The Honey W. Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service is pleased to announce that Dr. Michelle Kelso has been awarded the Nashman Community Engaged Teaching Award.
Dr. Kelso has taught service-learning and community-engaged scholarship courses for 15 years. All of her courses in the Human Services and Social Justice program include a significant community engagement component. Some of her courses engage student in direct service with community members, working with organizations that serve newly arrived refugees, people experiencing homelessness, and mentoring/tutoring youth. In other courses, her students do projects that build capacity for those same organizations, such as program evaluation (HSSJ 3100W), grant-writing (HSSJ 3110W), and organizing (HSSJ 1177).
In HSSJ 3100W: Program Evaluation, students work closely in teams of 2-3 with a non-profit to conduct a program evaluation from the conceptualization of the research design, through analyzing the results and writing up a final report. In a 2019 class, a team of three students worked with the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), focusing on the research question: Why is NWF membership low among millennials and Gen Z? They examined two areas: NWF social media outreach and overall organization objectives. The team designed a survey questionnaire that they distributed amongDC student populations. After collecting data, they then wrote a 20-page research paper for the NWF to improve their outreach to these age groups. NWF asked the team to present to their DC staff.
One of the students wrote in a reflection about this project: “This course has enabled me to learn skills this semester and then apply them to benefit a real-world organization when choosing and designing our group’s research tool of a survey. In addition, I particularly enjoyed being able to use findings from my literature review to help create recommendations for the organization.”
A representative from the National Wildlife Foundation had this to say about working with Dr. Kelso's course: "My collaboration with Dr. Kelso and her students has produced practical results for NWF as an organization and provided me with a tremendous opportunity to learn from them, as well as share my knowledge and experience with them. The purpose of this collaboration was to use a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to determine how NWF might break through to ensure more young Americans are aware and compelled to act on reversing the wildlife crisis."
Working with communities has been an integral part of both Dr. Kelso's teaching and scholarship. Throughout her career, she has worked to build upon previous partnerships with organizations to strengthen their programs as well as to deepen the bonds with the HSSJ Program. In total since she began teaching at GW, she has worked through her classes with over 40 DMV organizations.
"I work behind the scenes, encouraging students, building up their skills through coursework, mentoring them through their projects and standing back to let them soar on their projects for non-profits. Oftentimes in our program, we have big asks of students. They must learn so many new skills and abilities. This stretches them and me ! I hear a lot –“But I don’t know how to do that!” I assure them: “Don’t worry, you here to learn and I’m not going to let you fail. We will work and work and work together to make sure you do know how to....” conduct program eval, write a grant, organize an online fundraiser, etc. And it is a joy to watch them succeed!" - Dr. Michelle Kelso
