GSL 6: Keynotes and Plenaries

Plenary: On-Campus Organizing and The Great Breadth of Health-Connected Activities: Advancing Ethical Engagement before Students Depart

Nancy E. Glass, PHD, MPH, RN, FAAN, Professor, Associate Director, Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, Independence Chair in Nursing Education

Jessica Evert, MD, Executive Director, Child Family Health International, and Faculty, Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of California, San Francisco

Virginia Rowthorn, JD, LLM, Executive Director, Center for Global Education Initiatives, University of Maryland Baltimore

Tricia Todd, MPH, Director, Pre-Health Student Resource Center, University of Minnesota

This panel will advance next steps and insights following concerns raised through Professor Judith Lasker’s Hoping to Help: The Promises and Pitfalls of Global Health Volunteering, The University of Minnesota’s Ethics of Help Symposium, Dr. Jessica Evert’s keynote presentation at the October 2018 Association of American Colleges and Universities Global Learning Conference, and Globalsl’s research insights overview video regarding possible benefits and clear risks in global community engagement.

Plenary: Asset-based Local Engagement and Inclusive Community-Building 

Laura Barbas-Rhoden, Ph.D., Professor of Spanish, Wofford College, Founder of Alianza Hispana of Spartanburg*

Araceli Hernández-Laroche, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Modern Languages, University of South Carolina Upstate, Facilitator of Alianza Hispana Spartanburg

Natalia Valenzuela Swanson, Program Director – Healthy Eating | Active Living, Mary Black Foundation, Alianza Hispana Spartanburg Steering Group Member

Sandra López ’21, Wofford College, Finance Major, Bonner Scholar, Member of the Track and Field Team and Newman Civic Fellow

This panel shares our work of globally informed, inclusive community building in Spartanburg, South Carolina. We will share the ways we understand and apply our understanding of different developmental arcs important in change work — the growth of students and professionals from novice to expert; the development of collaborations from preliminary dialogue to co-creation of new work; the movement in communities from operating in accordance with inherited structures to co-laboring for more inclusive, democratic structures and cultures that foster equity and thriving. And perhaps most importantly, we’ll work to encourage an engagement with the topic that is participatory, in which the audience engages in the kind of upstream thinking, attention to design, and care in presence and signaling that guides us in the work we do together with others.

* Alianza Hispana Spartanburg is a social impact network dedicated to facilitating, encouraging, and promoting the inclusion of Latinx residents in improving quality of life in Spartanburg County. You can read more about our work here.

Plenary: The Praxis of Engineering: Theory and Value driven practice

Caroline Baillie, PhD, Professor of Praxis, Integrated Engineering, University of San Diego, Co-founder of the Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace network and Co-director of the not for profit ‘Waste for Life’.

Debbie Stein, Kumeyaay Language Program Coordinator and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) teacher at the Viejas Indian Reservation, home to the Viejas Kumeyaay Nation in the southern Laguna Mountains of San Diego County.

Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace (ESJP), a network of academics, practitioners, and students in a range of disciplines related to engineering, social justice, and peace, seeks to better understand the relationships between engineering practices and the contexts that shape those practices, with the purpose of promoting local-level community empowerment through engineering problem solving, broadly conceived. When Baillie, a materials engineer, co-founded the ESJP network in 2004, many people made comments such as, “I didn’t know I could be me and an engineer” or “what a relief to be able to bring the two sides of myself together.” In contrast to the assumed objectivity of engineering and science, this panel will explore the question: how do we bring our values into our work? However, values are not formed simply, and the cultural, political, religious, gender, class and other societal lenses we develop over the years will have formed who we are and how we see things. Navigating our way through this and understanding how we are impacting others, and whether it is how we actually want to be acting and working, is never easy. In this panel we will explore how educators have critically reflected on their values and brought them into their work.