Category: Uncategorized

This week’s (Nov 25, 2016) Chronicle of Higher Education included several pieces commenting on the implications of the presidential elections for higher education. One I found particularly compelling was by Erik Klinenberg, “Professors in a Post-Truth Era.” (Apologies for broken links - The Chronicle is subscription-only).

“There is one thing that universities must do better: teach students skills for learning, discerning, reasoning, and communicating in an informational environment dominated by quick hits on social media like Twitter and Facebook. Like it or not, social media is at the center of the new public sphere. This election leaves no doubt that candidates, campaigns, and their surrogates can make great use of it: planting memes, spreading rumors, building communities. Professors know how to help students work through difficult ideas in books and articles. But except for some of us in the learning sciences, few of us have thought much about how to help students develop critical-thinking skills for the media that they use most.”

- Eric Klinenberg, professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU.

I do believe it is the charge of all who work in higher education to prepare students for their civic as well as their professional lives. Some have argued that the learning outcomes and skills for students' civic and professional lives are the same (critical thinking, communication, problem solving, etc.). But Klinenberg has pointed out that the context of this learning matters.

I do not believe that the charge to meet the public good aims of higher education requires that we completely re-design our courses. However, we do need to recommit to explicitly addressing the learning needed for the civic context of our students' lives, and whatever large or small shifts to our courses that requires.

A Washington Post article on how to engage students in civic education was posted on Saturday. The article has a couple of examples of current methods being used by faculty to teach about civic education. The article mostly focuses on civic education in the context of the recent election results. You can read all about Molly W. Andolina and Hilary G. Conklin's research as well as Steve Zemelman's research here.

Diverse Issues in Higher Education published an article by Lydia Lum about Georgetown Professor Dr. Marcia Chatelain's syllabus about the shooting of Michael Brown by a White police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The syllabus has been a resource for educators across the country to speak about the recent events surrounding the shootings of Black men and race in general in our country.

You can read the full article here.

Nashman Center staff found several worthwhile articles in this issue, particularly those focused on, “community partnerships and the educational benefits that arise for all participants.”  Link here for access the full text of all articles, http://seceij.net/seceij/summer16/index.html

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.

April 5, 2016

What: A Moment or a Movement? Why Black Lives Matter on the Path to Equitable Development in Washington, DC

Where: The George Washington University Marvin Center Grand Ballroom, Third Floor

About: Movement building is the focus of the third annual conference on equitable development in Washington, DC co-sponsored by ONE DC and The George Washington University. Bringing together residents from all parts of the DC area, organizers, students, developers, elected officials, and all who are concerned with sustainable, equitable development, this conference will build on the ongoing efforts to create more democratic and just communities in Washington, DC.

Register today! Click here.

On behalf of the George Washington University Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service, it is our pleasure to formally invite you to our César Chávez Day Celebration that will take place on March 31st, 2016 on the Marvin Center third floor, from 4:00 to 8:00 PM.

Honoring the life, work, and values of César Chávez, this event will be a unique and exciting opportunity to join together as a community of dedicated individuals and organizations committed to ensuring the continued legacy of one of the twentieth century’s foremost civil rights activists, and a true American hero.

March 31st will be a day to educate the greater George Washington community on the life and works of César Chávez, advocate for the social justice issues that still affect our society and, most of all, celebrate the service and commitment to reform that César Chávez embodied every day of his life.

The GW César Chávez Planning Committee is currently working together with over 30 different organizations, both on and off campus, to ensure that this pioneering event brings the George Washington and greater DC communities together in their shared commitment to justice and service. As we strive to ensure the continued legacy of César Chávez, we hope you will join us in building a tradition of celebration, service, commitment, and dedication for years to come.

As a communal celebration and event, all members of the George Washington community are invited to join. Please share with us your wisdom, work, and example in honor of César Chávez as an attendee, speaker or panelist.

We look forward to sharing together in this celebration and call to action!

¡Sí se puede!

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will fund projects that bring environmental education to communities and that promote environmental stewardship. Applications are open until April 8, 2016. Each applicant can be awarded up to $91,000 for their project. Click here for more information about the application and grant requirements.