Thursday I had the opportunity to co-present a brief session, “Models and Methods of Ethical Engagement,” at the Association of American Colleges and Universities Annual Meeting. Many thanks to Jennifer Magee, Senior Associate Director, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, Swarthmore College, for inviting me to co-present with her and her colleague, Katie Price, who is Assistant Director at the Lang Center. I ended up presenting primarily on one slice of our work at Haverford – how we prepare students for ethical engagement during summer internships. I share related resources – and some initial thinking about what we miss or ignore – below. We also covered some new ground, which I’m going to explore in another post tomorrow, followed by the many questions we continue to explore about next steps for people taking this work seriously.
Ethical Global Engagement? What do we avoid, what do we do, and how do we evaluate it?
- Straight avoidance of particular forms of “service” and engagement.
- Careful advising and intentional partnerships.
- Further preparing accepted students for ethical engagement.
- Who am I as a cultural being, and how does my identity intersect with power, privilege, inclusion, exclusion, and safety where I will be working? I should note that among the population of students accepted for internships in recent years, approximately half are nonwhite. Our activities don’t presume our students’ identities, but root themselves in processes of self-exploration and identification, coupled with consideration of the ways in which identity expression may shift in different contexts.
- How will I be an appropriate, culturally humble guest and contributor in the community and organization where I’ll work this summer?
- How can I work through ethical and professional challenges I may face this summer? Who are my resources where I will be, at the College, and online? How will I proactively practice a healthy approach to self-care?
- How can I ethically represent my experiences and stories others may share with me this summer – in story sharing, social media, photography, writing,? (This includes what not to represent or share).
- How does this summer experience relate to the roles I may take up now and later in life, relating to vocation, personal habits, conscious consumption, and local and global citizenships?
- Bodies of Injustice: Health, Illness, and Healing in Contexts of Inequality with Dr. Carol Schilling
- Development, Human Rights and Transnational Injustices with Dr. Thomas J. Donahue
- Human Rights in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania – in National and Global Contexts with Dr. Eric Hartman
- Enhance the extent to which our work is community-driven and otherwise follows Fair Trade Learning principles
- Collaborate with faculty to create more opportunities for increasingly sophisticated experiential learning
- Provide students with scaffolded curricular pathways for global civic engagement
- Produce outcomes that derive from community-articulated desires