Service Learning Grants
Please join me in congratulating the recipients of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Service-Learning Small Grants, a grant program co-sponsored by CETL and Volunteer Connection. These faculty members will receive three credits of reassign time in the coming academic year to allow them to undertake the redesign of a course to include a service-learning component. They will share the results of their redesign with their colleagues through participation in workshops and panels and by making materials available on-line. Thank you to them for their willingness to use innovative pedagogies and to engage with the community in their teaching.
Thanks also to Academic Affairs and the Deans of each college for their support of this program.
The grant recipients are (all quotations are taken from grant applications):
Tracy Ore, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, College
of Social Sciences
Professor Ore plans to redesign Sociology 462: “Sociology and the Global
Politics of Food,” which examines the global politics of food. Professor
Ore has strived to “enable students to put to use the knowledge that
they gain through the course and to foster their ability to make connections
to their own communities.” A service-learning component in the
course “will permit students to make these connections to communities
more real” and “will broaden and deepen the students’ learning
process as well as serve important community needs in Saint Cloud.” Professor
Ore plans to ask her students to develop an action plan to address the growing
issues of “hunger and food insecurity.”
Phyllis Greenberg, Department of Community Studies, College
of Social Sciences
Professor Greenberg plans to redesign Gerontology 411/511: “Aging Programs
and Policies.” By utilizing the Gerontology program’s “excellent
network of providers and officials that relate to services, needs, and issues
for older adults,” Professor Greenberg will design a service-learning
initiative that will “provide students the opportunity to understand
how policy impacts lives professionally and personally and that as professionals
they need to be aware of existing policy, programs and also how to advocate
for clients and potentially changes in policy where warranted.”
Catherine Fox, Department of English, College of Fine Arts & Humanities
Professor
Fox plans to redesign the English 191 course that she teaches as part of the
learning community “From Surviving to Thriving: Connecting
Lives to Social Change,” which “offers students an interdisciplinary
exploration of race, class, gender, and sexuality.” The service-learning
component will help students begin to “perceive entry points for themselves
as social change agents”: “Involvement with and learning from a
community organization [will] provide students with the opportunity to move
beyond the boundaries of the university in order to connect their critical
literacy and personal transformations to social organizing and social change.”
Keith Christensen, Department of Art, College of Fine Arts & Humanities
Professor
Christensen plans to redesign Art 420: “Systems Graphics,
Advanced Graphic Design, Studio I,” in which students develop “an
identity system that includes various components such as a logo, poster, brochure
and map.” The service-learning component will have students complete
these projects for a community agency by collaborating with that agency to
determine its needs and desires for its identity system. The service-learning
experience will allow students to develop professional skills by working with
the community partner in a graphic designer-client relationship.
Darlene Copley, Department of Nursing, College of Science & Engineering
Professor
Copley plans to redesign Nursing 312: “Mental Health Clinical” to
allow students to develop a relationship with an individual experiencing mental
illness by participating in a series of recreational events with the individual. This
service-learning project “directly addresses the caring component” of
the Nursing Department’s mission by enhancing students’ “holistic
view of addressing the whole person, not just the specific illness.”
Tonya Huber-Warring, Department of Human Relations and Multicultural
Education, College of Education
Professor Huber-Warring plans to redesign Human Relations
102: “Human
Relations and Race,” a course “whose very topic and content begs
for a human-to-human component.” Students “report that the
most meaningful events of this course are the interactions with panelists and
speakers. The opportunity to structure this interaction component more
meaningfully will enrich” the course and allow “students to apply
what they [learn] about institutionalized oppressions and strategies for active
anti-racism.” The service-learning component will develop students’ “reflective
awareness and action regarding systemic issues of racism and oppression that
preclude social justice.”
Jesse Benjamin, Department of Human Relations and Multicultural
Education, College of Education
Professor Benjamin plans to redesign Human Relations
102: “Human Relations
and Race” because “when students engage in practical and experiential
engagement of the theories we study in class, and introduce practice to join
the theory, they learn and retain knowledge at a far greater rate.” The
service-learning component will allow students to connect a “broad review
of institutional racism manifestations with local examples and connections
that could be mapped out and engaged.”
Paula Weber, Department of Management, G.R. Herberger College
of Business
Professor Weber plans to redesign Management 470/570: “International
Business Management” to “require that students work directly with
individuals from other cultures.” “Students in this course
will first build their own understanding and then working with the community
organization propose a variety of ways to build community understanding of
the culture and organization with which they are paired.” The service-learning
experience will provide students “a basis for formulating personal ethics,
for recognizing one’s responsibility to society, and for building awareness
of how one can contribute to society.”
Mark Schmidt, Department of Business Computer Information
Systems, G.R. Hergerger College of Business
Professor Schmidt plans to redesign
Business Computer Information Systems 351: “Systems Analysis and Design II.” In the service-learning
component of this course, student groups will partner with non-profit organizations
to “assess the current capabilities and needs of the organization” in
order to help the organization evaluate “various options to meet the
organization’s information system needs.” The service-learning
experience will enhance students’ opportunity “to assimilate classroom
principles with the real world scenarios while assisting a non-profit to assess
and address their information system needs.”
