By Tyler George
Information
This beyond session is about a course where students worked with a newly established community partner to answer their key questions, to help them better serve Iowa communities. In recent years there has been a call for statistics and data science to be culturally relevant which guided the development and implementation of this course. A combination of individual reflections, course discussions, and collaborative learning (across the entire class and within groups) was used. The community partner, Waypoint, works with Iowa’s houseless families and was interested in any differences by race and/or gender in the persistence of rental placements. Students were all sophomore undergraduates and the class had no prerequisites. The learning objectives included descriptive statistics, history of race and gender housing inequities in the US, communicating statistical results to the public. Students listened to podcasts, attended talks, played a relevant board game, and met people in the community, to learn about and understand the current and historical realities of housing inequities, along race and gender lines, in the United States. The course was implemented in 3.5 weeks with 15 students but would easily be expandable to 30-50 students in a longer time-frame. Course materials: https://bit.ly/STA200.