Opportunity for engaged learning! 6th Global Service-Learning Conference

Shannon DoyleSeptember 8, 2019Leave a comment

The 6th Global Service-Learning Summit will focus on the topic ‘One World: Inclusion and Transformation in Global Service-Learning’. Those with an interest in such topics as migration and inclusion, ethical engagement in the field of global health, or how different organizations approach community-based learning, are invited to attend the summit.

The conference will take place on November 3rd-5th, 2019. It will be held at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina. The fee is now $425, however there are scholarships available.

If you are interested in learning more, please do so here.

Conversations Series: The Big Data Share

wagnerwSeptember 6, 2019October 3, 2024Leave a comment

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.

...continue reading "Conversations Series: The Big Data Share"

GW’s CIPP Creates “Guide to Indigenous DC”

wagnerwAugust 27, 2019August 27, 2019Leave a comment

Kudos to Dr. Elizabeth Rule and colleagues at the AT&T Center for Indigenous Politics and Policy on the quality of their new app, a guide to local sites of importance to Native Americans. This is a great example of scholarship for the public good. Link to: Guide to Indigenous DC

New Professional Development Series on Health Equity

wagnerwAugust 27, 2019Leave a comment

Nashman Faculty Affiliate, Dr. Maranda Ward shared this great new opportunity with us:

GW Health Sciences is pleased to announce a professional development series on health equity. The Department of Clinical Research and Leadership (CRL) is sponsoring the series to facilitate a shared understanding of health equity and its use as a lens for teaching, practicing, and service.

The series runs from September to January, 2020 and is open to the GW community and the public. CMEs are available. The five-month-long series will take place on the second Thursday of each month on the Foggy Bottom campus.

To register for the first event on September 12 or to learn more about the series, please visit: https://go.gwu.edu/healthequity

The first event on Sept. 12 from 10 to 11 am features Maranda Ward, EdD, MPH, discussing "Framing Health Equity." Ward, assistant professor in CRL, developed the series. "This health equity learning series will better equip us to fulfill our social mission in teaching, research, and service," Ward said. "It is chocked full of local experts and national leaders who rely on evidence and innovation to put the justice back in health."

Among the topics covered in the series are:

Social determinants of health
Recognizing vulnerable and socially disadvantaged U.S. populations
Workforce equity
Contemporary challenges to health equity
Cultural humility
Root causes of health disparities

Resource on Teaching Civic Engagement

wagnerwAugust 27, 2019Leave a comment

The Teaching for Democracy Alliance website has a wealth of resources related to talking to students about voting and being an informed citizen.

GW Named on Washington Monthly List of America’s Best Colleges for Student Voting

wagnerwAugust 27, 2019August 27, 2019Leave a comment

George Washington University appeared on the Washington Monthly's List of America's Best Colleges for Student Voting. The list includes 80 institutions. Notably, none of GW's market basket schools appear on this list.

Congrats to GW and particularly to the GW Votes program for this success.

Please do forward your students to TurboVote, an online platform available to the GW community which provides timely notifications on upcoming elections wherever users are registered to vote, as well as non-partisan information about local, state, and federal candidates.

Online Exhibit Explores 50 Years of Service-Learning in Higher Ed

wagnerwAugust 27, 2019Leave a comment

The Stanford University Libraries, in partnership with Campus Compact and other supporters has curated an online Service-Learning History Project archive, curated by Tim Stanton, Seth Pollack and Josh Schneider. The archives contains downloadable interviews, films, and documents, telling the story of the emergence and institutionalization of service-learning from over the last fifty years.

Imagining America Receives $500K Grant to Promote Public Scholarship

wagnerwAugust 27, 2019Leave a comment

Imagining America recently received a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their Leading and Learning Initiative. The goal of the project is to shift institutional culture in higher education toward greater support of public scholarship in the humanities, the arts, and design.

This three-year initiative will have two primary outcomes:

it will increase awareness of the value of research and creative practice that engage diverse communities in addressing pressing public issues;
it will build the institutional capacity needed to support and enable such work.

“At a time when society is deeply divided and when many people are fearful, discouraged, and struggling —through enduring inequalities across social, economic, racial, and gendered lines —there is a clear need for collaborative and community-based knowledge-making. Public scholarship—including both research and creative work such as public histories, community art-making, and poetry—have a unique power to bring people together to study and reflect on the world as it is and to imagine what it might be. Strong voices speaking out on urgent social and environmental issues are necessary if we are to create the just and healthy world that we want. IA believes that institutions of higher education have an important role to play in lifting scholarship that inspires public ideas, creativity, and critical hope, all desperately needed today." - Erica Kohl-Arenas, Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Davis, Imagining America’s Faculty Director, and the lead researcher on the new initiative.

Symposium on Community Engaged Scholarship: How to Prepare a Showcase Presentation

kmisraApril 4, 2019April 8, 2019Leave a comment

Each semester the Nashman Center hosts the Symposium on Community Engaged Scholarship, an afternoon for students, faculty, and community partners to share and reflect upon their experiences. During the Showcase Session, student presentations describe the nature of their community engagement during the semester, in terms of:

the outcomes for the community,
the outcomes on their own learning and growth, and
what they believe the general public needs to know about the issue they addressed or the community they worked with.

To prepare a Showcase Session presentation, it is important to keep in mind a few key aspects of the context of this portion of the Symposium.

During this part of the Symposium, the audience flows through presentations much like an art gallery or research day poster session.

You will not have a sit-down audience. People come and go. We advise you to carefully prepare a 1-2 minute “pitch” presentation, which you will give many times. The goal of this pitch is to make your audience want to stay longer to ask follow-up questions and hear more about your project. Spend some time thinking about how to summarize your experience, while highlighting the community impact, what you learned, and what you think it is important for the general public to know about the issues your project addressed.

Leverage visual aids to get audience attention and make your points memorable.

Students use posters, powerpoint slides, handouts, art, or other visual aids to be able to quickly and memorably make their points. In some cases, such as for engineering or interior design courses, students bring the actual product they designed for their community partner.

For students using slides on a laptop: photographs, maps, and graphs have greater impact than bullet points or text. You will need to bring your own laptop, and make sure its battery is fully charged.

Consider ways to engage the audience in active participation.

If your findings are surprising, ask your audience what they think or expect before revealing the results. Take a poll, indicating the results in real time using a poster with tally marks. If there is a way the general public can make a difference on the issue or with the community you worked with, provide information about that (what information can they share with their elected representatives? where can they go to do volunteer service?)

Highlights from the Imagining America March 2019 Newsletter

kmisraMarch 29, 2019April 1, 2019Leave a comment

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Imagining America, an organization dedicated to promoting community engagement and service-learning partnerships. Below are some highlights from their March 2019 newsletter.

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The Imagining America National Gathering will take place on October 18-20th in Albuquerque, NM. The call for participation will be released in April. For more information on early hotel booking, click here.

The National Women’s Studies Association is offering scholarship for graduate students, with applications due by tomorrow night (March 31). If you know a graduate student that is currently a member and interested in scholarship opportunities, refer them here for more opportunities.

Check out IA Faculty Director Erica Kohl-Arenas as a guest in the Niskanen Center's recent Science of Politics podcast and speaks on how philanthropy diverts social movements. Click here for the podcast site, along with a transcript.

Events Hosted by DC Area Educators for Social Justice

kmisraMarch 20, 2019March 27, 2019Leave a comment

The DC Area Educators for Social Justice are hosting several upcoming events of interest to the Nashman family. This group is primarily focused on K-12 educators, but their events are open to all.

Educators for Equity Book Club

Late April-Early June

Educators for Equity invites D.C. area educators to participate in a book club to read and discuss We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love over three sessions. All three sessions will occur on weekday evenings, with one in late April, an author talk with Bettina Love in May, and a final session in early June. The group prefers participants who can attend all three sessions.

Reconstruction Teach-In

Saturday, April 13

This teach-in will be held at Howard University, and include hands-on workshops with lessons on Reconstruction that can be used in middle and high school classrooms, presentations on key aspects of Reconstruction history with a focus on education and the law, and an introduction to a student project to identify and give visibility to Reconstruction sites in the area.

Link here for more information and to register

Ivory Toldson Author Talk

Wednesday, April 24th, 6:30PM-9:00PM

Toldson is a professor of Counseling Psychology at Howard University and will be discussing his new book, No BS (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe in Black People Enough Not to Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear about Black People.

Link here to RSVP

Civic Engagement for Grad Students

kmisraMarch 19, 2019March 27, 2019Leave a comment

Inside Higher Ed had a nice piece this week by a graduate student encouraging others to get involved in their local communities, in particular using their graduate level learning to support local government. We encourage you to share it with your students.

Link: Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For your CV

Community Engagement and College Completion: Campus Compact’s Monthly Webinar

kmisraFebruary 28, 2019March 27, 2019Leave a comment

“Campus Compact’s 2018-2019 webinar series takes the great and varied work happening on the ground around the country and brings it straight to your desk. Topics touch on issues of relevance to faculty, staff, students, and their partners in education and community building. Be sure to tune in to each session for information, tools, and resources to support and inspire you.”

The 2018-2019 webinar series is being offered free of charge, but all attendees must register: https://compact.org/webinarseries/

MARCH 5
3 P.M. ET

Exploring the Connection: Community engagement and college completion
Colleges and universities face the significant challenge to help students from all backgrounds enter and complete college in a timely manner. This webinar will highlight the potential that community engagement offers to increase college completion rates, using specific research studies that have contributed to the growing body of evidence that connects community engagement with student success for all students.

Video of each month’s webinar so far this year is available here: https://compact.org/webinarseries/

Emerging Engagement Scholars Workshop

kmisraFebruary 28, 2019March 27, 2019Leave a comment

This professional development opportunity is offered as a pre-conference event, preceding the Engagement Scholarship Consortium Annual Conference: October 6-7, 2019, Denver, Colorado.

“This intensive professional development program provides advanced doctoral students and early career faculty with background literature, facilitated discussion, mentoring, and presentations designed to increase their knowledge and enhance their practice of community engaged scholarship. Participation in the Emerging Engagement Scholars Workshop (EESW) is limited and interested applicants must be nominated to be considered for this workshop.” For more information: https://engagementscholarship.org/networks-partnerships/esc-partnerships/emerging-engagement-scholars-workshop

March 13th Webinar: Organizing Against Violence Pedagogy Project

kmisraFebruary 28, 2019March 27, 2019Leave a comment

Imagining America (artists and scholars in public life, https://imaginingamerica.org) is launching a new initiative, an online “teaching and learning circle.” The first program of this initiative is a webinar, offered on March 13th at 1pm EST.

”Our first webinar will feature critical dialogue and creative group work with Kush Patel (2016-2018 IA PAGE Co-Director) and Mallika Bose's (Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Penn State) "Organizing Against Violence" project. The “Organizing Against Violence” pedagogy project was initiated at the 2018 IA National Gathering in Chicago, IL. The aim of Patel and Bose’s project is to create a network of critical pedagogues, engage in collective writing, and co-create a toolkit for distribution through Imagining America and related media. In the upcoming webinar, participants will reflect on their teaching practice and its relationship to the interconnected violence of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy within affiliated institutions and communities. The webinar will involve live group writing, where participants will draft brief position statements to unpack their own institutional biographies and approaches to teaching, learning, and community engaged practice.”

Registration is now open to IA members and individuals interested in joining the IA network. For more information please contact Erika Prasad, Associate Director of Membership and Development, at eaprasad@ucdavis.edu.