A number of collaborative councils exist in the District of Columbia to work on neighborhood-based prevention services. Such groups work together to improve the lives of community members in the DC area. The group each have a different set of goals as per the talents of the combined efforts of the involved community partners and the needs of the communities they serve.

Examples of work include family services to maintain healthy and strong families, develop the unemployed and underemployed to build a robust economy, and prevent youth violence. Partners differ based on the neighborhood and include local and national organizations alike. Prominent partners include the American Red Cross, Capital Area Food Bank, and the Sasha Bruce Youthwork.

These councils provide a great basis for community-based research and great connection to partners conducting positive initiatives in their local neighborhood. Check out the work these councils do as well as connect with them on future projects by communicating through their website: http://dccollaboratives.org/the-collaboratives/

The Truman Scholars program is a $30,000 merit-based award for college juniors who intend to pursue a career in public service of some kind. The award provides assistance for graduate or professional study that will prepare the student for a government or public-service career. Students should begin their application process now.

Students must be nominated, and GW may nominate up to four students each year. Students must apply to GW to be selected for nomination by November 20, 2015. Please encourage your students to apply, and support them with recommendation letters.

For more information about the Truman Scholarship, visit the Truman website. For more information about the GW nomination process for this award, visit this website provided by the Center for Undergraduate Fellowships and Research.

The Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering (CEOSE) has submitted the 2013-2014 report to Congress. The report highlights the potential of the National Science Foundation to,

“be the catalyst to help higher education take greater responsibility for a diverse STEM workforce, transforming STEM at all levels and educating STEM domestic talent that fully reflects and represents the US population.”

Below are the links to the cover letter from the CEOSE committee, the two-page summary of the report’s recommendations, and the full 2013-2014 CEOSE Report to Congress.

CEOSE Advisory Committee Colleague Letter

CEOSE 2013-2014 Report Summary

CEOSE 2013-2014 Biennial Report

The Nashman Center Executive Director Amy Cohen shares this interesting discussion at the American Council on Education’s 97th Annual Meeting. The interview, held here in DC, was broadcast nationally via the NPR program, On Being, and both the written transcript and the recording are available here. 

As Amy Cohen shared with us, the interview offers,”quite different perspectives, about higher education, the connections between the curriculum and the “real world,” civic engagement, neighborliness, civility, and living with the history and legacy of slavery and racism.”

We encourage you to have a listen and continue the conversations.

The general public is invited to “an afternoon conversation with Alicia Garza.” Tuesday, Oct 20th, 4:30pm, Grand Ballroom, Stamp Student Union, University of Maryland. Please link for more information.

Share widely with your colleagues, it is that time of year again. Applications are now available (link to a PDF here) for the Nashman Center’s mini-grant competition to support community engaged scholarship and teaching at GW.

The purpose of these awards is to promote the development and institutionalization of new community-engaged scholarship opportunities that are consistent with the University strategic plan.

Funds are available to support

• Development of new or ongoing academic service-learning courses
• Community-based participatory research and publishing engaged scholarshipEfforts to engage entire departments community-engaged scholarship through teaching, learning and research
• Activities that promote individual or group professional development in community-engaged scholarship
• Research about engaged scholarship and teaching

Timeline

• December 11, 2015: Proposals Due
• January 29, 2016: Grant Recipients Selected and Notified
• March 2016: Funds distributed.
• End of Spring 2017: All activities for this round of funding must be complete.

As a reminder, all posts to the e-newsletter for community engaged faculty  remain on the Faculty Foci blog to review in your own time. Click the categories in the right-hand column to find the posts that interest you most. Enjoy and forward to your colleagues.

The Nashman Center is proud to announce that GW has received the “Engaged Campus Award” sponsored by the Maryland-DC Campus Compact. The award is in recognition for our institutional commitment to community-engagement.

“This is the region’s highest award for a community-engaged campus which is actively seeking to fulfill the public purposes of higher education.”

We thank President Knapp and the community of faculty at GW who are committed to connecting scholarship and community engagement.

The Nashman Center is proud to announce that GW has received the “Engaged Campus Award” sponsored by the Maryland-DC Campus Compact. The award is in recognition for our institutional commitment to community-engagement.

“This is the region’s highest award for a community-engaged campus which is actively seeking to fulfill the public purposes of higher education.”

We thank President Knapp and the community of faculty at GW who are committed to connecting scholarship and community engagement.

You must explore this incredibly valuable resource: an excellent online curriculum of ten learning units covering issues such as service-learning course planning, building course infrastructure, establishing community-campus partnerships, building cultural competence, and pursuing service-learning scholarship. The curriculum includes case studies, worksheets, research findings, and sample syllabi from over 60 different disciplines.

This resource was originally create by Community-Campus Partnerships for Health and recently redesigned by California Campus Compact and Campus Compact of the Mountain West. Click here: https://ccph.memberclicks.net/efi-units

Additional materials are available for those interested in using the curriculum to facilitate a collective faculty institute experience. If your department or other collective of engaged faculty are interested in exploring that option, please contact the Nashman Center – we would love to support you. Email: gwsl@gwu.edu

A Year in Review is a new initiative of the Honey W. Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service, which will share the narratives of the community engaged work across GW. Our goal is to deepen the discourse about public service, underscore our shared commitment to community engagement and share important stories from the campus and community.

A Year in Review: Curricular Engagement Magazine will feature the stories of GW’s exemplars of engaged scholarship, highlighting:

• Community Based Participatory Research
• Engaged Teaching
• Academic/Community Partnerships
• Our Students’ Engaged Work

On a rolling basis until February 22, 2016, the Nashman Center will be asking for your help as we gather these stories. Please consider submitting a brief narrative about your service-learning course or community based research project. You might encourage your students to submit reflective course work describing their journey in service-learning. Perhaps your community partners may submit a piece describing academic service from their perspectives.

More details on the submission process to come – for now, please consider how you might share your story.

As you know, the Fall 2015 Service-Learning Symposium is scheduled for December 9, 2015. Link here for more information about having your students participate.

This year, the Spring Symposium will be replaced by a new celebration of community engagement and public service: A Year in Review.  This event, April 26th, 2016, will highlight GW’s stories of community based research, service-learning, academic/community partnerships, and our students’ own accomplishments in service. These same stories will be featured in an online publication, A Year in Review: Curricular Engagement Magazine.

We are looking forward to gathering your stories about courses, research, community partnerships and the positive impact being made for our community and on transformational student learning. It will be a wonderful event, please mark your calendar now!

The eJournal of Public Affairs has posted a call for papers for their special issue on civic leadership for social justice. Submissions might include empirical studies, theoretical frameworks, innovative use of community-engaged scholarship to advance student leadership and social justice skills, community initiatives or other efforts to, “conceptualize, teach, and assess civic leadership that advances claims of social justice at all levels…”

Deadline to submit is January 11, 2016. Link for more information.

The Nashman Center and the GW community of engaged faculty are looking forward to GW Teaching Day this Friday (Oct 9, 2015). In anticipation of the keynote speaker, Dr. Elizabeth Barkley and her ideas related to involving students in collaborative learning, we found a recently published study worthy of note. The study findings suggest a connection between service learning courses and increases in group work skills.

The study examined several potential learning outcomes of service learning, and found statistically significant evidence for two: civic responsibility and interpersonal skills. The interpersonal skills learning outcome includes competencies like teamwork, leadership, and verbal communication. We encourage you to check it out.

Hébert, A., & Hauf, P. (2015). Student learning through service learning: Effects on academic development, civic responsibility, interpersonal skills and practical skills. Active Learning in Higher Education, 16(1), 37–49. http://doi.org/10.1177/1469787415573357.  Link: http://alh.sagepub.com/content/16/1/37.full.pdf+html

Many service-learning courses engage students in group work relative to their service projects. In fact, for many faculty, students’ ability to work effectively in those teams is an aspect of the course learning goals. It is surprising then that there isn’t more empirical literature connecting these service learning projects to the development of collaboration skills. Given the many fine examples of service learning and group work here at GW, this is a gap in the literature that might be ours to fill.

The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) has shared the first in a series of blog posts on Impact Measures. The first submission shares three measures of critical consciousness, potentially quite useful tools for researching/evaluating the impact of civic engagement initiatives.

Critical consciousness is a concept put forward by Paulo Freire and is connected to the ability of marginalized of oppressed groups to reflect on social injustice and act to address oppressive conditions. These three quantitative instruments,

“assess youths’ thinking about social inequalities, their motivation to engage in action, and their actual participation to change perceived inequalities.” (http://www.civicyouth.org/guest-post-critical-consciousness-impact-measures/)