Summer 2025 SOWK 588 Class 05 Weekly Email

MyHeritage Syllabus Presentations Emails

Looking forward to seeing everybody on Saturday!

Unit Introduction and What You Will Learn

Week five includes an in-person class session on Saturday (06/28/25). In $2.00 a Day, Edin and Shaefer (2016) shift toward the work of survival that can be so consuming for people living on the margins. There is a forum to start considering potential policies that could help support this population or to reflect on the systematic nature of this poverty. Linquiti’s (2022) reading is focused on the characteristics that make up an effective policy analyst. Students will engage in several forums this week—developing and sharing their own Fermi Cheat Sheets, responding to applied policy discussion questions, and critically examining what it means to “deconstruct” a policy claim.

During the in-person class session, content is TBD.

The learning objectives this week include:

• Explain how Fermi estimation techniques can be used to approach policy questions quickly and effectively.
• Identify and evaluate the components of a well-structured policy claim.
• Reflect on the structural causes of poverty and explore potential policy responses.
• Apply critical thinking to assess assumptions, power dynamics, and ideologies embedded in policy claims.
• Explore broader critical frameworks and consider how they expand the scope of policy practice.
• Practice articulating and critiquing policy arguments through structured written and verbal responses.

Unit Assignments

Read

• Edin and Shafer (2016) Chapter 4: By Any Means Necessary
• Linquiti (2022) Chapter 7: The Mindset of an Effective Policy Analyst

A-01 Weekly Online Discussion Forum

The expectation is that each of your replies will be substantive and provide meaningful perspectives, contributing to the forum’s conversation and scholarship. They can be related to the prompts or building on conversations shared by peers. There are four forums for this week, and you are expected to make at least three replies across any of the forums. These forums include the following:

• Drawing from $2.00 a Day, the Policy Connection to Those Living on $2 Per Day forum invites students to reflect on the structural nature of extreme poverty and consider potential policy responses using Linquiti’s policy claim framework.
• Through the Deconstructing and Critiquing Policy Claims forum, students are encouraged to engage more critically with the foundations of policy analysis by exploring alternative approaches like decolonization, critique, or defamiliarization.
• The Develop and Share a Fermi Cheat Sheet forum gives students the opportunity to apply Fermi estimation techniques by creating a cheat sheet on a topic of their choice, helping them practice data-informed reasoning for complex policy questions.
• In the Chapter Seven Discussion Questions forum, students select from a range of applied prompts provided by Linquiti to sharpen their skills in making policy claims, critiquing arguments, and estimating outcomes under time constraints.

A-04 Attendance and In Class Participation

Attend and engage in class this Saturday.

Unit Resources

All of the presentations for this class can be found at https://presentations.jacobrcampbell.com. This weeks presentation will be posted closer to class.

MyHeritage is where all of the lecture videos can be found. The video this week is at [Summer 2025 SOWK 588 Week 05]().

Reference

Edin, K. J., & Shaefer, H. L. (2016). $2.00 A Day: Living on almost nothing in America. HarperCollins.

Linquiti, P. D. (2022). Rebooting policy analysis: Strengthening the foundation, expanding the scope. CQ Press.

To-Do List

• Attend class
• Read chapters 7 of the textbook and By Any Means Necessary in the $2 per day book
• Complete at least three replies across any of the four forums