Faculty Development Workshops
The Center for Community-Engaged Learning offers development workshops and individual consultations to faculty and instructors currently teaching community-engaged learning courses or interested in doing so in the future. For more information or to schedule an individual consultation, please contact Laurel Hirt, [email protected] or 612-625-3344.
Examples of Workshops Held in the Past
The following workshops are examples of sessions the Center for Community-Engaged Learning has hosted in the past.
Challenge to the Notion of Service Revisited Thirty Years Later with Nadinne Cruz
In 1989, Nadinne Cruz, an early pioneer in community-based experiential learning in higher education, published the essay "A Challenge to the Notion of Service." In this groundbreaking piece, Cruz speaks about the contradictions and dilemmas of service-learning. Since that time, the field has evolved and the language of service-learning has changed to community-engaged learning. But have the practices we use in 2019 also transformed enough or are Cruz's early concerns about our social realities, history and practice of community-based experiential learning still as valid as they were in 1989? Join us to hear Nadinne Cruz reflect on this in light of today's context and practice and engage in discussion with colleagues from across the Twin Cities grapple with the issues of reciprocity, power and privilege in community-engaged learning.
Learn more about the facilitator, Nadinne Cruz
Census 2020 Lunch n' Learn: Intentionally Integrating the Census into your Curricula (Part 1)
The Census in 2020 will have far reaching implications for the well-being of Minnesotans and for our institutions of higher education. The process and outcomes of the census have relevance to almost every academic discipline. Data collected from the decennial Census impacts all of our lives every day. One of the largest outcomes of the Census results in financial allocations to Minnesota communities for a wide range of programs and services including federal financial aid, cooperative extension services, nutrition programs, special education, transportation, health care centers and insurance, housing, crime victim assistance, business development and employment and training. Census data also determines where things are located, how much money Minnesota receives for these important federal programs and how many Congressional Representatives MN will have in 2012 for the next decade. Leaders in Minnesota immigrant communities and traditionally undercounted community populations have been mobilizing to prepare for the Census for the past couple of years to help participation in the Census be used for liberation in order to make sure their communities are seen and acknowledged as valuable contributors in the fabric of MN and the US. Sara Axtell, Faculty Development Liaison in the Office for Public Engagement, and Laurel Hirt, Director of the Center for Community-Engaged Learning attended a two-day Higher Education 2020 Census Planning Institute and will share some of what we learned and facilitate discussions about how you might begin educating your students about the importance of the Census our daily lives by incorporating Census content into your curricula.
A second shorter Census 2020 follow-up session will be held in November to continue this discussion and help build on discussions started here.
Census 2020: Intentionally Integrating the Census into your Curricula (Part 2)
The Census in 2020 will have far reaching implications for the well-being of Minnesotans and for our institutions of higher education. The process and outcomes of the census have relevance to almost every academic discipline. This session will be a shorter version of the Lunch n' Learn session held on October 22. Facilitators, Sara Axtell and Laurel Hirt, will provide a brief recap of the earlier session and invite participants to share what and how they are thinking about incorportating content about Census in their Spring 2020 courses.
Faculty Workshop 2022
Our focus for this session will be "Critical Service-Learning," a social justice/social change approach to teaching with community engagement that has been gaining prominence in our field in recent years. The critical service-learning framework challenges all of us to make sure we are guiding students to analyze the root causes of the social issues they are working on in the community, identify structures and systems of inequality, and develop a stronger sense of themselves as collaborators and agents of social change. While the framework focuses on engaging students in community organizing and advocacy work, we also want to discuss how we can apply some of the core concepts even when our students are working in more traditional social service placements.
We will also be sharing a number of new resources we have developed in the CCEL that you can use to engage your students in critical reflection on their community-engaged learning experiences.
Developing Effective Reflection Assignments
Critical reflection is the cornerstone of effective academic service-learning and yet assignments are often broad and vague, creating student writing that is also vague and underdeveloped. In this session, we will discuss best practices for designing reflection assignments based on a year-long research project in partnership with the Center for Writing.
Assessing the Impact of Community-Engaged Learning on Your Students
Creating quality reflection assignments is a critical first step in facilitating students' learning from service-learning experiences. But once you have your students reflect, how do you grade their assignments? How do you assess whether or not they have achieved the learning objectives? In this workshop, we will review examples of student reflection and discuss how to develop and communicate criteria or rubrics for reflective assignments to ensure that service-learning is impacting your students' learning in the ways that you hope.
Place-Based, Community-Engaged Teaching, Learning and Scholarship - Northside Orientation and Opportunities
This day-long workshop will include:
- Conversations with neighborhood leaders
- Transportation to and tours of a series of local North Minneapolis community organizations
- Lunch from a local restaurant
- Opportunities to network with other faculty and a panel of University colleagues who will share their experiences with community and place-based engagement and how it works in their classes or as part of their research agenda.
The Center for Community-Engaged Learning partners with community engagement staff from the Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center (UROC) to host this one-day faculty development workshop.
