Professional Development Opportunity: Summer Institute of Civic Studies

The Summer Institute of Civic Studies has announced its dates for 2015. The seventh annual Institute will take place at on Tuft University’s campus in Medford, Mass., June 15-27, 2015.  Peter Levine, Tisch College (Mass.), and Karol Soltan, University of Maryland, have organized this year’s institute, which will feature guest seminars and group discussions centered on the following questions:

• What kinds of citizens (if any) do good regimes need?
• What should citizens know, believe and do?
• What practices and institutional structures promote the right kinds of citizenship?
• What ought to be the relationships among empirical evidence, ethics and strategy?

This institute is open to advanced graduate students, faculty and practitioners from diverse fields. While the Institute itself is free, attendees are responsible for the cost of housing. Following the Institute, participants are expected to attend the public conference, “Frontiers of Democracy.” If interested, please apply by March 15, 2015. Learn more here.

Hotel Deadline Monday 10/6 for 2015 Global Challenges Faculty Institute

Thursday & Friday, November 6 – 7, 2014
Global Challenges Institute on Educating Globally Competent Citizens
The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey · Galloway, NJ

HOTEL DEADLINE: Monday, October 6, 2014

This two-day institute introduces participants to numerous tools for educating globally competent citizens. Global Engagement Scholars (faculty members) from 11 AASCU campuses describe how they have built courses and curricula around the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ 7 Revolutions framework to address seven Global Challenges: population, resources, technology, information, economies, conflict and governance. Institute leaders demonstrate the teaching materials and resources they have found most valuable in the courses they teach (including introductory, first-year, discipline-based and honors courses) and guide participants in anticipating how these same tools could be used effectively on their home campuses.

Each Institute participant will receive a faculty toolkit for using the global challenges content in campus courses and programs. This practical and insightful Institute is ideal for colleges and universities that want to deepen their commitment to providing effective international education in a variety of disciplines. That’s why AASCU is excited to provide reduced registration fees for campus teams. While individuals are certainly welcome, campus teams of three to five may find the Institute most instructive

Guest speakers include CSIS’s Scott Aughenbaugh and photojournalist Dominic Bracco II from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

To register, visit http://www.aascu.org/meetings/globalchallenges14/. Please note the hotel deadline of Monday, October 6^th.

To learn more about the Global Challenges curriculum, visit the following website: www.aascuglobalchallenges.org.

What We’re Reading: NERCHE’s The Challenges of Rewarding New Forms of Scholarship report

The Challenges of Rewarding New Forms of Scholarship: Creating Academic Cultures that Support Community-Engaged Scholarship, a new report by John Saltmarsh, John Wooding and Kat McLellan (2014) — it’s what we’re reading.

According to the authors:

The report is the result of a meeting of that took place on May 15, 2014 involving over 30 faculty and staff from all five campuses of the University of Massachusetts system. The seminar was funded with a grant from Bringing Theory to Practice and was hosted by the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) and Boston URBAN (Urban Research-Based Action Network).

The purpose of the seminar was to examine a wide range of faculty rewards (including promotion criteria, awards, faculty development support, and policies at various levels) that provide incentives and rewards for faculty to undertake community-engaged scholarship. Community-engaged scholarship focuses academic knowledge to address real-world issues through mutually beneficial, reciprocal collaboration with peers outside the university who have locally grounded knowledge and experience.

The report provides a set of findings and concrete recommendations for both the system office and the individual campuses for measures that can be implemented to advance community-engaged scholarship.

The authors hope that the report can serve as a tool for catalyzing a deeper conversation on campus about supporting and advancing community engaged scholarship.

Download the full report here.

 

Campus Spotlight: Community Engagement at the University of Alaska Anchorage

Today’s campus spotlight feature’s the University of Alaska Anchorage’s CCEL or Center for Community Engagement & Learning. CCEL “serves as the intersection of student learning, faculty research and creative activity, and community engagement.  Our mission is to connect academic programs with community needs to use scholarship and action for the mutual benefit of the University and the State, its communities, and its diverse people.” Learn more about CCEL and UAA’s community engagement work in the guest blog post below. And make sure to take time to peruse their 2014 Engaged University Report!

– Jen Domagal-Goldman, ADP National Manager

 

By Judith Owens-Manley, Director, Center for Community Engagement and Learning, University of Alaska Anchorage

Key to community engagement at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) is our academic curriculum.  Service-learning courses allow teaching, learning and scholarship to combine in a way that addresses community-identified needs and enhance community well-being.  Stories of engaged teaching collected for this publication over the past academic year reflect a wide distribution across the disciplines.  From a long-term project in Conservation Biology to Architectural Drafting and everything in between, our university students work with individuals across the lifespan, diverse organizations and communities.  Our 2014 annual report “Teaching Excellence in an Engaged University” features student and faculty reflections for a community-engaged pedagogy and two programs that offer students paths to leadership in community engagement.

The Center for Community Engagement & Learning brings faculty, students, and community members and organizations together, connecting academic programs with community needs for the mutual benefit of UAA, the State of Alaska, its communities and its diverse peoples.  We provide faculty mini-grants for community-engaged projects, as well as the opportunities for Community-Engaged Student Assistants, that facilitate community partnerships that work!  We are very pleased to feature a sample of the many fine faculty members exemplifying their use of high impact practices in their classrooms.  We hope that you enjoy their stories.

http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/engage/upload/UAA-ENGAGE-REPORT-2014-Web.pdf

 

 

6th Annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies | Call for Applications

The sixth annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies will be an intensive, two-week, interdisciplinary seminar that considers civic theories and civic practices as part of an effort to develop the new field of civic studies. To date, more than 100 practitioners, advanced graduate students, and faculty from diverse fields of study have participated. The Institute is organized by Peter Levine of Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College and Karol Sołtan of the University of Maryland.

See http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/civic-studies/summer-institute/ for more information.

WHAT IS CIVIC STUDIES?

The idea of a field of “civic studies” was proposed in 2007 in a joint statement by Harry Boyte, University of Minnesota; Stephen Elkin, University of Maryland; Peter Levine, Tufts University; Jane Mansbridge, Harvard University; Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University; Karol Sołtan, University of Maryland; and Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania. See http://tinyurl.com/ltwvkmp

The field can be seen as the intellectual component of the emerging movement for civic renewal.

Civic studies aims to develop ideas and ways of thinking helpful to citizens, understood as co-creators of their worlds. The field does not consider “citizens” as official members of political jurisdictions, nor does it invoke the word “democracy.” One can be a co-creator in many settings, ranging from loose social networks, local communities, and religious congregations to the globe. Not all of these venues are, or could be, democracies.

Civic studies asks, “What should we do?” It explores ethics (what is right and good?), facts (what is actually going on?), strategies (what would work?), and the institutions that we co-create. Good strategies may take many forms and use many instruments, but if a strategy addresses the question “What should we do?”, then it must guide our own actions–it cannot simply be about how other people ought to act.

Civic studies is not civic education. Nor is it the study of civic education. However, when more fully developed, it should influence how citizenship is taught in schools and colleges.

For more on civic studies, see:

o The new book edited by Peter Levine and Karol Edward Sołtan: Civic Studies: Approaches to the Emerging Field (American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2014), which is available free at http://www.aacu.org/bringing_theory/CivicSeries.cfm#CS

o The Good Society Symposium on Civic Studies, written and edited teachers and alumni of the Summer Institute http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/goodsociety.22.2.issue-2

o The syllabus for the fourth annual seminar (in 2013): http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/circle/summer-institute/#syllabus. (The 2014 syllabus will be modified but will largely follow this outline.)

PRACTICAL DETAILS FOR THE 2014 SUMMER INSTITUTE OF CIVIC STUDIES

Sessions will take place weekdays from July 7-17, 2014, at the Tufts campus in Medford, MA. The seminar will be followed by a public conference—“Frontiers of Democracy 2014” that will conclude on July 18 at 6 pm. Participants in the Institute are expected to stay for “Frontiers” as well.

Tuition for the Institute is free, but students are responsible for their own housing and transportation. A Tufts University dormitory room can be rented for about $230-$280/week. Credit is not automatically offered, but special arrangements for graduate credit may be possible.

TO APPLY

Please email your resume, an electronic copy of your graduate transcript (if applicable), and a cover email about your interests to Peter Levine at Peter.Levine@Tufts.edu. For best consideration, apply no later than March 15, 2014.  You may also sign up for occasional announcements even if you are not sure that you wish to apply: http://tinyurl.com/a9qfftb