The September 5th, Conversation on Community Engaged Scholarship focused on recent research findings, student surveys, and student service data.
The presentation slides from this event are available here.
The Periscope video is available here.
Wendy Wagner, the Nashman Center's director of community engaged scholarship, presented these findings and facilitated a conversation about uses of the data and new lines of inquiry for the coming year.
We are happy to present/discuss specific findings with your department faculty as well. Contact wagnerw@gwu.edu to schedule a department presentation.
While many topics arose, important themes were: cost of transportation to service sites, future data gathering and reporting, and further mining of the data from the MSL research study.
Cost of Transportation to Service Sites. While most of the reported data was positive news, we did discuss student concerns about the expense of travel to service sites, and considered responses to this problem. While the majority of the GW students surveyed did not report that cost of transportation to service sites was problematic, the number of students who did is still a concern. Our discussed responses fell into two categories.
First, faculty need to be clear about anticipated costs associated with community engagement in the course syllabus. Several faculty suggested describing this cost as being in alignment with lab fees or textbooks. Faculty should also provide information on the use of public transportation to sites, as several students surveyed noted that they hadn't realized how convenient public transportation was, given their former reliance on Uber.
Second, while the Nashman Center cannot provide funding to support all student travel to service sites, we can help. We are at work on a policy that will be intended to particularly support students serving in areas of DC that are under-resourced and more expensive to travel to. Please reach out to Wendy Wagner if the cost of transportation is a concern for your students.
On a related note, we discussed the issue of transportation time. Many faculty want to encourage students to serve in areas outside of the Foggy Bottom area, but the policy against counting transportation time toward reported time served is an incentive for busy students to choose service placements closer to campus. One excellent suggestion was to require fewer hours from students who serve with organizations that require more than 30 minutes of transportation time.
Future Data Collection/Reporting. Participants also forwarded several excellent suggestions for data gathering moving forward. Using the information gathered from students reporting their service (including where, how much time, and the nature of the activity), the Nashman Center is able to provide reports on students' community engagements by course, department, school, or institution, including data tables, maps. Following today's participant feedback, we will focus the coming year on collecting and reporting the outcomes of this work for our community partners.
Research Data Available for Further Mining. In Fall, 2018, GW undergraduates were involved in a national research study on college student experiences and the development of socially responsible leadership. Following a brief overview of the findings, faculty gathered here were encouraged to consider additional analysis of the data that colleagues or graduate students might do. Please contact Wendy Wagner (wagnerw@gwu.edu) if you would like more information about this study.
Thank you to everyone who came and participated in the thoughtful discussion.
