Rachel Talbert is the new Graduate Coordinator for Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Nashman Center. Rachel is a second year doctoral student in GSEHD, with interests in urban American Indians and civic identity, social studies education, school climate, urban education, and civic education.

Rachel comes to the Nashman Center with a love for GW and the field of Civic Engagement.  Rachel attended the Elliott School as an undergraduate and served on the Colonial Cabinet and as an RA. Rachel also received her Master’s Degree from GW in Religion, with a concentration in Ethics and Early American Religion.  After leaving GW, Rachel worked on Capitol Hill, in the Alexandria, Virginia Public Schools and taught English as a Second Language to adults. Most recently, Rachel served as Vice President of Curriculum and Programs at The Close Up Foundation, designing curriculum for programs fostering the political efficacy of high school and middle school students from around the world. She also led trainings and professional developments for teachers on how to best educate for democracy and worked closely with student programming for Native Americans, urban students and immigrant/migrant student populations.

This fall she will present at the Association of Moral Education conference in St. Louis Missouri on school climate and suspension rates and at the National Conference for the Social Studies in San Francisco on the civic identity of American Indian students.

Rachel's favorite service opportunity is work that she did (and still does) with Free Minds. Free Minds works with incarcerated youth and Rachel served as a pen pal in the past for student inmates and now participates in Write Nights. Ask her about her former students or the program any time. She has also served as a mentor to a student (now graduate) of DCPS for the last 12 years.

This year's Pen to Paper Retreat, hosted by several regional Campus Compact Affiliates, will be November 9-11, 2017 in Rochester, NY. This event has three tracks, for those who are: planning to write, ready to write, or ready to publish. Link here for more information or to register. Pen to Paper is an academic writing retreat designed to provide time, space, and resources to guide faculty, professional staff, graduate students, and community partners working on (or planning for) journal manuscripts related to service- and community-engagement.

"The two and a half-day retreat provides participants with time to discuss ideas with and receive feedback from journal editors, receive mentoring from senior faculty coaches, share ideas with peers, and write.

Each year attendance is intentionally kept to a minimum in order to foster personal connections between participants and their journal editors and senior faculty coaches. The small group also provides the space participants need to focus on their writing."

A Nashman Affiliate Faculty member recently brought this to our attention: Ralph Nader on What Should be Essential Teaching in Schools: Let's Start with Teaching Civic Skills and Actions.  We particularly appreciate the reference to Ernest Boyer:

Or as Ernest Boyer, executive director of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, rhetorically asked in 1990: “Is it possible for the work of the academy to relate more effectively to our most pressing social, economic and civic problems?”

For faculty who have used NobleHour to collect and report student service hours, I must announce that GW will no longer be using this platform. As we spend this year implementing a new, much improved platform, we will in the meantime collect this information in other ways.  More information is coming soon.  Template forms and handouts, including a timesheet, are available here if you will need another mechanism for students to record their service on in the meantime.

http://serve.gwu.edu/faculty-resources

We encourage you to review the latest issue of the AAC&U's publication, Diversity and Democracy. The Spring/Summer 2017 issue explores issues related to Free and Civil Discourse:

"What is the relationship between free speech and civil discourse? Which voices are heard in what contexts? And what are the implications for inclusive learning environments? This issue explores these questions and more, with a focus on how colleges and universities across the country are navigating current events."

Table of Contents:

Free and Civil Discourse: Challenges and Imperatives

• Speech, Spectacle, and Looking Closely for What One Cannot See
  AAC&U President Lynn Pasquerella explores the complexities of free speech on campus
• Toward a Democratic Speech Environment
  Hampshire College’s Christopher Tinson and Javiera Benavente examine how campuses can serve as sites of justice-seeking conversation and discourse
• Bridging the American Political Divide: The Role of Higher Education in Advancing Civil Discourse
  CSU Monterey Bay President Eduardo Ochoa writes about modeling respectful, inquiry-based dialogue across differences
• The Role of Governing Boards in Addressing Campus Tensions
  AGB's Susan Whealler Johnston describes how governing boards can engage in current issues

Perspectives

• Free Speech is Not Enough
  Robert Quinn of the Scholars at Risk Network and NYU calls for more speech, but also more nuance and more inclusivity
• Owning Your Own Mind
  Leslie Wong and Alison Sanders of San Francisco State University reflect on modeling the practices associated with liberal education
• Practicing Peace on a Weaponized Campus
  Lisa Moore describes creating space for intellectual risk-taking at UT Austin

Campus Practice

• This Is Who We Say We Are
  Drake University President Emeritus David Maxwell reflects on addressing campus conflicts
• Community Days of Learning: Building Capacity for Challenging Conversations
  Kimberly Cassidy and Ruth Lindeborg describe a powerful campus-wide experience at Bryn Mawr
• World Ready: Incorporating Interfaith Learning into General Education
  Esther Boyd and Katie Cruger make the case for identity formation and dialogue across difference in a first-year course
• A Whole-Institution Approach to Civic Engagement
  Michael Sorrell discusses embracing core beliefs and values through institutional practice at Paul Quinn College

AAC&U President Lynn Pasquerella is a host of the radio segment The Academic Minute, produced by WAMC Northeast Public Radio in partnership with AAC&U. The Academic Minutefeatures faculty and researches from colleges and universities around the world discussing what's new in the academy and the ways in which academic research contributes to the public good. In addition to being broadcast widely on radio stations around the country, each segment is posted daily on Inside Higher Ed and across The Academic Minute's and AAC&U's social media portals.

The Academic Minute is seeking submissions for upcoming segments. Please send submissions to David Hopper at dhopper@wamc.org, and be sure to tune in daily to The Academic Minute. Thank you for considering this opportunity for public engagement.

The Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program (SRHRL) at the American Association for the Advancement of Science is asking colleagues to provide input to a survey on Human Rights in STEM education.

You can take the survey here.

A new monthly edition of the Community-wealth.org Newsletter for the August 2016 has been released. The newsletter covers such topics as the new book releases of Conversations on Community Wealth Building by Steve Dubb and The Opportunity Makers by Charles Rutheiser.

You can sign-up for the monthly eNewsletter here.

The National Center for Science and Civic Engagement has released a new request for proposals for the SENCER-ISE Partnership Champions eMentorship Project. The initiative provides one-year sub-awards to five cross-sector partnerships. Each sub-award will provide $10,000 and is expected to be matched by the recipient partnership.

For examples of projects which have won in the past, please visit the website. Applications are due on September 26, 2016 by 9:00am. Application guidelines can be found here and the application itself can be found here.

The end of semester Service-Learning Symposium gathers students, faculty, and community members to present and participate in critical reflections on the impact of campus/community partnerships.  It is a thought-provoking day for all involved.

The Fall 2016 Symposium will be on Monday, December 12th, 2016. Resources (such as a poster presentation template) are available on the GW Community Engagement Wiki, where you can add your own symposium resources to share with this community.

Note that this is the last day of Fall semester classes.  While we do have faculty who require participation in this event (by including it on the syllabus the first day of class), others offer Symposium participation as a final reflection assignment option (as an alternative to a written paper, for example).

The focus of the day is the students’ critical reflections on the impact of the service-learning experience on a) their own learning and b) the community partner’s ability to meet their goals. You are free to guide the direction of students’ reflection presentations in order to meet your course learning goals.

To be crystal clear here:  students need not be ready to unveil the final version of the report or design they have created for their community partner. Rather, the focus is on their thoughtful reflections on their learning and community impact, and how they have made meaning of the experience. 

Participation format can vary and innovation is quite welcome. The Human Services and Social Justice capstone students typically participate via poster presentations.  Students in the UW Writing For Social Justice Course give panel presentations. We encourage you to invite community partners as either audience members or panel presenters along with the students they worked with so they can be a part of the discussion as well.

We would like to encourage as much participation in this year’s Symposium as possible, so please contact us (gwsl@gwu.edu) if you need any clarification or assistance thinking about how your students might share their experiences with the GW community.

A new documentary has been released by producer Bob Gliner about the convergence of learning and service called Communities as Classrooms. The documentary discusses an education experiment in El Salvador that celebrates learning in the community to reiterate regular classroom skills. The documentary airs this coming Wednesday night, July 20 at 9:30 PM in the greater Washington D.C. area on PBS station, WHUT.

Here is a brief summary:

Communities as Classrooms shows an educational experiment in participatory democracy that can serve as a model here in the US – where viewers see students become actively engaged in solving problems in their own communities, not as an extra-curricular activity, but as part of learning math, language, writing and other basic educational skills – skills they see as necessary to solving the issues their communities face.

Bob Gliner has won awards for the many documentaries all over the nation in places like Michigan and Oregon and the world in countries including India.

You can read about all his documentaries, including this one, as well as watch trailers and order the full films here: http://docmakeronline.com/

A group of service-learning colleagues at the Center for Community-Engaged Learning of University of Minnesota has compiled a shared Google doc of recommended documentaries on community engagement.

The list includes a wide diversity of films which cover everything from He Named Me Malala on the education of young girls in Pakistan to The Human Experience on different forms of humanity throughout the world to The Voluntourist on the negative outcomes associated with international volunteer work.

These films offer interesting reflection on different elements of community-based participatory research and offer alternative views on community engagement. Check out the full list here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n2bvaZOq_ziGiuXH11h1IZe7Ksv9OWRIOkG7W0yVJJQ/edit

GW's 2016 Research Day had featured a new award: the Nashman Prize for Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR). CBPR is research on significant social issues that occurs in collaboration with local residents with the aim to provide potential solutions and contribute to long-term sustainable change in the community.

Eighteen studies were submitted to compete for the inaugural Nashman Prize. We offer our congratulations to the winners:

First Place: Shanna Helf an undergraduate in the Human Services and Social Justice program, for her study, "Aging through Change: Gentrification, Social Capital, and Senior Citizens of Washington DC's Wards 1 and 6."

Second Place: Katherine Stasaki and Elsbeth Turcan,undergraduates in Engineering, for their study, "CAPITAL Words: Algorithmic Generation of Reading and Spelling Exercises for Low-Literacy Users."

See below for abstracts of each study.

Helf, 2016, "Aging through Change: Gentrification, Social Capital, and Senior Citizens of Washington DC's Wards 1 and 6."

This study investigated the social wellbeing of senior citizens in Wards 1 and 6 of Washington, DC, as affected by elements of gentrification and rapid urban change. Informed by literature from the fields of gerontology, human services, and urban studies, preliminary research shows that gentrification acts as a lifestyle barrier, inhibiting seniors’ interactions with their neighborhoods and the ability to age in place with familiar social support. To locate participants and identify areas of highest need, the researcher partnered with Age-Friendly DC and We Are Family, two prominent local organizations working towards inclusivity of seniors and intergenerational activity in DC. A mixed methods research design first utilized quantitative data from 600 responses to the Age-Friendly DC 2015 Livability Survey, identifying needs across all 8 wards of the city. Second, qualitative data collected during focus groups with seniors from Wards 1 and 6 provided deeper understanding of the first-person experience of aging through gentrification. Initial themes include affordability, respect and inclusion, interracial and intercultural relations, and the deep desire for independent, purposeful, and supported aging. In an era of unprecedented growth of the senior demographic, the results yielded by this study may inform policymakers and direct service providers in Washington, DC; in addition, A1:Q28 raised about the role of seniors in changing urban contexts will have implications for cities nationwide.

Katherine Stasaki and Elsbeth Turcan, "CAPITAL Words: Algorithmic Generation of Reading and Spelling Exercises for Low-Literacy Users."

According to the American Library Association, 14% of adults in the United States cannot “search, comprehend, and use continuous texts" [1]. There is a significant opportunity for the development of technology to help improve literacy rates.

The goal of the CAPITAL project is to make high-quality learning resources accessible to users of all literacy levels. The project aims to automatically create exercises that will help users improve their reading skills. CAPITAL Words is a mobile application designed to deliver and evaluate responses to exercises aimed at improving a novice reader’s phonemic awareness.  Three types of exercises can be automatically generated:

Phoneme Swap is an exercise that takes a word and generates answer choices based on real words that differ from the base word by one phoneme.  The student must either choose a correct spelling from a spoken word or choose a correct pronunciation for a word they read. For both exercises, two types of questions are generated---vowel and consonant questions. Vowel questions find all single-syllable words that differ only by the vowel phoneme.  Consonant exercises swap commonly-confused letters [e.g. b/d/p, m/n, t/d].

Pick the Misspelling presents students with four words and their pronunciations.  Students must hear each pronunciation and decide which word is misspelled.  In order to ensure the questions were challenging, we developed an intelligent system of misspelling words. Spell the Word is an exercise that shows students a word with one of its syllables replaced by blanks. Students hear the word spoken and must select letters from a given pool to spell the missing syllable correctly. When creating a question, we intelligently select a syllable to remove. We then choose appropriate distractor letters, considering possible homophones.

Truly effective algorithms would generate questions indistinguishable from human-created questions, which poses the question: Can people tell the difference between human-made and algorithm-generated exercises?  In order to test this, a survey was sent out to sixteen participants asking them to decide if a computer or a human had generated the given question.

Results strongly suggest that our algorithms generate questions that are comparable to human-generated exercises.  On average, participants did worse than chance in guessing if a human or the algorithm generated the question---43% accuracy for misspelled words and 36% for spell the word.  This indicates that people were unable to clearly differentiate between the computer-generated exercises and those created by humans

Please join us on May 24th for our annual Faculty Brunch.