The Journal of Public Scholarship in Higher Education is an academic peer-reviewed journal with a focus on community/civic engagement. They are now soliciting peer reviewers, higher education faculty and staff with a terminal degree and a background in community/civic engagement research and/or practice. This is a great opportunity to connect to the national community of engaged scholarship.

This report highlights important needs in our local community, particularly related to social and economic justice for young people of color. Disparities include access to higher education, employment and earnings.

Link to Report

This article from the Chronicle sparked a lot of conversation in the Center this week. How do we improve our ability to engage students in critical conversations about the events in our communities? How do help students make connections between the practical work they do in the community and our collective goals for social change? How do we help students move from feeling guilt or helplessness to taking action?

Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement is a peer-reviewed online journal from North Carolina Campus Compact.  A few highlights from the latest issue (Vol 6, Num 2, 2015):

• International partnerships enhanced with storytelling practices
• Interdisciplinary service-learning teams through the lens of social ecology theory
• The social construction of difference when service is defined as “volunteerism”

While the “funding opportunities” posts here will tend to focus on external funding sources, this is a good time of year to remember the support available to you right here at GW. A few examples:

Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service: Course Development Grants

Funds available to support the development of service-learning and community-based research courses. Grantees attend workshops and have individual consultations to assist with course design, establishing partnerships with community organizations and other relevant issues. Final proposals to receive 2016/2017 funds are due at the end of January 2016, with decisions made in early February.  Click here for more information.

University Teaching and Learning Center: Peer-Reviewed Explorations in Teaching (PRET)

The PRET program provides an opportunity for you to demonstrate rigorous, peer-reviewed contributions to excellent teaching.  Obviously, at the Center we are enthusiastic about innovations connected to active community engagement (grin) but these grants are open to any proposal that would demonstrate a new approach to teaching and learning in your course. Applications are due in early December. Click here for more information.

Office of Diversity and Inclusion: Innovation in Diversity and Inclusion Grant

These grants support activities that “use the lens of diversity and inclusion to advance GW’s academic, education, research, and service mission.”  The next opportunity to submit a proposal is October 15, 2015.  Click here for more information.

Center for Career Services:  Faculty and Staff Innovation Grants

Supported by the Shenkman Career Services Fund, these $2,000 grants support faculty who create professional and career development activities for undergraduate or graduate students. Connecting applied professional and career skills to service-learning activities is one such option. Proposals for Spring semester awards are due October 1, 2015. Click here for more information.

Campus Compact will be celebrating its 30th anniversary next academic year. The culminating event will be their national conference, March 21-23, 2016 in Boston. Conference session proposals are being welcomed until June 19th.

If you are interested joining with GW colleagues to present on a topic, please let us know. Contact us at gwsl@gwu.edu. Click here for more information. 

The Spencer Foundation provides funding to support a year of study for mid-career (7-20 years post doctorate) scholars who are interested in advancing their understanding of a compelling problem in education. Recipients are released from teaching and service responsibilities in order to explore new areas of study that can connect to their existing scholarship. For example, grantees might invest a year learning new methodological tools or studying the theories of another discipline that might intersect and inform their work in new ways. Proposals are due September 10, 2015.  The funded year is 2016/2017.    Click here for more information.

This time of year, the service-learning listserves and blogs are active with new book and article recommendations. We would like to strike up this conversation at a campus-level, and invite you to share your favorite assigned readings.

As a field that crosses all disciplines, we are always discovering new literature and frameworks that help students more fully understand important issues related to (for example):

• ethical community engagement;
• social inequality;
• the role of citizens in a democracy;
• approaches community engagement (direct service, advocacy, issue research, politics and voting, etc.) and how each leverages social change differently;
• applications of discipline-specific knowledge and skills to one’s civic as well as professional roles;
• how general education goals such as critical thinking, problem solving and communication emerge uniquely as one works in diverse groups toward shared goals

Please use the “comments” space below to share your favorite assigned readings (author, title). The Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service will gather and share these resources to the GW service-learning community on Blackboard.

In their on-going effort to promote ethical community service and fight the sharing of “poverty porn” on social media by otherwise well-meaning volunteers, our colleagues at GlobalSL.org are sponsoring a photography contest.

Entering is easy and open to students, faculty and community partners: post the photo on your instagram account, tagging it with the following:  #globalservice   #ethicalphotography and #GWServes. You can also tag it with the contest category you are entering, such as #mutuallearning.

The contest sponsors have well-articulated guidelines for selecting photos that represent people “truthfully and show dignity, equality, support and integrity… ensuring that those being represented in the images maintain the right to share their story in their own way.”  Share details about the contest with your students and community partners by sending this link: http://globalsl.org/links/global-service-ethical-photography-contest-guidelines/

The service-learning newsfeeds are actively discussing the role of institutions of higher education in addressing the recent events in Baltimore.

Imagining America extended questions for us to all reflect upon and a call to engage in this dialogue further at their annual conference in October – which will be held in Baltimore.  Click herefor recent posts from their blog.  They also have provided suggestions for keeping informed (for example, the UMBC community of faculty, students and alumni are sharing their diverse perspectives on social media using the hashtag #BaltimoreUprising).

Yesterday, Campus Compact posted a bold statement on their blog, regarding higher education’s response to the events in Baltimore.  The post includes a list of action items for institutions of higher education, with implications for faculty, staff, and senior administrators.  Click here for the original post.

Eric Hartman, the editor of one of our favorite blogs, globalsl.org has published an article in International Educator about the role of higher education in fostering meaningful connection across cultures.

Definitely worth your consideration (as is the blog itself if you aren’t already a regular reader), click here for a link to the article.

As we continue to explore the literature on the experiences of service-learning faculty, we have come across another recent article we thought the GW faculty would find interesting.

Harrison, B., Clayton, P. H., & Tilley-Lubbs, G. A. (2014). Troublesome Knowledge, Troubling Experience: An Inquiry into Faculty Learning in Service-Learning. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 20(2), 5.

Click here to link to the article.  (Note: you may need to be logged in to the GW Library system to navigate the link).

The authors encourage faculty to consider applying the scholarship of teaching and learning to our own journey as we learn to facilitate learning through service.  It is based on the theoretical framework of threshold concepts. Threshold concepts are, “those concepts on which a deep understanding of a field of practice and inquiry hinges and which, once understood, open a doorway to otherwise inaccessible ways of thinking.”

The central characteristics of threshold concepts and the three phases of that learning process are applied to the experience of faculty learning to practice service-learning. For example, one possible threshold concept for service-learning faculty is understanding that it is not the service experience, but the reflection and meaning-making on the experience that fosters learning.

What have been the threshold concepts to your learning to practice service-learning? What are the important concepts that opened the door to new ways of thinking about your work as an educator?  How can we use our experiences to mentor other GW faculty?

Given findings in the literature connecting psycho-social wellbeing with community service and other opportunities to engage with the community to make a positive difference, the Center would encourage any faculty or staff interested in exploring those connections to consider applying for funding from Bringing Theory to Practice.  Click here for more info. 

Funding is available for both research projects and hosting seminars/campus discussions about these issues.  Deadlines are August 15, 2015 (for seminar grants) and September 15, 2015 (for research grants). A webinar on these RFPs and logic models is available on the link provided.

Public is a peer-reviewed multimedia e-journal published by Imagining America. Its focus is on the role of humanities, art and design in public life. This issue features continued conversations about the power of story-telling for social change. We encourage you to check it out.

This time of year, we can count on our service-learning listserves conducting a nation-wide discussion of the best books and resources for service-learning and civic engagement. Below are a few of the most compelling submissions we’re seeing.  Please let the Center know if there are any of particular interest to you and we will either invest in our resource library or work with the Gelman Librarians to see that you get a copy in your hands.  Contact Wendy Wagner with those suggestions: wagnerw@gwu.edu.

The Unheard Voices:  Community Organizations and Service Learning by Randy Stoecker and Elizabeth Tryon

World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students by Yong Zhao

Service-Learning in Theory and Practice: The Future of Community Engagement in Higher Education by Dan W. Butin

The Future of Service-Learning: New Solutions for Sustaining and Improving Practice by Jean R. Strait and Mary Lima (Eds).

Toxic Charity by Robert Lupton

Building Playgrounds, Engaging Communities by Marybeth Lima

Social Responsibility and Sustainability:  Multidisciplinary Perspectives Through Service Learning by Virginia Sterling

Coming Full Circle: A Guide to Service-Learning by Joyce Duncan

Transforming Cities and Minds Through the Scholarship of Engagement: Economy, Equity and Environment by L. Hoyt (Ed)

Learning Through Serving by Christine Cress

The Future of Service Learning by Jean Strait and Marybeth Lima

Sentipensante Pedagogy by Laura Rendon

Democratic Professionalism by Albert Dzur

Pushing back the Gates by Harley Ettiene

Social Problems: A Service Learning Approach by Corey Dolgon and Chris Baker

How High Is Up?, by Curtis DeBerg

The Service Learning Companion by Dawn Duncan and Joan Kopperud

Community-based Participatory Research: A Guide to Ethical Principles and Practice

Research on Service Learning (2 volumes) by Patti Clayton, Robert Bringle, and Julie Hatcher (Eds)

International Service Learning by Robert Bringle, Julie Hatcher, and Steven Jones (Eds)

Service-Learning: Engineering in Your Community by Dr. Marybeth Lima