Notes from Nashman Center sponsored workshops, panel presentations, and more.
Hear Zaniya's Presentation here
This presentation is submitted by Zaniya Lewis, a 2019-2020 Knapp Fellow. Knapp Fellowship for Entrepreneurial Service-Learning. Knapp Fellows receive up to $10,000 to support their ideas to combine scholarly work with community action. Students, work with a faculty advisor, and one or more community partners, spend one year conducting inquiry and implementing their idea. Note: Applications for the 2020-2021 Knapp Fellows are due May 26, 2020 (see link above).
Yesenia’s project focuses on developing and implementing an app, Familia United, which assists Central American immigrant families in Yuma County, Arizona with family tracing and reunification. Recently, Yesenia discussed her Knapp Fellowship with a Community Engaged Scholar. For more information about Yesenia’s Fellowship, please click here to read her previous interview. ...continue reading "Yesenia Grajeda Yepez, 2019-2020 Knapp Fellow, Discusses Familia United"
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Promising Futures engages D.C. middle and high school students as ambassadors and peer educators with a focus on everything from health to leadership skills.” To read the full article in GW Today, please click here.
...continue reading "GW Today highlights Dr. Maranda Ward’s civic engagement"
The February 7th Conversation on Community Engaged Scholarship focused on facilitating a deeper reflection.
Dr. Wendy Wagner, the Nashman Center's Director of Community Engaged Scholarship (CES), facilitated a discussion that focused on how community engaged scholarship courses can include more of the pathways of service, ways to weave critical reflection from service into class discussions (and vice versa), and resources to help facilitate deeper critical reflections about service.
...continue reading "Conversations Series: Facilitating Deeper Reflection"
The Knapp Fellowship award is just around the corner. The award will recognize one or more innovative proposals each year and will provide support for their implementation. Up to $10,000 will be awarded each academic year. Undergraduate and graduate students with one more semester may apply independently or with a group of students to design and create solutions that will make a significant difference in the lives of others. Awardees must work with the support and guidance of a faculty member on their research and action projects and must be enrolled at GW for the full Academic Calendar year in which the award is being given in order to qualify as a candidate for the Knapp Fellowship.
One key application component is that you must be enrolled at GW for the full Academic Calendar year in order to qualify as a candidate for the Knapp Fellowship.
Click here to see previous winners and their projects!
This year's 2019-2020 winners are Zaniya Lewis, and Yesenia Grajeda Yepez!
Click here to learn more about Zaniya's project!
Click here to learn more about Yesenia's project!
"Kristen McInerney's community engaged research with newcomer high school students continues to have an impact one year later.
The ripple effect and use of the data Kristen collected through the Knapp Fellowship continues to help tell a story." Click here to read about how T.C. Williams High School International Academy "provide[s] an equitable education where [teachers] meet each ACPS student at their level." Click here to watch International Academy's video, "Welcome to America," that highlights immigration stories.
To learn more about Kristin's Knapp Fellowship, click here to read her interview with Community Engaged Scholar Ashley Hidalgo. For more information about the Knapp Fellowship, click here.
The October 3rd Conversation focused on the Intersection of Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SOTL) and service learning. The discussion was led by Maria de la Fuente, (Spanish and Linguistics).
SOTL research is the systematic inquiry about student learning, grounded in theory and research, and disseminated through scholarly publications or presentations. Community-engaged learning pedagogies like service learning are excellent spaces for SOTL research.
...continue reading "Conversations Series: The Intersection of SOTL and Service Learning"
“The Climb Is Our Story” will provide college and career readiness skills to School Without Walls high school students who participate in the Multicultural Student Services Center student internship program. GW students will facilitate college and career readiness workshops with the assistance of the MSSC from September 2019 - May 2020.
Zaniya Lewis, a 2019-2020 Knapp Fellowship winner is a senior studying Political Science with a minor in Human Services and Social Justice. Community-Engaged Scholar, Emebte Atanaw, sat down with her to learn more about her research project.
Zaniya created this program because School Without Walls does not have a college prep course, this program will help students prepare for college success. All students participating in the program are overcoming obstacles to get ready for life beyond high school. The program includes a service component, students will volunteer at least once a month at a local non-profit organization during the school year. At the end of the program, students will have the opportunity to participate in The Climb Tour visiting local businesses in D.C. to learn about career opportunities. After completing the program students will have a portfolio that of college and career tools.
Lewis will use surveys throughout the program to measure success and assess how the program could be adjusted in the future. In addition, there are individual target goals for students who participate in the program. The project will be a model for other high schools looking to improve their college and career preparation program.
Zaniya believes it’s important to incorporate members of the community into her research. Lewis explains, “My whole project is about helping others on their climb and leaving the door open. As college students, we have experienced the college and career process, so why not teach students the lessons we learned from our experience. My goal has always been to use what I have learned and give back to others.”
In the future, Zaniya hopes to implement her program at other schools throughout the United States with college and career readiness. She will do this by partnering with more businesses, and her non-profit organization, the YesSheCanCampaign.
if you are interested in learning more about Zaniya’s work visit her website
http://www.yesshecancampaign.org
Applications for next year's Knapp Fellows are open to learning more about the fellowships and application information click here.
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"
Gillian Joseph was one of two winners for the 2018-2019 Knapp Fellowship Award. Her research project, Find Our Women, began with Gillian talking to women who were survivors, and family members of Indigenous women that are missing, murdered or victims of violence. She did this work within her honors thesis research and wanted to find protective factors for these Indigenous women. She began looking at the Dakota Access Pipeline camp, and concluded that decolonizing a space/society is a protective factor for violence against Indigenous women.
To learn more about Gillian’s early phases of the research project, and her inspirations for the project read this article!
After one year of Gillian’s groundbreaking community-based research, she was published in the APA journal through an internship at the American Psychological Association. She focused on Native American issues and met a Native American psychologist, who helped her publish a paper about the intersection of psychology and violence against women. She also has another article under review in the Journal of Indigenous Research .
To read Gillian’s journals click these links:
APA Journal: https://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/communique/2018/11/standing-sisters Journal of Indigenous Research: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/kicjir/
Gillian is creating a non-profit organization, Project Find Our Women, which gives money to Indigenous women to tell stories from their communities that aren’t being seen or heard so that other women can relate, and reach out if they are feeling the same violence or treatment. Learn more about Project Find Our Women here.
Gillian is graduating from GW and will get her master degree through a program called Erasmus Mundus, which is a program through the EU and fully funded. She will focus on cross-cultural psychology. She wants to continue her work and extend it to other Indigenous populations. She also wants to expand her non-profit and tell different stories. Gillian has done excellent work, her progress in a year is just amazing. Nashman is so proud of Gillian, and we're excited to see what her future holds!
On Wednesday, March 26, the Nashman Center hosted our March Breakfast on Community Engaged Scholarship at Gelman Library! Doctor Maranda Ward, a Nashman Affiliated Faculty member and Professor at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, presented and led a robust discussion.
The presentation focused on historic inequality in D.C. that has perpetuated to this day and the ways that GW faculty and students can interact with organizations fighting for justice in an appropriate way - by lifting up communities in the areas where they are strong. Thank you to everyone who came out for this enlightening conversation.
If you missed the event or want a chance to review what was discussed today check out the PowerPoint from Dr. Ward here.
The Black History Month Nashman Breakfast Conversation on Community Engaged Scholarship was hosted this week by the Black Lives Matter Faculty Learning Community (FLC).
Some BLM FLC goals that faculty kept in mind during discussions were:
If you missed the presentation, or want a recap, the PowerPoint from the presentation can be found here and video of the presentation can be found here.
Dr. Maranda C. Ward is part of the school of Medicine and Health Sciences and she stated that their mission as a school is “excellence through diversity and inclusion” and “addressing the challenges of health equity.” Dr. Ward created a health equity course audit rubric which assessed health equity classes based on if they were implementing diverse cultural perspectives and found that many of the classes weren’t including diverse course work. Now as a department they are trying to figure out the best way to revise curriculum.
Dr. Imani Cheers teaches digital storytelling and revised her syllabus to include Black Lives Matter themes and issues. Students were assigned projects about social justice advocacy, researched areas outside of Foggy Bottom, and created a website of their videos, which you can find here: https://monumedia2018.wixsite.com/home
Dr. Susan LeLacheur and Dr. Howard Straker teach together in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences. In their classroom, they diversified case scenarios, used implicit bias tests and added material on African American historical trauma, and prenatal care. The session ended with faculty discussing ways to talk about race in their classes with conversations about Governor Northam and how to discuss the issue with students.
Thank you to the BLM FLC for a great scholarship!
If you would like to join this or any other FLC, information is here.
There were so many great takeaways in yesterday’s conversation we cannot cover them all and encourage you to listen to the session.
The link between faculty diversity and support for community-engaged scholarship. Research by Saltmarsh and others suggests a link between explicit rewards for community-engaged scholarship and an institution’s ability to attract and retain faculty of color and women. Young faculty in particular, are interested in scholarly careers that link knowledge and learning with the public good. They are seeking institutions that will support them in those aims. Link here for a paper on this issue co-authored by Saltmarsh: “Full Participation: Building the Architecture for Diversity and Public Engagement in Higher Education” (2011).
The need for both policy and faculty education in changing institutional culture. Saltmarsh’s current research is examining an institution that recently experienced an intentional shift to support community-engaged scholarship, including a call for all departments to explicitly address support for this work in their bylaws and policies. More on that project is provided here: UNC faculty plan.
Clear policies are necessary but are not sufficient. As a university provost once told Saltmarsh, “policies don’t vote.” It is important that faculty involved in reviewing tenure cases understand how to evaluate community-engaged research for quality and impact. Saltmarsh noted, “Can we value a range of scholarly products? We have to rethink that the only thing that counts is a peer reviewed journal, which may not be of interest to a community partner. These journals are highly specialized, which means they are read by very few. We have to explicitly rethink ‘impact’.”
Resources referred to in the Saltmarsh presentation:
2013 Tulane White Paper -academic review and engagement
Cleveland State University- Confronting the Careless (Byron White)
Links to papers by Saltmarsh:
We hope you’ll be able to use these resources and we’ll see you in
February at the next conversation.
This event was held Friday December 7th, Noon - 3:45 pm, Marvin Center, 3rd floor
Link here for the Fall 2018 Symposium program.
Link here for information about the upcoming Spring 2019 Symposium.
Wednesday, November 14th, Gelman Library Room 101
We can always learn and develop our knowledge to prevent sexual harassment from arising in any kind of work or social setting. Unfortunately, the University encounters alarming incidents of service learning students receiving unwanted advances from the clients of community organizations the students were serving with. The context of the service relationship makes the problem of sexual harassment particularly challenging. How do we prepare our students and how do we respond?
Christina Franzino, Assistant Director for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, facilitated the conversation in GW’s Title IX Office.
Please encourage colleagues to join in on future conversations and encourage open, ongoing discussions about how to build a safe space for everyone, regardless of their role.
Please contact titleix@gwu.edu with any concerns or refer to Title IX's training calendar and other resources on their website to find more information about sexual assault, harassment, and prevention efforts.
