First, substantively, it aims to introduce a significant amount of background information and hypotheses that have been offered to describe and explain key features of the Yucatecan reality. This part of the course will help provide background for the other courses in this Winter Term program and for independent study in the future. We will constantly be cultivating ways to relate specific sights, sounds, actions, and passages of text to general ideas about the patterns of the world and the changes going on in it. This part of the course should be of help in processing experiences we have here in field trips, in other courses, with families, and in other kinds of encounters. This course is intended, in these ways, to provide orientation and debriefing activities for the Winter Term Program here in the Yucatan.
Students work on mapping out the Merida mercado.
These will include articles from papers and magazines, brochures, posters, graphs, maps, charts, short sections from books, management plans, et cetera. Besides these readings, homework will involve short activities that provide opportunities to interact with people or observe things. These activities will provide materials for your journal observations and for the short writing assignments. Class sessions Minilectures will be used to provide general background and introduce some basic theoretical perspectives. In class, group exercises will be used frequently to help prepare for a field trip, homework activity or writing task or to debrief from one.