By integrating real world application into the learning experience, these ABCS courses create a stimulating, challenging and meaningful forum for students and the community.

Anthropology: Nutritional Anthropology
Anthropology Professor Francis Johnston has enriched his human growth and development course by putting theoretical concepts into practice. Johnston’s students teach nutrition, study food habits, survey the availability of produce in neighborhoods and engage in other community-based projects to reinforce their in-class academic learning.

Biological Basis of Behavior: The ABCs of Neuroscience
In this BBB course, Steve Fluharty’s students have the opportunity to work with Sayre High School students to develop hands-on educational activities for a reverse science fair. The science fair is a day-long event held for local third and fourth graders who participate in and evaluate the Penn and high school students’ hands-on demonstrations, which are designed to teach concepts in neuroscience.

Environmental Studies – Urban Environment: West Philadelphia
Professor Robert Giegengack and Elaine Wright teach a course that has students study and teach the community about environmental toxins. In this course, students identify sources of lead, gather soil, dust and paint samples, and map the risk of lead exposure in a specified neighborhood. The students also work with West Philadelphia students to design and disseminate materials explaining the dangers of such lead exposure.

Linguistics: African American & Latino English
In this course, Professor Bill Labov introduces students to the use and structure of dialects of English used by the African American and Latino communities in the United States. The field work component involves the study of the language and culture of everyday life and the application of this knowledge to the programs for raising the reading levels of elementary school children.

Political Science: The Politics of Food
Students in Mary Summer’s course explore the politics that shape food production, marketing and consumption. Community service projects involve opportunities to research and address problems in several different arenas: campus cafeterias, the West Philadelphia schools, anti-hunger campaigns, food workers’ organizing efforts, and impact of food industry advertising on diets. A focus on case studies of leaders who are making a difference in the politics of food include several guest speakers, who work on food related health, labor, farming, technology, and globalization issues.

Music: World Music & Cultures
In this course, Carol Muller introduces students to the scholarly study of traditional music from around the world and their incorporation into US popular and classical music, through in-depth reading and close listening to assigned sound recordings. The focus is on music of indigenous peoples from what, in the United States, may seem to be fairly remote regions of the world. These musicians and their music travel around the world, either in person or in sound recordings. A new feature of the class is the group ethnography project students will engage in with older African American residents in West Philadelphia. Its goal is to create an oral history archive and website of jazz performances in Philadelphia.

Urban Studies: Urban University- Community Relationships
Inspired by Penn's founder, Ben Franklin, President Amy Gutmann has identified rising to the challenge of a diverse democracy and educating students for democratic citizenship as critical goals of her administration. Ira Harkavy’s seminar aims to synthesize numerous, unrelated, academically-based community service courses into an effectively integrated curriculum. As now envisioned, the new Penn curriculum developed by the seminar would have as a significant component, thematic, problem-solving clusters, i.e., interrelated, cross-disciplinary, complementary sets of courses designed to stimulate and empower students to produce, not simply consumer, societally-useful knowledge.