The Nashman Center has a new opportunity that we are excited to share with you.

In April, we will launch our first-ever Academic Service-Learning Magazine: A Year in Review! We hope to feature articles, reflections, papers, art, photos, and more submitted by our service-learning students, faculty, and community partners.

We would appreciate if you could share this announcement with your students so that they start to consider a project they would like to submit for publishing. You can also submit your own reflections and/or nominate students and community partners to share something with us.

We are eager to get the word out about all the great work that GW is doing to collaborate with the DC community. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email the Academic Service-Learning at gwsl@gwu.edu. Submissions can be sent for review to this address as well. The deadline will be in March 11, 2016 at 5 pm.

Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to hearing from you and your classes!

To All full-time Faculty at Maryland-DC Campus Compact member institutions,

The Office of Service-Learning at Loyola University Maryland invites full-time faculty from Maryland Campus Compact member institutions to participate as Guest Fellows in its 2016 Faculty Fellows Seminar on Service-Learning and Engaged Scholarship. Initially, we have space for five Guest Fellows this year.

Seminar dates: May 16-19th and August 30th.

Three of the May dates (Mon., Tues., Thurs.) are half days (9 am to 12 noon)…with the exception of Thursday, which ends with a luncheon from 12:30-1:30. Breakfast is provided on these days.

On May 18th and Aug. 20th, we meet from 9 am to 3 pm. Breakfast and lunch are provided.

Participants must be able to attend all sessions of the seminar.

There is a nominal fee of $300 to cover food and resources for the seminar.

In addition, Guest Fellows are expected to arrange for their own accommodations and travel and cover those costs.

Please see the attached invitation for details and the registration form.
Guest Fellow spaces fill up quickly. If you are interested, please complete the accompanying registration as soon as possible and email a signed, scanned version of it to Robin Crews (email: rcrews@loyola.edu).

Applications will be accepted in the order in which they are received.

For more information, please contact Robin Crews. [(410) 617-2112] [rcrews@loyola.edu]

 

Overview

The Faculty Fellows Seminar is an opportunity to learn about service-learning pedagogy and integrate it into an appropriate course in the company of friends and colleagues from a number of departments (and institutions). It is also an opportunity to learn about other types of engaged scholarship in addition to service-learning.

Faculty Fellows:

• investigate the theories and models of learning behind service-learning;
• discover how others have successfully integrated service-learning into their own disciplines and courses at Loyola and at colleges and universities nationally and internationally;
• explore syllabi and principles of good practice by prominent leaders in their fields and academe;
• provide and receive feedback on course development in interactive small groups
• engage in a comprehensive look at structured reflection and its role in integrating diverse forms of learning;
• meet community partners and explore reciprocal partnerships;
• inquire into methodologies of assessment and evaluation;
• review the ‘nuts and bolts’ of teaching service-learning courses at Loyola;
• learn about various forms of engaged scholarship in addition to service-learning; and
• integrate service-learning into one of their courses so that they comply with Loyola’s service-learning definition and course criteria for best practices (i.e., for successful designation as service-learning courses following the seminar).

Abstract: As we scale up engagement with communities around the world, how do we ensure that the foundational engagement principles of responsiveness, respect, and accessibility are never compromised? While community engagement is important and can have a dramatic positive impact, it can also result in unintended negative consequences for all stakeholders, including community members, students, faculty, and staff. At Penn State, we are developing a framework for an Engagement Review Board (ERB) to proactively educate university members about the principles and best practices of engagement, and to work with them to ensure that collaborative projects benefit all stakeholders in spirit and substance. This article summarizes the larger challenge of equitable community engagement and makes the case that there is a need for additional protection such as through an ERB. The various resources and functions that can be provided by an ERB across the life cycle of engagement projects are described. The objective is to stimulate discussion on how we can collectively develop an infrastructure—undergirded by a “culture of concern” rather than a “culture of compliance”—to strengthen and mainstream community engagement without making it more onerous to all stakeholders.

By Irena Gorski, Eric Obesysekare, Careen Yarnal, and Khanjan Mehta

October 26th, 2015    Published in the Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship Vol. 8 No. 2

To read the full article: http://jces.ua.edu/responsible-engagement-building-a-culture-of-concern-2/

The Association for Moral Education’s 42nd annual conference is on December 8-11, 2016 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, MA. It is cosponsored by Tisch College at Tufts.

Civic Engagement: a cultural revolution?  the expanding definitions of civic participation, their intersections with ethics, and the implications for education

Call for Proposals: All are welcome to submit symposia, papers, posters, and media presentations related to civic engagement and education. Deadline: March 14, 2016.

For more information, please visit the conference website.

“Creating new solutions to enduring problems can be difficult, especially if you don’t know where to start. Design thinking gives you the tools and processes you need to focus your efforts where they will add the most value.

“Design is the action of bringing something new and desired into existence—a proactive stance that resolves or dissolves problematic situations by design. It is a compound of routine, adaptive and design expertise brought to bear on complex dynamic situations.” —Harold Nelson

It can take years to become a professional designer, but there are resources out there that teach the basics of design thinking in a fraction of the time. If you wanted to get a view on the fundamentals of design thinking, you can’t go wrong with the following list of resources. Here are six resources that will help you understand and implement design thinking in every facet of your life.”

Source: TeachThought; Click here to go to the full article.

Building a Bridge Between Engineering and the Humanities

By Julio Ottino & Gary Saul Morson

(Feb 14 2016)

“An educational system that merges humanities and sciences, creating whole-brain engineers and scientifically inspired humanists, fosters more than just innovation. It yields more-flexible individuals who adapt to unanticipated changes as the world evolves unpredictably.”

“Like literature, engineering sometimes works not by satisfying recognized needs but by creating the needs it satisfies.”

To read the full article, click here.

NCSCE and SENCER have released a new enewsletter. The newsletter offers a number of new opportunities including upcoming symposia and opportunities at other institutions. The newsletter is a great resource for anyone looking for opportunities related to service-learning in STEM.

You can access and subscribe to receive this newsletter here:  https://ncsce.wildapricot.org/eNewsSignup

Apply to gain all-expense paid, hands-on, year-long training in Community-Based Participatory Research at the Detroit Urban Research Center's CBPR Partnership Academy. Each team includes a community member and an academic researcher.

Training focusing on solving health inequities in their communities and offers three core components including a week-long intensive course, mentorship and opportunities for one year in the field of CBPR, and access to the a network of community-engaged scholars.

Only 12 teams are selected and the deadline to apply is February 15th, 2016. You can access the application here. More information can be found here.

A new piece was published recently this year by the Kettering Foundation titled Dynamics of Faculty Engagement in the Movement for Democracy's Education at Northern Arizona University: Background, Practices, and Future Horizons by Romand Coles and Blase Scarnati. The piece focuses on the recent renewal of civic energy into higher education faculty further increasing the civic culture of their institutions.

Here is the abstract:

As scholarship has become increasingly narrow and disconnected from public life, Kettering research has documented an intense sense of malaise in higher education, what Harry Boyte has called a loss of civic agency. Surprisingly, however, faculty at a few campuses have begun to self-organize to integrate civic work into their teaching and research. This study, by Blase Scarnati and Romand Coles, documents such efforts at Northern Arizona University. Rather than making civic engagement a specific project of one or two faculty, what makes this campus special is that civic engagement has taken hold across the university. Building on research byKerryAnn O’Meara, this working paper shows that civic engagement is not only fulfilling to faculty at an individual level but is starting to impact the civic culture of their institutions.

You can read the full article as a free download on the Ketterling Foundation website here:

https://www.kettering.org/catalog/product/dynamics-faculty-engagement-movement-democracy%E2%80%99s-education-northern-arizona

NPR recently released an interview by Steve Drummond with authors Diana E. Hess and Paula McAvoy on their new book: The Political Classrom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education. The book discusses the delicate topic of how much politics should be allowed in the classroom.

The full article is available here: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/12/16/459673575/politics-in-the-classroom-how-much-is-too-much?ft=nprml&f=1001

Civic Aspirations: Why Some Higher Education Faculty are Reconnecting Their Professional and Public Lives was released this year. The piece discusses the motivations behind faculty who focus on civic initiatives even though it may not offer any bearing to their status at their university.

Here is the Abstract:

In higher education today, most institutions reward faculty for such things as research productivity, course enrollment, and academic completion. There is little incentive for them to focus on educating students in their civic development. In spite of this, civic engagement programs are popping up across higher education, and faculty have played a critical role in initiating these programs on their campuses. Building on research by Harry Boyte and KerryAnn O’Meara. The Kettering Foundation seeks to make visible the motivations of these faculty. In this study for Kettering, based on faculty interviews, Claire Snyder-Hall explains this movement using Hannah Arendt’s concept of “public happiness,” a sense of fulfillment from engaging with others. Beyond higher education, this study has relevance across fields to practitioners struggling to integrate their civic aspirations into their professional work.
The full work can be read as a free download on the Kettering Foundation website here: https://www.kettering.org/catalog/product/civic-aspirations

Early registration for Science Education for New Civic Engagement (SENCER)’s Summer Institute this summer is Nov 4 – March 11. The Summer Institute tracks this year will include: Working and Teaching with Data and Public Engagement with Science.  Link here for more information. 

The Community-Campus Partnerships for Health recently announced their Fall Regional Community Partner Forums, to be held in Denver, Minneapolis, and Boston. For more information on the forum, please visit here.

A community-partner forum is an interesting model, and one that might be usefully replicated here in the DC-region, particularly given the number of institutions of higher education here.

The goal of each forum is to “support the ability of community-based organizations and community leaders to play significant roles as partners in research, ultimately ensuring that the results of research are used to eliminate health disparities and achieve health equity in their communities.” They work by fostering regional networks, connecting with existing regional efforts, and helping community members to negotiate community-academic research partnerships.