This book is a collaborative project by RJ Fellows seniors, produced in the capstone seminar at Muhlenberg College in Spring 2015.  For several years, seniors in the capstone seminar, “Cultures of Change,” have situated their learning in community contexts in Allentown.  Past projects have included collaborative research with Lehigh Valley Health Network on asthma and trees; a service project with Good Shepherd to develop an arts program for the pediatric unit; and most recently, a “disOrientation map.”  

Throughout the capstone, students were asked to explore the changing quality of the relationship between Muhlenberg and the wider community of Allentown, and to explore this relationship along multiple dimensions. The story told here is not intended to be definitive or exhaustive, but rather represents the experiences, interests, and observations of one group of students who have found diverse avenues for connecting with Allentown during their time at Muhlenberg.  What they present is a form of multi-modal scholarship that required active participation, archival research and first-person interviews, extensive real-world interaction with the spaces of the city, as well as hands-on learning with the multimodal scholarly publishing tool, Scalar.