like this. We focus on negative aspects like the group living arrangements or the strict rules people must obey. Pay attention to the variety of people who live and work in a home. Pay attention also to the character and quality of relationships residents have with each other and with staff. Be mindful that those relationships often are not placid, without conflict, or minus political aspects. This is a rich and intimate setting that one can penetrate if you take the time to talk to people and see them as whole and valuable human beings.

Writing About a Delinquency Facility: Assignment #1

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Asking you to visit a facility for delinquents has three objectives.

The first is to encourage you to think about what these facilities and programs are for.

We have a variety of programs in the area that serve teen agers who have gotten in various degrees of trouble. Some of them are residential and some are day programs where young people continute to live at home or in a foster home. Facilties usually are coercive but one of the things for you to notice is their degree of coerciveness and what coercion entails. It is important for you to learn how kids get there. Who sent them, what did they do, what do those who referred them hope to accomplish by sending the kids, and what will it take for them to exit the program? w\What the program architects and directors think the purpose of the program is. What are the regular programs and rules that you notice? Does the program have a clear philsophy that you can discern and that you can relate or compare to the things you see?

A second objective is for you to think about the personal experience of becoming part of one of these programs, perhaps part of a residedntial program, and how this would affect your sense of identity.

Visiting a coercive program or a total institution, one tends to emotionally distance oneself from the participants. One of your tasks is to get to know the residents as people and think of how it would be yourself to be in this setting. One of the elements to consider is what transformations of self might accompany being a resident. Erving Goffman talks about this in terms of a “moral career”. What can you say about the transformation of self that happens as one becomes a resident and what effects do you think this transformation might have.

A third objective of this visit is for you to think about and understand the nature of a total institution.

Writing About School in a Delinquency Facility

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

There are two goals in terms of your writing and thinking about the high school programs you see in delinquency facilities.

One purpose is to explore how order is maintained in a school where the students all have histories of being extremely disruptive and probably dangerous in the outside school and community lives. There is likely to be a definite and specific philosophy about maintaining order. You’ll want to learn about that philosophy and think about how it is put into practice.

A second purpose is to consider what purposes there are behind school programs. You want to connect with the personal meaning and value of learning. To the young people you meet in a delinquency facility value education and how does their orientation towards this activity compare to your own?

As you write, consider the following issues. You will not be able to cover all of these issues in a three-page paper so use the list below as ideas that can inform your writing rather than as a required list of topics you must cover.

You will want to talk to teachers and students and to the school director if you can to learn information about how the school works, how people understand the intentions of the program, and how effectively they think it works.
There is the potential for a school serving delinquents to be extremely disruptive. If there are disruptions or if you learn about serious disruptions that occur, what can you say about why those events occured, what was done to limit the conflict, and how did the young people in the program relate to the disruptive events? You will want to think about whether the students in the program seem to buy into the activities and programs that are offered so that they consent to going along. Alternatively, consider whether the school is coercive forcing students to go along, perhaps against their will. The first kind of orderliness is called an authoritative system. The second kind of orderliness is called an authoritarian system. You will want to think about the differences between these two ways of maintaining control and how each system works to achieve obedience from students. You might want to think about how the system of consent that you observe compares to your own high school.
We do not think in personal terms about our philosophy of education and learning. How should education happen and how should a school contribute to learning? You will see students in the school you observe who are very interested in learning and others who are indifferent. What goals are appropriate for a school like this? How do the goals you think make sense for this kind of school match your own personal goals for learning at Bucknell?

Writing About Violence, Abuse, and Family Life

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

Watch the video, “Bad Dads” about the Bethesday prison parenting program. It is on reserve in the library.

There are three objectives in thinking about the connection between family life, abuse, and the violence or illegality of kids’ behaviors.

First, the main focus of this assignment is on your own knowledge and experience of family relationships, of altruism, and possibly of abuse. Appreciate that it could be very uncomfortable and even dangerous for you to be too aggressive or probing in asking students in the school you visit about the issues covered in this assignment. Be mindful that we all have complex family lives and that one benefit of visiting a school for delinquents is that we learn about ourselves. Make this assignment reflective, drawing on events that happen in the facility to sharpen thoughts about family life as you understand it and have experienced it.

Second, examine and think carefully about family relationships as altruistic interactions. We want to look closely at how and why family relationships are important. We want to think about the gift of being a parent, and what gifts are involved in being a child. We want to think about why gifts of love are offered, what happens when they are not, and the challenge of giving love when someone has hurt us.

Third, collect information about how hurtfulness is related to emotional repression and, in turn, to the inclination to hurt others. The Bethesday program described in the video is based on the premise that criminality is anchored in personal abuse suffered by offenders as children and that overcoming the inclination to commit crimes requires confronting and overcoming the consequences of this early pain. It is important for us to recognize this dynamic and to see that it shapes the lives of successful people like Bucknell students and professors just as it does the lives of the offenders we will meet.

This assignment has the potential to be very sensitive and intrusive in terms of the people you are observing, meeting, and thinking about. It is important not to violate their confidentiality. For that reason, DO NOT use actual names. As far as you can do so, either do not describe individuals in a way that would allow others to recognize them or falsify descriptive details so that it protects the privacy and anonymity of the people you are writing about. Do not assume that your world at Bucknell is either distant or insulated from the worlds of the people you meet in the delinquency facility. Do not share things you observe or learn about with friends or roommates. At a minimum keep all descriptions of experiences within the group of people who make up our class. If events seem especially upsetting or shocking, you may consider asking your professor to retain the confidentiality of your paper. That means that only your professor will read it and it will not be shared with other students in the class (we sometimes read the papers of other students to learn how to improve writing).

1.Before you begin this paper, write a brief autobiography particularly reflecting on aspects of your family life in which something you could call abuse occured. You do not need to share this writing. The purpose is for you to think about how issues of family altruism and abuse relate to your own experience so that you can sharpen your focus on what you hear and learn about when visiting students.

Engage in passive observation to learn about the family backgrounds of students you meet and how this background relates to their present circumstances. You should only write this paper if material on students’ backgrounds and how this relates to their recent violent or illegal behavior comes out in classroom activities or conversations. Do not start conversations or try to collect information on this theme. If a student talks to you and brings up themes related to this paper do not press the student for details. Let the information come to you.

Since you are an inexperienced observer it can be disruptive and threatening for you to ask probing questions about family issues and crimes. The assignment is meant to allow you to reflect on instances where these issues come up in the course of your field experience. In many respects, the purpose of this assignment is for you to reflect on your own life as much as on the lives of the young people you meet.

When a visit leads you into the themes raised in this assignment, write a brief description of the experience. You want to describe things in specific and particular ways. You do not need to describe everything that happened. The emphasis should be on specific things that caught your attention and that you found surprising. Reflect on why you noticed these things and what you learned.

Writing About A Fair
(September 30, 2008)

This writing assignment relates to county fairs or agricultural fairs that people may visit for SOCI 239 as one of your required field experiences. Fairs are more difficult to observe than one might expect. Because vendors relate to large numbers of people and often are seen as quaint or interesting by visitors they may be emotionally defended from talking openly about the experience of being part of the fair or they may have stock, unimaginative comments to make about the experience. Finding ways to dig deeper and to find interesting angles in the experience can be a challenge.

This assignment has two objectives.

One is to place you in an unfamiliar setting where there are many social activities and relationships to observe, where many kinds of people are interacting, and where values we each hold and that the people we are observing manifest all come to the surface. This is an exercise to demonstrate the richness of social and community life. This is the first step in an understanding of what sociologists and anthropologists try to do when the do ethnographic observation. Your paper ought to provide a description of the rich social scene you encounter and discuss your feelings and the reactions you have to the things you see and experience.

What to Do

Fairs are made up of many settings that are jammed up against each other and often overlap with each other. Choose one or two particular settings that may be one large event (like the livestock barn) or examples of a feature that is repeated over and over (you might talk about food booths limiting yourself to a few of the hundreds that might be at a fair). Write about settings that interested you. Tell what was interesting. Try to focus on people you see in the setting and tell specifically who they are, how they relate to the setting, and what conversations you had with them. What did you learn and what puzzled or surprised you?

You may find the fair surprising, unexpected, and very different from things you have experienced at home. You may want to try to capture the sense you have taken away from the whole experience. This can be a good way to write about a big, new experience but it carries the danger that your writing will be vague and overly general. You may want to capture the overall sense of what the fair was like and make that the focus of your writing but you still will want to focus on particular people, events, and moments that particular caused you to react emotionally and that led you to think about new ideas. Be concrete and specific as you build up your general ideas.

In addition to describing particular aspects of the scene, talk also about aspects of community that you saw. When you do that, it helps to “position” the people or the events or the scene in relationship to the structural aspects of community mentioned above, given in our reading, or discussed in class. This might lead you to do a census of the kinds of people you saw and the different roles you noticed. This can be a helpful way of conveying the complexity of the event.

Writing about Field Experiences in SOCI 239

(updated 8/23/09)

Visits to all of our field sites in Sociology 239 are meant to do three things:

(1) Encourage you to think about readings and class topics and to use those materials in your discussion of the field experience;
(2) Raise issues for you about participation in community life and political activity and to discuss how engagement and social responsibility, or disengagement and social irresponsibility happen;
(3) Give you field experiences and opportunities to write in an “ethnographic”, observational way. This prepares you for other courses that will have more intensive field experiences, like Anthropology/Sociology 201.

Your papers are not meant to be long. Three or four pages is enough.

There is an assignment prepared for each of the field experiences suggested on the course website. Students often suggest other field experiences that they would like to observe. If these are rich, social observation opportunities and you discuss your proposed observation experience with this instructor in advance this is usually fine. The instructor generally can produce an assignment for you quickly but often you can look at other writing assignments to see the kinds of questions that you ought to address in your paper.

You may not find it possible to write about all of the themes that are mentioned in an assignment. Doing so might mean that you cannot deal with the most important aspects in the depth necessary if you are to do a good job while still staying within the four-page limit.

In general, field papers have three general objectives and ask you to write about these things:

Give a detailed descriptive account of your experience.

Avoid being overly general and abstract as you tell about the scene and instead emphasize specific, concrete details. Tell what the activity was, where it was and what the setting was like, who did what, what you did if that was relevant, and what caught your attention of these activities. Pay attention to the people who were present including how many there were, what subgroups you noticed, whether there were people who talked to you and were interested in you, and what key actions by people occurred.

Be mindful of when it is essential to maintain anonymity and confidentiality in your reports and to protect the rights of human subjects.

ALL students in this class must become certified in the protection of human subjects course sponsored by Bucknell’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) before observing in any setting that is NOT open to the public. (Thus, the initial auction assignment and attending a high school homecoming game are examples of settings that are open to the public and do not require IRB certification.) All students who will work in settings with people under 18 MUST be certified by the State Police, the Department of Public Welfare, and the FBI for working with young people. If you have been certified within the last year you still are covered. If you have not been certified it will cost you $60. Go to the UPS store opposite Walmart and they can get this done in a couple of days.

It is particularly important for you to be aware of confidentiality rules if you work in the North Central Secure Treatment Unit (the prison for delinquents) or in the hospital emergency room. Students sometimes receive instruction but do not quite believe that these constraints are real. BELIEVE! If you reveal identities you can get in trouble and you can have Bucknell’s program thrown out of the facllity so other students cannot receive the benefit of access that you have enjoyed.

Be mindful of readings, films, concepts, and class themes that you see played out in the scene as you observe it.

There is a danger that you can become caught up simply in telling about the richness and intrigue of your field experience without asking what meaning that experience has. Remember that this is a class exercise and that the point of observing is to better understand how the abstract themes presented in the readings are played out in real life.

The timing of your field experiences usually is not synchronized with when we will be discussing related material in class that tells about the setting or presents concepts that might help you to observe interesting things in the field. Look for readings or other resource materials that are related to your setting and go through them before you observe or at least before you write. If you bring these materials into your discussion it will improve your grade. If you ignore formal concepts in your paper it will lower your grade.

Having said this, remember that your paper ought to be driven by the field experience. It is a mistake to spend your whole paper discussing an abstract concept and only lightly telling about what you saw and experienced in the field.

Tell how the institution is organized and how the particular setting you observe fits into the whole of the institution.

Almost all of our observation opportunities happen in a particular place, involve a particular activity, and have a specific, limited cast of characters. Almost always this scene or setting exists with a larger organization or institution that is made up of interconnected parts. The hospital emergency room is a system within itself but it is also connected. It is connected to the outside through the community emergency response system of police, fire fighters, ambulance, and family members. It feeds to the inside of the hospital and provides referrals either to private doctors’ specialty medical practices or to in-hospital wards that have different levels of intensity in their services (the intensive care unit is different from a normal hospital ward).

Pay attention to who is present in your setting and who does what. Also, try to learn how your setting is connected to everything else through the division of labor within the organization. In some institutions you may be able to disentangle the complexities of the immediate organization but you may discover that there also are regulations, grants, and outside organizations that are very important to your setting. Juvenile courts and detention centers are this way and it is important for you to know how the kids you see fit into the overall system as well as how the different components—the school versus the residential unit—fit together.

You are not going to be able to cover all of this complexity in your short, four-page paper. You should show awareness that this complexity exists and there may be specific issues that come up that encourage you to discuss how the larger “institutional field” or system shapes the setting you are working in.

Most settings are meant for you to observe on one day but some require multiple visits.

Some settings only work if you can get to know the clients so it is required that you visit on a regular basis throughout the semester. If you have a tight schedule you might want to avoid these settings (the most important one is the North Central Secure Treatment Unit). For these settings there are multiple writing assignments so you will cover different issues and themes with successive papers.

Sociology 239; Human Service Systems
Prof. Carl Milofsky, milofsky@bucknell.edu 204 Coleman Hall, 7-3468

Field Experience Options, Fall 2012
(Revised, August 31, 2012)

Students are required to participate in four field experiences over the course of this semester, of which the auction visit is one. Some of these opportunities take only a few students. Therefore, I will ask students to fill out a form indicating their choices of field experiences so that we can get started on planning your field visits. Students will have to make these choices early and if people fall behind and do not complete necessary requirements they will fail field assignments. By the third week of classes all students must have secured criminal clearances from the state police, the FBI, and the Department of Public Welfare as indicated in the syllabus. All students must also complete IRB training with CITI. The Field Writing page gives details about all of the settings and you should consult that page for information before you go to a field setting.

The list below may expand or contract over the course of the semester. Students should certainly suggest and help to develop sites so that we have more options available. If you come up with a setting to visit, I will create a special writing assignment for that setting.

I have several goals in seeking sites. First, I want sites to relate to themes and topics that we discuss in Sociology 239. Second, I want settings to provide a rich observational experience for students. That means, first, that there must be lots of social interaction happening, second that there must be several groups or communities involved in a setting, and that activities are surprising or challenging so that students with little field experience will find lots to write about. Third, I prefer for settings to be intense but we also need to think about preparation and support for students who participate. This support might come before and/or after the experience or it might involve people at the site who are willing to spend time providing background, preparation, and support to students who participate.

If you do not have a car, there is a good chance you will be able to use a car from the Bucknell motor pool. Class use has priority. However, you must take the university driving class, past their test, and gain approval. The classes and tests are given only on a few dates at the beginning of the semester so you MUST pay attention to these times. You also may car pool with other students in the class. There are enough placements close to campus, however, that you can complete the requirements for the course without access to a car.

Hospital Visit Experiences (available for 2012)
Evangelical Hospital, Lewisburg (not checked out, but probably availble if we want)

We have not often used Evangelical Hospital for internships or field experience placements. Over the years student experiences at the institution have not always been rich and interesting as we want them to be. However, in Spring 2012 we had contact with an Evangelical Hospital administrator who was assertive that Evangelical wanted Bucknell interns to work there since they have interns from other local colleges. Since the Hospital is local it is a convenient place to work and if there is interest among students we can work to set up internships.

Sunbury Hospital, Sunbury (10 miles south of Lewisburg) (available for 2012)

We have been developing a research and action partnership with Sunbury Hospital over the last year and over the summer we set up a formal institutional agreement between Bucknell and Sunbury Hospital. Although we do not have specific experiences set up, Marketing Director Bruce Marion who is our contact person is willing to set up special, appropriate experiences for SOCI 239 students if people are interested in working at the hospital or in the medical community. We have particularly been working on community and medical programs related to diabetes in the Sunbury community.

Williamsport Regional Medical Center Emergency Department (confirmed for 2012)

Williamsport Hospital and Medical Center in Williamsport (about 30 miles north of Lewisburg) is willing to host students from our class for up to an eight hour experience in their emergency room.

Students who participate in this setting must watch a video and take a short quiz on HIPAA regulations before they will be allowed to visit the ER. This is in addition to the security clearances and CITI protection of human subjects certification that are required for the course. The approval process is time consuming, complicated, and may require an extra trip to Williamsport for certification purposes. Coordination tends to be a bit complicated, but we have lots of support and help that can help us to smooth out communication if students speak up about problems and do not become impatient with the complexities inherent in arranging these visits. Once the visits are properly set up, they are rewarding

The directions in the next paragraph give you contact information for our contact person, Sherry Hyland. However, in many ways it works best if we get a list of interested students during class and set up a schedule for visits and for going through the HIPAA training. Contact Milofsky so he can plan the group experience.

Once you let your instructor know this is a placement you want, scheduling is your responsibility. To schedule a visit, conrtact Sherry Hyland, Clinical Nurse Educator of the Emergency Department. of the Williamsport Hospital and Medical Center. Her office phone number is: 321-2250 and her email is: shyland@susquehannahealth.org.

In past years we have had students serve as interns at the Williamsport Hospital ER as well as at other hospitals in the area like the Geisinger Medical Center and Shamokin Hospital and students have had very meaningful experiences.

One of the nurses in the ED will act as your host and guide. This means that you’ll have a contact person you always can check in with when you are on the unit and if, perhaps you got involved in some other activity and want to reconnect with a supervisor who can give you new directions. Usually the nurse host will give you a tour of the facility and also will make a point of introducing you to new activities or settings.

Understand, however, that while your nurse supervisor will help you out an emergency room is a busy place and your nurse contact has a job to do. She or he may have to quickly become intensely involved in the case of a patient. Your responsibility then is to find a place that is out of the way and observe what is going on. You may ask where to stand and in some cases you may be asked to wait outside of the booth, room, or treatment area since issues of privacy and confidentiality may come up.

Haven Ministries (Although I have not specifically set this up for 2008, overnight visits to the shelter are easy to arrange.)

This is the primary homeless shelter serving Central Pennsylvania (there are partial shelters in Williamsport) and it is located in Sunbury at 1043 So. Front St. (570-286-1672). It is housed in an old motel and generally there are about ten single adults living there and four or five families. Housing is meant to be short term and the program managers at the shelter insist that residents spend time during the day seeking work and making arrangements to live on their own outside of the shelter. There also are strict rules banning misbehavior (drinking, drugs, sexual relationships) and violating rules can cause a person to be evicted on short notice. The shelter began as a project of the Ministerium (the interchurch council) in Sunbury and it is entirely supported through voluntary contributions of time, in-kind resources like food and clothing, and cash donations.

To do this field experience you must stay overnight at the shelter. Generally to stay overnight you must do this with a partner. There are other service opportunities at the shelter like providing meals for residents and these do not count. If you are involved in a richer, more complex role at the shelter (like working with the staff on a project that involves you with residents) you may ask to use this experience for the present assignment.

To get to Haven, go south on Rte 15 and take the bridge over to Sunbury. At the end of the bridge continue straight towards the Weis warehouse where the road over the bridge ends. Go right and continue about two blocks to a stop sign. Take a sharp right at the stop sign, which will cause you to head back towards Sunbury. The Haven Ministries shelter is on your left about 1/2 block from the intersection.

Snyder County District Attorney (current status: in past years they have said they would like to have interns and students have worked wityh them. This has not been set up for 2008.)

This one is still being developed but there is negotiating room. My hope is that we can set up opportunities for you to travel with probation officers for a day or so. They are also trying to develop a youth drug education program and that might produce opportunities.

Other field placements are possible. Students are encouraged to suggest ideas. We have had students work in the emergency room of a small local hospital where we have friendly contacts. This is pretty slow, but the doctor in charge will be happy to talk to you a lot. Other health placements are possible if we have enough student interest. We have had good internships at Geisinger Medical Center and we might set something up there. We might also set up some religion experiences-an example is a conference for people who are members of small congregations run by local Episcopal and Lutheran churches.

AIDS Resource Alliance(current status: Although this has not been set up for 2009, it would be available if the agency has clients who need a buddy. Contact Prof. Milofsky if you are interested.)

This choice is to serve as an AIDS Buddy to a person living with AIDS in Williamsport. You would visit this individual two or three times with the guidance of the counseling staff at the AIDS Resource Alliance.

Contact Person: Amy Harrada
AIDS Resource
520 West Fourth Street, Suite 2A
Williamsport, PA 17701
(570)322-8448
email: aidsr@epix.net

Bethesday Day Treatment Center (Status: This is not a setting we have set up. However, some students from class have had the opportunity of visiting and this writing exercise is for people who have had that opportunity.)

The Bethesda Day Treatment facility is a school and after school program for teen agers who have been judged too behaviorally difficult to keep in local public schools or who have gotten in trouble with the law and who have been sent for after school counseling by one of the county juvenile courts. Students in the program come from a variety of interesting backgrounds and they are interesting to meet and to talk to. Bethesda runs a variety of programs like discussion groups and behavior modification sessions that are interesting to observe. Bethesda is a large organization that runs a variety of programs related to the criminal justice system like the program described below in the prisons.

Other auctions and fairs

Beaver Run Amish School Consignment Sale (not checked for 2012 but contact me if you’re interested)

This is a large consignment sale and auction organized by the Amish as a school benefit. The auction is happening Saturday, September 4 near Washingtonville (about 15 miles NE of Lewisburg and 6.7 mi. east of the Turbotville exit for Rte. 54 off I-180) beginning around 9 am and continuing through most of the day. To get there take Rte 147/I-189 north towards the Lycoming Mall and take the Rte 54 exit towards Turbotville. Continue through Turbotville and you come upon the turnoff when you are almost ready to enter Washingtonville. Look for signs as you travel along Rte 54 east of Turbotville (headed towards Danville). The auction site is four miles north of the town of Washingtonville on Arrowhead Road. This would be an interesting follow up to the required auction experience. It counts as a separate field experience, however, and not as one of the auction opportunities.

For more information call 437-2758 or 437-3704.

Bloomsburg Fair (www.bloomsburgfair.com/), Sept 22-29, 2012

This is a huge, state-fair type fair (but it’s not a state fair). It is so massive and impersonal that it is hard for students in SOCI 239 to observe it effectively unless they have some idea of what is going on ahead of time. While there is lots of food, many rides and shows, and hordes of people the most interesting part to me involves the agricultural exhibits and their connections to 4-H clubs and other local farming groups. Students who have farming backgrounds understand this hidden dynamic and get a lot out of this experience. For others it’s mostly a fun experience (and one that Bucknell students should have during their four years here!)

Local Auction House Experiences

Once students have completed the rural estate auction exercise, they may want to visit another auction setting and some of these places are fascinating.

The most interesting one is the Middleburg Livestock Auction in Middleburg, the county seat of Snyder County and about 45 minutes southwest of Lewisburg. Every Tuesday between about 10:00 am and 2:00 pm they auction off livestock. The first Saturday of every month they have a horse auction which is the place (I’ve heard this but not seen) that the Amish and Old Order Mennonites buy horses for the buggies because some of the horses being sold are retired race horses. Before the livestock auction they have a vegetable auction (where individual grocery items are auctioned off) and in September there also is a huge farmer’s market outside. This is a setting where Amish, Old Order Mennonite, and secular Pennsylvania Dutch farmers interact speakin PA Dutch. Since the town is 20 miles from the nearest large supermarket, this is the place lots of people by food.

There is a smaller livestock auction in Dewart north of Lewisburg near Allenwood and there are vegetable auctions held on Friday nights in Sunbury and Williamsport. I don’t have detailed information about where these places are but students have found them and have had fascinating visits to them.

Alcoholics Anonymous

Alcoholic Anonymous makes a distinction between public and private meetings and the public meetings can be attended by anyone. Meetings occur multiple times each week at many settngs in Lewisburg and in other nearby communities.

Before you decide to pursue this option, think carefully about why you want to do so and what you are doing. Even though meetings may be public, participants are there because they believe they have a drinking problem that is causing pain and disruption in their lives and in the lives of people they care about. These meetings are real and serious and you should not attend with the attitude that you are disengaged and observing an interesting event—you are not going to the zoo to see unusual animals. Do not attend simply because you must complete this assignments, meetings are nearby and convenient, and you have mild curiosity. Doing so would be an insult to the participants.

Saying these things is not to discourage you as students from attending AA meetings for the class. You may well be interested and curious about what this organization is and how it works. You may have friends who attend AA meetings or who have gone through recovery and you may want to learn more because of those friendships. We also function at Bucknell in a social world where significant amounts of drinking are a part of the social life. You may learn useful and helpful things about how drinking has a presence in your own life. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous would probably think that these kinds of motivations are good reasons for attending public meetings.

It also is important to read some background material about Alcoholics Anonymous before you attend. I can make some reading materials available if students want to participate in this field experience. The meetings are quite ritualized in structure, in the sense that certain things happen at every meeting and there are certain sayings like the Serenity Prayor that are said by the group and you might want to know about the process before you participate. It also would be helpful for you to know that Alcoholics Anonymous is anchored in a philosophy of Twelve Steps for recovery and Twelve Traditions that support one’s recovery.

There are some philosophical aspects of AA that uninformed visitors do not understand and you can more accurately respond to the setting if you have some general knowledge of these things. For example, AA people will often make reference to a “higher power” and how it influences their lives. Visitors tend to interpret this as a religious statement, but it need not be religious. In one aspect it is referring to the community as bigger than oneself and for some people this may be the higher power. A major focus of AA philosophy and programming involves combatting an attitude of extreme individualism and the allied notion that as an individual you can control every aspect of your life. AA encourages people to give up this determination to control everything and to subordinate oneself to the reality that many things are out of your control—subject to a higher power.

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Division of Labor

One of the challenges for understanding human service systems is to think self-consciously about how the organization works independently of the activity at hand. A key part of this is the division of labor and in a sports event. One of the things you can look at is who is working, what they are doing, and how the “pieces” of the event are put together to make the thing work and not fall apart. You want to work hard to see “behind the scenes” aspects of the event.

Group Behavior

Community sports events are compilations of many “small group” activities. How many can you see, what is happening, and what evidence do you see of organization, hierachy, and ritual among the different actors? Pay attention to both central players in the event and peripheral actors.

What to Write About

In all of our writing assignments, one task for you is simply to tell about your experience. Write about what you did, what happened, who you talked to, what caught your attention and what you learned.

Make a list of the most interesting things you see at the event. Describe them in rich detail and tell why you found them interesting. Often they are interesting because they surprised or bothered you and if that happens tell what you expected and then tell how events you witnessed differ. You want to avoid describing the game in obvious ways—ways one could have written out without even attending. What’s interesting, surprising, and counter-intuitive?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

AUCTIONS

WEST BRANCH SCHOOL

NORTH CENTRAL SECURE TREATMENT UNIT

VISITING RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES

AIDS PROJECTS

FOODSHARE

JOB SHADOWING

NURSING HOMES

MENTAL HOSPITAL

ATTENDING A CONFERENCE