Join a Spring 2023 Community of Practice

Co-Facilitators: Celine Fitzmaurize and Zapoura Newton-Calvert

Our CEL courses have the potential to serve as a practice ground for healthy communities -- they are microcosms of larger society. As long-time practitioners of community-engaged learning,  we are interested in the way that our educational spaces can encourage practice, imagination, and sharing that allow us to grow our skills, beliefs, and relationships in ways that support all of the community spaces of which we are part (including family, work, education, spiritual, and other spaces). This Community of Practice will focus on guiding structures and metaphors that support and scaffold inclusive, participatory learning in critical community-engaged learning spaces, both in-person and online.

Facilitator: Nicholas Currie

Evaluating the best practices to support student-initiated community projects, preparing students to manage project-based partnerships with community organizations, administrative approaches to student activism, and the process by which student input and feedback is considered and implemented.

Facilitator: Castel Sweet

Many campuses are now considering how to engage in the community in more equitable ways. Therefore, it would be beneficial to talk through the various methods and approaches to do so. Exploring the structural and functional integration of DEI and community and civic engagement work could greatly advance our campuses' ability to engage more equitably.

Co-Facilitators: Cindy Vincent and Cynthia Lynch

In this Community of Practice, we invite peers to share their knowledge and experience in cultivating equitable community-engaged partnerships. This CoP will be framed by the six principles of CECL: social justice, power dynamics, community, civic learning objectives, reflexivity, and sustainability. In each session, participants will be invited to collectively imagine/discuss how each principle can be or already is incorporated within their work and why each principle is powerful for creating equitable community engagement. This framework is inherently anti-racist, which will be discussed in every session as well.

Co-Facilitators: Cara Scharf and Maya Stallings

Connected Article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10665684.2012.715534?journalCode=ueee   

Exploring the ways that service-learning represents "whiteness pedagogy" and collectively imagining new ways of structuring service learning experiences that do not recreate this pedagogy but instead utilize different models, such as those found in critical race theory, feminist theory, indigenous ways of knowing, etc. Thinking about how the Civic Engagement spaces cater to white students, as they are heavily based in helping to reveal unjust structures/privileges in our society, which tend to be most hidden to students who benefit from those structures and privileges. What would it look like to design learning experiences that catered to students who already know the harmful effects of these structures and privileges?

Co-Facilitators: Carin Zinter and Shaquan McDowell

Evaluating equity and inclusivity in community and civic engagement at community colleges.

Cofacilitators: Susan Trudeau and Felicia Hartinger

Focuses on techniques to engage students in volunteer civic and community activities in a time when many interests (including life obligations) are competing for their time and strategies to embed attention to their emotional and mental health needs. Volunteering as healing is supported by research, and it even appears in the new Students Learn Students Vote Ask Every Student Academy and programs such as Fresh Check (both implemented at the author's  institution). Facilitators will share research and personal experience of what works, and participants will have an opportunity to discuss individual successes and troubleshoot challenges.

Co-Facilitators: Matt Isola and Tracy Jacobs

Evaluating tools and resources that promote a co-generational and intergenerational approach to community and civic engagement.

Facilitator: Nancy McHugh

Evaluating the importance of a health equity lens in community engagement. How can we successfully bring this into campus spaces? How do we navigate the intersection between health sciences and community engagement spaces?

Co-Facilitators: Stephanie Lespreance and Dreama Gentry

Recognizing the value and impact of their individual communities, Rural serving institutions play a vital role in engaging, serving, and connecting their communities, to resources, experiences, and opportunities, within and beyond their locale. Through efforts to create synergy and collaboration between rural serving institutions and the communities they serve continue to expand, limited access to resources, time constraints, and an array of other challenges continue to serve as barriers against engagement. This CoP will consider the state of community engagement across rural serving institutions nationally: what’s gone well, what has been learned, and what are the ongoing challenges? Through open dialogue, it will facilitate an exchange of resources and learned experiences, to better address challenges for community engagement experienced by rural serving nationwide.