Molly Sturges is this year’s Corcoran Visiting Professor for Community Engagement. She adapted one of her pieces called “Waking the Oracle,” for the GW community. It is described as “A multi-arts rave focusing on arts, spirituality, and climate justice.”
The show will run October 31-November 3 in the Black Box theater in Building XX. Buy tickets here.
Professor Pulcini, a Professor of Nursing, was the Director of Community and Global Initiatives and served as the Chair of the Acute & Chronic Care Faculty Community. Maureen Albero, a Community Engaged Scholar at the Nashman Center, interviewed Professor Pulcini to learn more about her work.
Professor Pulcini has been with GW for seven and a half years and has been expanding international opportunities for Nursing students. Professor Pulcini’s dedication to local and global public health manifests in her research and initiatives. Locally, from the PCORI Grant, Professor Pulcini has been able “to research asthma barriers in children with special needs.” The PCORI Grant also allowed Professor Pulcini and her collaborators to focus her research in Washington, DC, Iowa, and Washington State. In DC, Professor Pulcini worked with “nurses and parents in schools to create a community engaged design study that focused on children with special needs and asthma.”
Professor Pulcini teaches and participates in a Community Health, a course at GW that is required for Nursing students. As a requirement in this course, students may go to either Haiti, Ecuador, Costa Rica, or Uganda for one week. In this one week, students are totally immersed in this community as they do 40-50 hours of service. Professor Pulcini asserts that “the goal in this course is for students to have a community health experience.” This one week abroad “satisfies a major portion of the clinical component of Community Health by providing healthcare, treatment, and education abroad.” Professor Pulcini noted that “Carol Lang, the current Director of Community and Global Initiatives, is working to expand the program to include Slovenia.”
Professor Pulcini noted that in recent trips to “Uganda and Haiti, students worked with community workers to teach community members about hypertension.” In Haiti, “students worked with mothers and children susceptible to anemia and parasitic diseases.” Professor Pulcini found this work in Haiti to be very intriguing as community members asked the facutly, and students, “to teach the community at large about anemia in hopes to implement preventative measures.” To maintain these global partnerships, new students in Community Health and experienced faculty members visit the same sites each year. To note, Community Health is offered every semester.
While students learn a tremendous amount about local and global public health from this experience, students also benefit in other less obvious ways. “After living in an under resourced part of the world,” Professor Pulcini has seen “students change the direction of their academic study, pursue higher degrees in public health, and work internationally.” When asked about her favorite student story, Professor Pulcini recounted a memorable student experience, “this student earned their doctorate in Global Health from Duke University and continued their post-doctorate fellowship at Harvard. Now, this student focuses their work on tuberculosis in South Africa.” From the student’s experience in Community Health, they were inspired to “center their career in International Health.”
Professor Pulcini encourages all students to take a service learning course because “you will learn so much about the community and world.”
Zaniya Lewis is the Founder/CEO and Executive Directior of #YesSheCanCampaign, as well as a writer, activist, speaker, designer, and entrepreneur. Zaniya is a senior at GWU majoring in Political Science and minoring in Human Services and Social Justice. Zaniya is also GWU's 2019-2020 Knapp Fellow.
The Climb Is Our Story is a "program implemented by YesSheCanCampaign and The Multicultural Student Services Center at GWU in partnership with School Without Walls."
Recently, Zaniya published an article in seventeen magazine talking about what inspired her to found and grow YesSheCanCampaign. In 2016, when Zaniya was 18, she "founded a national 501(c)(3) youth-led organization called YesSheCanCampaign that empowers girls overcoming adversity while striving to complete their education."
In her article, Zaniya notes that YesSheCanCampaign began as an Instagram account. Within “4 months,” Zaniya “started to receive emails from people across the country asking about how to get involved with her mission.”
Since founding YesSheCanCampaign, members have “volunteered 10,000+ hours, 
reached 2,000+ students, won five national awards and one national award. In July 2019,” YesSheCanCampaign “became a Princess Diana Award 2019 Holder, which is the largest accolade a young person can achieve for social action or humanitarian efforts.”
Zaniya's article includes how YesSheCanCampaign impacts young women across the US as they overcome adversity and pursue education.
The Elliot School of International Affairs will be hosting a book launch event in celebration of Reclaiming Patriotism, the newest book of Dr.Amitai Etioni, University Professor and Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies.
The event will be on October 1st, from 12:30pm-2:30pm in the Lindner Family Commons (room 602) of the Elliot School of International Affairs (1957 E St. NW, Washington, DC 20052). The event is free, with books available to purchase and a light lunch provided.
RSVP for the event here
Knapp Fellow Yesenia Grajeda Yepez: Project Familia United Aims to Reunite Children at the Border with Families. Her advice to GW Students: “Follow and pursue nagging questions.”
Yesenia Grajeda Yepez is one of the Knapp Fellowship winners for the 2019-2020 school year. Community Engaged Scholar, Maureen Albero, sat down with Yesenia to discuss her project. 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.
Professor Ryder is an Associate Professor of Writing specializing in service learning, composition, academic literacy, faculty librarian partnerships for teaching academic research, rhetoric of democracy, public and community writing. Itohan Amu, a Community Engaged Scholar at the Nashman Center, sat down with Dr. Ryder to learn more about her work.
She has two current publications. The first is a book, Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics https://www.amazon.com/Rhetorics-Community-Action-Cultural-Pedagogy/dp/0739137662 . The second is an article about her evolving understanding of the community partners that she works with, From Reciprocity to Interdependence: Mass Incarceration and Service Learning available here http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=121172789&site=ehost-live
We asked Professor Ryder how she incorporates service learning into her courses. She allows “students to work with organizations in DC in order to have a context to really think about language, writing and communication and also because it sparks some questions that students will often research”. She made clear that she likes it because it helps people to understand that there’s a deeper purpose for the scholarship that happens at the university and understand the amount of impact that the students can make on the community by answering real world questions. Over the years, Professor Ryder has worked with over 20 community partners including: Life Pieces to Masterpieces, DC Central Kitchen, Free Minds Book Club, US Dream Academy and many more.
During the course of her class, Professor Ryder talks about what’s actually happening among community organizations and how they conceptualize social change while doing their work and what it means to bring a community together. Professor Ryder believes that it is important for GW students and professors to be involved in the community because it forces them to keep testing their assumptions. It’s important for them to understand the issues happening today and the new layers that come with it. She stated that “what’s happening on the ground is dynamic and if we’re not plugged into that, then scholars and teachers are not necessarily doing their scholarship fully and are teaching in a limited way. Having that engagement with community keeps them humble and keeps them to adapt theories and goals.”
The Nashman Center appreciates Dr. Ryder’s work as a Nashman Affiliate, she chairs the Black Lives Matter Faculty Learning Community learn more about their work here and community engaged work in her course which you can learn more about here.
I am drawing connections between their sense of belonging and creating a community of practice
“I am drawing connections between their sense of belonging and creating a community of practice within our school community to help affect their academic achievement.”
Kristen Mclnerney is a Knapp Fellow for the 2018-2019 school year. Her research is on newly arrived immigrant students’ experiences in high school and honoring their voices. She has some big takeaways from her Fellowship year. “I have learned so much this year, including survey development, utilizing quantitative and qualitative methods, and going through the IRB process. It has been a difficult but great year. What first started as just ideas, has started to come to fruition. I still have a lot to do but the research is coming together in a way that I never thought was possible. The Nashman Center connected me with the GW Art Therapy Department to build community connections for the school that I work at and also with Dr. Jordan Potash who has helped create a living mural lesson plan that will help our students and staff create a mural.”
The Knapp Fellowship made Kristen’s ideas possible and she completed a pilot study. “The funds have helped me get study items translated to Amharic, Dari, Spanish, and Arabic for my students and their families. Translation services are very expensive; the Fellowship enabled me to make the IRB and research process accessible in home languages.” Kristen recently presented her preliminary data at the CIES conference in San Francisco in April. She notes that this work will extend into next year, and data from the pilot study, will inform a larger study in the fall, Kristen’s dissertation study. Presenting at the Symposium provides her with the opportunity to receive feedback and connect with other students. She notes, “the opportunity to present at the community Symposium through the Nashman Center provides practice in presenting my data and opportunities to connect with other students and faculty. I even had a few students volunteer to help as research assistants in the Fall. The connection with folks and the questions they ask after they heard my presentation was a great opportunity to get feedback.” McInerney finds her two-year research process very rewarding. “Through the Nashman Center, I’ve connected the community with my school. There are doors being opened now with faith-based organizations and other parts of GW with my school. I’ve learned that our GW and local community is extremely generous and that there are bridges just waiting to be built. It’s absolutely worth taking the time to build those bridges and deepen those connections between the community and our school.”
Kristen has undeniably made great connections in her Knapp Fellowship year to propel her project even further. The Nashman Center is proud of Kristen’s community engaged scholarship!
Dr. Sean D. Cleary, a member of the Nashman Affiliate Faculty, is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology & Biostatistics at the Milken Institute School of Public Health. His work with young adults with autism for class “The Autism Experience: A Public Health Perspective” has been highlighted in GW Today!
We are excited to see a spotlight on the excellent work that Dr. Cleary and his colleagues are doing! Check out the article here. Check out more of our great Nashman Affiliate Faculty here.
Erin Wentzell is an assistant clinical professor in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences Department of Health, Human Function and Rehabilitation Science and the Academic Director for Pediatric Physical Therapy Residency between GW Physical Therapy program and Johns Hopkins Hospital. She is part of our Nashman Affiliated Faculty and recently Itohan Amu, a Scholar with the Nashman Community Engaged Scholarship team sat down to learn more about Wentzell’s work.
As an instructor Wentzell teaches a community engaged service-learning course called “Interprofessional Community Practicum”, which discusses health equity, social determinants of health, and how health is impacted by community and socio demographic factors. Professor Wentzell incorporates service learning into her course, her students work with community partners in the DC area who work with underserved populations. Students hear about the communities in class but are able to see it face to face and understand it better through their service and partnership.
Professor Wentzell and her course work with community partners that look at health in a broader sense in underserved populations. Catalysts sports, Whitman Walker Health and Youth Services, Washington Senior Wellness, Department of Defense, HSC Kids in Action adaptive sports program, NRH adaptive sports and boxing program, The Playtime Project, the National Park Service just to name a few. While teaching this course, professor Wentzell has learned that she’s not the only one out there doing community engaged scholarship. She is motivated by the amazing people in the DC area with a level of passion and engagement. She noted that while “it takes a lot of upfront work to set up partnerships, there is nothing compared to it, because students end up learning from it, the community benefits from it, and we are proud of it at the end.”
Wentzell believes that it is important for GW professors and students to be involved in the community because they need to realize that we are all neighbors and part of the Foggy Bottom community. However, she notes it is also important that we ensure it is reciprocal relationship, the community helps the students grow and develop and we can make an impact in the community and that makes the community a better place for all of us.
Wentzell imparted some healthy wisdom to an outside of GW audience recently check out her quote in w Outside magazine https://www.outsideonline.com/2393660/ask-your-doctor-if-nature-right-you
Nana Evison, a scholar at the Nashman Center, spoke with Dr. Manuel Cuellar, one of our Nashman Affiliated Faculty about his Community-Engaged Scholarship. You can learn more about Nashman Affiliates here.
Dr. Cuellar is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literatures and Cultures in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, in the Department of Romance, German, and Slavic Languages and Literatures. His research and teaching at GWU are centered on Mexican and Latin American literary and cultural studies on race, gender, and sexuality using ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and studies of contemporary and classical Nahuatl.
We asked Cuellar to describe his work and how he incorporated it into his course, SPAN 4480 Studies in Latinx Cultural Production. “My work looks at the role of movement and dance, in particular, in Mexico in public spaces. I study how dance became crucial to understanding questions of national belonging at the beginning of the twentieth century in Mexico right after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. For over twenty years I have been a traditional Mexican folk dancer. One way I have been able to incorporate my knowledge and expertise in Mexican dance is to bring it to the classroom and extrapolate that to service.”
He stresses the importance of rehearsal. “At the end of the day, that is what my students do in the classroom; they rehearse ideas. They’re trying to understand different concepts about Latin America and Latinx communities in the United States by thinking critically and rehearsing what it means to interrogate these questions about national belonging, gender, sexuality, and interracial diversity in Latin America and the US.”
We wanted to know Dr. Cuellar’s thoughts about community-engaged scholarship and collaborating with people outside of classrooms. “I think when you think of Latinidad, you usually imagine the Mexican American community on one hand, and the Caribbean diaspora on the other. However, the largest population of Latinx people in the area are from Central America, particularly from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. We need to think about how we engage these particular communities, not just theoretically, especially if we think of the students that we get here at GW: their lived experiences and backgrounds.”
In talking about the community-engaged scholarship that students do in his course, Cuellar notes, “I want them to be flexible in terms of the kinds of service that they can provide, considering their internships and paid jobs, and not to think of this as a burden but as an opportunity to enhance their learning. My responsibility as a professor is to enhance my students’ knowledge and to have them think about how knowledge is created, and the places where that knowledge is created. Without doing community engaged work, we wouldn’t really get to that part. Knowledge can’t be reduced to the classroom. We work with different kinds of organizations because in our department we have an incredible program; it is called Operación Impacto; that is run by one of my colleagues, Dolores Perillan. She has already created an incredible network of various communities. This vast network consists of the Latin American Youth Center, Somos Familia, and DC Bilingual, to only name a few.”
The Nashman Center is delighted to have Manuel Cuellar as a Nashman Affiliated Faculty Member. To learn more about Community Engaged Scholarship Courses, click here.
Professor Gregor D. Squires, a Nashman Affiliate Faculty member and Professor of Sociology and Public Policy & Public Administration, will be teaching the Social Problems in America (SOC 2105) Engaged Scholarship/Service-Learning class in Fall 2019. The Nashman Faculty Update wanted to highlight this class for those who might be interested as registration comes up soon!
The class aims to integrate students into the city to see first-hand the problems addressed in the readings, lectures, films, and other classroom activities. It includes guest speakers who are actively engaged in addressing critical issues facing the DC community, attendance and analysis of an event in DC (e.g. Congressional hearing, theatrical performance, political demonstration, museum exhibit) and volunteering with a local non-profit advocacy or service delivery organization. The final paper will be an assessment of the causes, consequences, and potential solutions of a critical social problem based on students’ experiences on and off campus.
To read more about the class, check out the page from Fall 2018 on GivePulse here. You can also check out our previous interview with Professor Squires here.
Professor Gregor D. Squires, a Nashman Affiliate Faculty member and Professor of Sociology and Public Policy & Public Administration, will be teaching the Social Problems in America (SOC 2105) Engaged Scholarship/Service-Learning class in Fall 2019. The Nashman Faculty Update wanted to highlight this class for those who might be interested as registration comes up soon!
The class aims to integrate students into the city to see first-hand the problems addressed in the readings, lectures, films, and other classroom activities. It includes guest speakers who are actively engaged in addressing critical issues facing the DC community, attendance and analysis of an event in DC (e.g. Congressional hearing, theatrical performance, political demonstration, museum exhibit) and volunteering with a local non-profit advocacy or service delivery organization. The final paper will be an assessment of the causes, consequences, and potential solutions of a critical social problem based on students’ experiences on and off campus.
To read more about the class, check out the page from Fall 2018 on GivePulse here. You can also check out our previous interview with Professor Squires here.
Bianca Trinidad, a scholar with Community Engaged Scholarship at the Nashman Center sat down with Dr. Anna Helm, a Nashman Affiliate from the GW School of Business (GWSB), to learn more about the possibilities and challenges of performing community-engaged work within GWSB.
Dr. Helm holds multiple roles at GW: as a faculty member in the Department of International Business, as the Director of the Center for International Business Education and Research (GW-CIBER), and as the Principal Investigator of a Teagle Foundation Grant related to the integration of Liberal Arts into the undergraduate business curriculum at GWSB.
Dr. Helm’s primary role is as a faculty member, teaching courses on international business and international marketing in particular, occasionally offering specialty courses like Foreign Market Analysis, Cultural Environment of International Business, and International Perspectives on Green Business, along with short-term study aboard consulting courses. These specialty courses pinpoint Dr. Helm’s passions: consulting, culture and sustainability. In the Green Business course specifically, she teaches sustainability from an international and service-learning perspective, engaging “glocally” with local organizations like Martha’s Table as well as international non-profits. Longer term, her overseas consulting courses focus specifically on intensive consulting projects for international clients – typically in the CleanTech or Healthcare industries – assisting innovative international start-ups in bringing their product solutions into the U.S. marketplace.
As a long-standing committee member for CoreFac, which helps develop programming for undergraduate students at GWSB, Dr. Helm strives to embody the focus of the Teagle Foundation by bringing liberal arts learning into the undergraduate business curriculum within GWSB. Dr. Helm explains that as a part of the Teagle Foundation Grant, professors from the Columbian College have developed and taught modules in their specialty areas – Arabic, German, and Korean language and culture - within her Cultural Environment of International Business course.
With a bigger global picture in mind, Dr. Helm also is the Director of GW-CIBER, a center derived from a federal Title VI Grant from the Department of Education to promote U.S. competitiveness abroad. GW-CIBER promotes the nation’s capacity for international understanding and economic enterprise by supporting research and educational programming related to international business and by conducting outreach to the corporate community.
Dr. Helm shared what she likes about her community engaged work with us and why it is important:
“I really enjoy the interaction with students and especially to see them apply their theoretical knowledge in the real world and then bring back practical insights to the classroom. The community engagement in the Business School looks a bit different from what is done in other disciplines. We tend to focus on firms mostly and our students bring their talents and skills to help those companies succeed in their markets. Personally, I have opted to work within industries that I consider important for the common good and which can help ensure a sustainable future for all, such as the CleanTech and Healthcare industries.”
And what about the mix between local and global engagement for her students?
“I want to do more, and I do think that there are a lot of ways to engage, but it’s hard to implement it while purely focusing on non-profits. My personal limitation is that I teach international business, and invariably the intimacy of getting students involved in their local business communities is not always possible. Most of the time we are working with firms across the globe, and that distance fundamentally changes the experience for both students and faculty.”
As noted earlier, Dr. Helm’s passion lies in sustainability and culture, and we wanted to learn more. To explain, Dr. Helm told us about her time growing up in Sweden and how that impacted her thinking:
“Coming from Sweden which has a much greater focus on sustainability, I was baffled at some of the wasteful behaviors that I observed when I moved to the U.S. back in the 90s. When I first arrived here as an exchange student, having never set foot in the United States before, I remember how surprised I was that my host family used disposable plates. I also noted that people took much longer shower and that they did not turn off the water while shampooing their hair. In Sweden we grew up with a love of nature and a focus on taking care of the community. As children we even had songs to sing while we were outside picking up trash. I was just a totally different world. I think those experiences are what really prompted me to focus on sustainability and clean technology. In my opinion, CleanTech is right at the intersection of Sweden’s passion for engineering and technology and its love of nature. Sweden is a world leader in high-tech innovation, and sustainability is ingrained into the whole process of the conceptualization and development of new products. On a personal level, culture is my lens to international business. To figure out how a culture is distinctive and how to define in positive ways how that culture can productively engage in international business solutions is truly fascinating.”
As always, we ask faculty to share a favorite story about their course and Dr. Helm described her shared success through the experience of a former student:
“I really take pride in the fact that students are getting real-life experiences in my courses to bring to their future careers. One student e-mailed me after her first big meeting at PriceWaterhouseCoopers with all the new recruits and told me that the people in charge had asked the new employees “Is there anybody here who knows about hypothesis-driven consulting?” which is a method that I had used in my class. My former student was so excited because she was the only one of 50 new recruits who knew what that was and had actively used the approach in a real-client consulting project. For me it was really fulfilling to know that what we do in my Foreign Market Analysis consulting course does have a positive and tangible impact on students.”
Not only does she share successes with individuals but on a greater scale, Dr. Helm’s commitment to Community Engaged Scholarship has led her to a greater appreciation of the feedback loop between academia and experience:
“I find that it is fulfilling both for the faculty and the students to work together on research projects. I personally have a small research team consisting of current students and alumni that works on my green consumer behavior research project. It is fulfilling to know that you are giving students a chance to be embedded in the academic community of the university, helping them explore career options and prepare for the real world. We get them involved and thereby help them become more thoughtful and engaged global citizens. I also think that for faculty it is important to be connected to the real world, because it is so easy to be cocooned in academia with our specialized research. To branch out and actually understand the implications of your research in the real world and having to bring back that feedback and those insights from the world outside to what you do allows us to develop a fresh perspective. There is really a kind of symbiosis there, in which you need to have that blood or pulse from the real world - to be a better teacher and researcher.”
And if students are interested in learning more about international business, marketing, or sustainability?
“I am currently teaching Foreign Market Analysis, which is my consulting course. I also teach Cultural Environment of International Business. That’s the course into which we have incorporated the Liberal Arts by bringing in faculty from the Columbian College to teach about the connection between language and culture. That course focuses on cross-cultural differences in managing and motivating people from different cultures and how to optimally lead diverse teams.”
The Nashman Center thanks Dr. Helm for sharing these insights with us. To learn more about our community engaged faculty click here, and for information on our community engaged courses click here.
Dr. Tara Scully, a Nashman Affilated Faculty member and Assistant Professor of Biology, will be recognized at the 9th Annual Faculty Honors Ceremony, which will take place on Tuesday, April 23rd, at 4:00 p.m. in the Jack Morton Auditorium. She will be recognized, along with several other teachers, and awarded the Morton A. Bender Teaching Award, which awards $1,000 to faculty for professional development. You can find more information about the event here and more information about the Morton A. Bender Teaching Awards here.
Dr. Scully has been an incredible asset to her students, teaching one of the largest service-learning classes at GW, with over 100 students. She shared her experiences with the Nashman Center in a faculty spotlight that we highly recommend you take a look at here. Congratulations to Dr. Scully for the well-earned award!
