A class trip to Spain inspired UNM undergraduate Wesley Morton to create an experiential learning course called "Destination Albuquerque: An Experiential Journey."
"This class is based on the idea that discovery lies not in seeing far off places, but in seeing places with fresh eyes," he said. "It's an oasis, in some sense, and thus receives the outsider reception of being a backwards cow town. The idea is that we want to learn to see the mundane anew and become wide-eyed tourists within our own city. "
The humanities class will include field trips, tours and guest speakers, such as architect Bart Prince, author Rudolpho Anaya, Mayor Martin Chavez, UNM administrator Cheo Torres and maybe local activist Don Schrader.
Morton got help from heads of the Urban Studies departments at Stanford and Brown with ideas for activities and book recommendations.
He said he was also inspired by people with a vision.
"You have artists like Jorge Luis Borges - he wrote all about Buenos Aires. He had a vision of a city," Morton said. "Woody Allen has a cinematic vision of New York City. Orhan Pamuk, his city is Istanbul. I wanted to take that romantic vision of encapsulating something as grand and varied as an urban center and apply it to the question, 'What is Albuquerque?'"
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Margo Chavez-Charles, who taught a UNM course called Conexiones in Spain in 2005, which Morton participated in, will be the master teacher for the class alongside Morton.
"The benefit of experiential learning is that you are learning actively by doing, by being on site, by talking to people directly and being in the places that you're learning about," she said. "It's more than textbook analytical learning, and it's fun. You're out in the town. So many people live in a place and know so little about it, so this is an in-depth look at our locale."
She said the course will cover many angles of discussion.
"We're going to have visits and panels in which we talk about issues of Albuquerque, things like growth and development, which includes water issues or issues of social justice, politics, arts and sub-cultures, military presence in Albuquerque, etc., with experts in the field," Chavez-Charles said. "And one of the interesting things is that the students will lead tours for us at the end of the program in which we have a three-day filed trip in Albuquerque."
Students will stay at the Route 66 Hostel, which is more than 100 years old.
Students will be assigned certain parts of the city to research beforehand.
"We're going to break into groups, and each student group is going to guide the class on a tour through their part of the city," Morton said.
He said they'll also go to the movie studios by the Journal Pavilion.
"It's like a castle - it's impossible to penetrate that place, so I'm stoked on that," he said. "They're filming 'Terminator.' They have a bunch of big-time clients that request closed sets. So just to get anybody's number in the system, I had to do some sleazy stuff - not sleeping around or anything."
