Grit Lab: Fostering Passion and Perseverance

This course will focus on plants and their role in sustainable ecosystem stability and food security globally and in the urban setting in the city of Philadelphia. We will explore challenges faced due to environmental and land use change, and access to green spaces. We will examine the role of plants in urban food, ancestral traditions, community, health & wellbeing, also ecosystems benefits. We will discuss plant biological, genetic, breeding as well as ecological solutions for enhancing plant resilience and system resilience. Students will gain hands-on experience, engage in dialog with farm, garden and ecosystem practitioners, as well as city officials and other support systems, NGOs and small businesses. Dialog will occur both on visits to local gardens, farms, or parks with representatives and stakeholders or on campus with guest speakers and each other. Students will develop project ideas, educational materials, plans, or designs that detail possible solutions to problems identified during their investigations. Activities will intersect with to those of PlantARC.

This seminar will focus on American jazz in diaspora: i.e., we typically think of the African diaspora as people from Africa coming to the US either through slavery or more recently, as immigrants, refugees, political exiles, for economic opportunity and even education. In this class we will think diaspora differently: we look at the ways in which 20th century US originating jazz traveled the globe with a message of freedom through the practice of improvisation and experimentation.