Unseen America - Legacy

Legacy

The Unseen America movement is one of several educational movements in clinical education and service learning which have continued to gain momentum since the 1980s, promoting skills-based and community-based learning. "The Unseen America" itself was inspired by clinical education work, such as the Stanford Law School's East Palo Alto Community Law Project and student-initiated, field-education courses that were developed in the 1960s. It differs in attempting to transform the curriculum (and the nature of the university) into becoming more democratic, more empirical and more accountable to communities, rather than "technical-skill-" or "donation"-oriented.

Students involved with the initial Unseen America published their syllabi and explanations of how to institutionalize similar courses in two books published during the 1990s: Escape from the Ivory Tower: student adventures in democratic experiential education and A Model Development Plan. A manual, Escape from Professional Schools, offers tools for applying the Unseen America approach to law, business and public-administration schools and social-science departments in Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America (based on case studies there). Student founders have gone on to develop similar initiatives elsewhere. Course founder David Lempert has offered these ideas for educational reform to universities around the world, partly through the Soros Foundation. Jim Pitofsky has founded a spinoff non-governmental organization, IDEALS, to apply the Unseen America approach at the secondary school level.