About the Research Team

Welcome to your CODES research team! For the next two years, you’ll work alongside me, representatives from Heartlands Conservancy and the Jackie Joyner Kersee (JJK), Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition (FAN) Innovation Center, and one another to understand our theme: Care and Equity in our Water Infrastructures. This first research team course is designed to help you learn about the community in which we’ll be working and to orient you to life as a college student and to CODES more specifically.

Read more about Care and Equity in our Water Infrastructures

Our collective goal for the semester is to settle into three sub-teams who each work to define one aspect of the wicked problem that water equity and infrastructure in the Southern American Bottoms and define each sub-team’s focus and the relationship it bears to the larger problem. 

Along the way (and equally importantly!) you’ll pursue some individual learning goals:

  • Learn time management skills, intellectual curiosity, self-evaluation, and study habits
  • Practice collaborative skills and work as a team to complete a digital project that addresses a communication need identified by our community partner
  • Learn about the water justice and equity and in the context of your own life, JJK-FAN, Heartlands Conservancy, the Southern American Bottoms, the U.S., and globally
  • Explore our problem using a transdisciplinary model that considers where appropriate content central to several disciplines including, but not limited to diverse fields such as history, literature, anthropology, biology, and sociology
  • Write multimodal digital compositions designed to reach different audiences
  • Present your work publicly twice during the semester for you classmates and later for a broader audience of community members

About the Website

This website is an important space this semester for sharing observations and reflections of our on-site experiences. The data and content we collect, analyze, and synthesize there will provide the basis for what happens in CODE 320: Digital Collaborations, your culminating course in the program. This is where you’ll submit your assignments and receive feedback on them.

You should also archive all assignments as individual pages on your ePortfolio. You can find links and logins to all of those sites on the ePortfolio website. Important guidance about how to use these sites and the content that belongs on them are available for you on the CODES Resource site.