MA International Development & Service Students Meet with Politecnico di Milano
In March 2015, the graduate students attending Siena Italian Studies (SIS) visited Milan, Italy. During this trip we met with Politecnico di Milano, a university in Milan. The SIS service coordinator plans this trip for every Masters cohort. The purpose is for us to understand what Development work looks like in Italy and to gain a broader perceptive for our field of study. For those who are not sure what International Development is, I found this definition on the University of Oxford's career web page which explains it well:
International development is about engaging with economically disadvantaged regions in the world to empower people to improve their well-being and address causes of poverty. Jobs in this sector are diverse, encompassing governance, healthcare, education, gender, disaster preparedness, infrastructure, economics and livelihoods, human rights, forced migration, security, conflict, the environment and other associated issues. International development seeks to implement long-term solutions to problems by working with developing countries to help them create the capacity needed to provide such sustainable solutions.
While visiting Politecnico di Milano, we met with a department called Polisocial. At the beginning of 2012 the Politecnico di Milano, in collaboration with the Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, launched Polisocial. Polisocial is one of the first public engagement programs with an academic nature in the Italian context. The aim is to involve and engage students, teachers and academic staff in real situations, putting them in very close contact with social actors and concrete problems. This approach wants to give students and teachers the opportunity to explore and discover how disciplines of design, planning, architecture and engineering can be applied for social purposes. Ultimately, the goal is to develop an awareness of one's role as both a professional and responsible individual and learn how to become an active citizen in their community.
Consequently, we were invited to listen and share our involvement with service learning and in the field leadership experience. In this video, you will hear members of cohort 5 explain what they did and why they volunteered their time with such organizations. A couple of organizations cohort 5 worked with are World Race and Americorps. I am not in the video. Most of my experience in service work and leadership happened in the Civil Air Patrol (still a current member) and Up with People.
During our time in Milan we met with a couple of the Polisocial students. They showed us around neighborhoods that were being charted by them. The Polisocial students were charting the neighboorhoods to create a database of the people living in the houses and their living conditions. We saw how the living conditions varied greatly between the people living in state funded housing, who were primarily immigrants, and the people living in private housing. In the video you will see a couple shots showing these differences. Also, we visited a few more neighborhoods that the Polisocial students were effecting. At the other sites, the students were designing community gardens, playground areas, or other types of communal areas which provide a sense of ownership and dignity.
*The sound in the video is pretty steady but there are a few moments were doors closing and opening are a bit loud.
