The projects profiled here represent wide-ranging approaches to collaborative, project-based, socially engaged learning and public scholarship. They vary across diverse dimensions including, among others: social issue, disciplinary approaches; type of partners and forms of engagement; lengths of the partnership; pedagogy and content; student outputs; and intended learning outcomes and partner outcomes.
The Do Tank is an action-oriented design thinking course, tied to a challenge to translate learnings into local impact. In collaboration with different partners every year, the Do Tank cultivates a group of people with varied skillsets to work together on a real-world issue, from collaborative ideation to collaborative creation.
Designing for Financial Empowerment (DFE) is a cross-sector initiative to explore how service design can be used to make public sector financial empowerment services more effective and accessible.
"Sound the Mound” is a project developed by students from the Transdisciplinary Department as part of their core PROJECTS STUDIO 1 course. In this course, they address complex issues of climate, sanitation, landfill reclamation, public parks, cellular technology, public art, sonification and more.
In the Participatory Community Engagement course at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy, graduate students work with New York City nonprofits to create a space for listening, dialogue and collective analysis of issues of shared concern.
Beyond Green’s Community Builder Kit (CBK) is a customizable tool that invites people to reflect on and identify community groups as well as public spaces in their neighborhood and the relationship between both. The CBK is an open tool, available for download through the Beyond Green website. Each community is encouraged to use it as they see fit.
OutHistory was founded by Jonathan Ned Katz, author of the groundbreaking Gay American History (1976) and other books on the history of sexuality. As the web became part of the everyday life, Jonathan saw the possibilities for LGBT history to reach larger audiences than ever before.
New Challenge expands opportunities for students to realize their ideas and to take them to the next level of implementation. Building on The New School’s commitment to learning through action, New Challenge helps students develop as changemakers and lead real change in the world.
HealthClass 2.0, a civic engagement project housed at The New School, is an experiential learning program empowering New York City youth to engage in new conversations about health, food and exercise.
This two-year collaborative service design grew from a shared interest in asking “What does it mean to make a thing for ourselves?” across our three learning communities: formerly incarcerated young people at The Fortune Society, public high school students at Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (WHEELS), undergraduate students at The New School.
The first HAL project will focus on the past, present, and future of incarceration, exploring the explosion of prisons and incarcerated people in the US — including immigration detention centers — and its global dimensions.
Our aim is to create an appropriate digital memorial that helps preserve significant cultural memories about AIDS, art, and activism, and personal memories about those who died of HIV/AIDS who are commemorated on the Quilt.
The purpose of the HCP is to support young people in Harlem to meet their higher potential. We will do this by testing our assumptions, being grounded in relationships and acting responsibly.
Integral City: Warren is a collaboration between community groups in Warren, Ohio and The New School Urban Collaborative (Milano Finance Lab + Parsons School of Design Strategies) to propose, design and implement visionary new models for urban life.
By harnessing the power of art, science and technology, Public Works in collaboration with the Department of Environmental Quality constructed a dynamic network that collects and translates groundwater data from across Kentucky into interactive soundscapes that manifest as public art installations and educational outreach programs.