Taught By:
Devin Fitzpatrick
Visiting Assistant Professor
General Education / Data Science Department
Lewis & Clark College
Read profile here.
Motivation to Teach Social Action:
I am currently teaching a new data science course at Lewis & Clark, DSCI 240: Data for Good, which I have structured around a learning-service partnership with a local non-profit, Growing Gardens, to perform data analysis and visualizations on their gathered data to support their external grant applications and internal review processes. The response from students, our community partner, and the college has been very positive and I have been asked to teach the course again in the Fall. I would like to learn more about finding new community partners locally and how best to serve them in a learning-service context.
Course Description:
In this learning-service course, students will complete real-world data science tasks for Growing Gardens, a local Portland non-profit focused on community gardening and which operates programs such as Youth Grow, for children K-12 at Portland public schools, and Lettuce Grow, for incarcerated adults and juveniles at Oregon correctional facilities. In addition to performing data cleaning, aggregation, analysis, and visualization tasks, students will learn how to develop surveys for future data gathering and volunteer for at least one on-site Growing Gardens planting event, reflecting on that experience through the interpretive lens of weekly readings on data science and ethics. By engaging first-hand with the organization we are assisting with our data analysis tasks, our goal is to learn both in theory and in practice how data may be used for good.
