Content with Topics : Engaged Campus

The Women’s Performance Group

The Women’s Performance Group considers itself more than just a club. It is an environment where young women and men consider women’s issues, develop their unique talents, nurture their aspirations, and support others who are in needs. The group often uses visual and performing aids in its many service learning projects. As members of this group, the students design and prepare each activity. Student officers and committees plan, oversee, and coordinate activities, and all members proudly demonstrate ownership of this service learning group. The women’s Performance Group is currently working with district elementary and middle schools and with other districts,…

Fostering Student Success Across the Education Continuum

Andrew Seligsohn, President, Campus Compact

A new report from the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania paints a clear picture of how deeply economic inequality is integrated into higher education in the United States. The report shows that 18-24 year olds from the top income quintile are nearly twice as likely to enroll in post-secondary education as their counterparts from the bottom quintile. Young people from the top quintile are more than eight times as likely as young people from the bottom quintile to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24. In 1970, those in the top quintile…

Student Civic Learning Depends on Institutional Commitment to Change

Andrew Seligsohn, President, Campus Compact

On Saturday morning, I had the opportunity to deliver the closing keynote at the Jon C. Dalton Institute on College Student Values at Florida State University. The Dalton Institute is an annual gathering of students, faculty, staff, and administrators who care about preparing college students for lives of effective public participation. The theme of this year’s institute was, “Widening Inequalities: Educating Students to Be Fair and Equitable in the World They Will Lead.” Ever since Aristotle, philosophers and social scientists have understood that exemplars make a difference: If you see your parents acting justly, that’s likely to have a big impact…

Helping Community Colleges Succeed

Following President Obama’s call for free community college, there has been much discussion of the role of community colleges in increasing access to college and improving our society. Predictably, opponents of the president’s proposal have pointed to low completion rates to support the claim that community colleges are a lost cause. The facts don’t support the conclusion. Compared to other institutions of higher education, community colleges disproportionately serve socioeconomically vulnerable and underprepared students. If you focus on graduation rates for this population, community colleges end up looking pretty much like four-year colleges. Claims that for-profits do better with the same…

What is to be done about rankings?

Andrew Seligsohn, President, Campus Compact

Join me in a thought experiment. Let’s start with the premise that colleges and universities—those that are publicly funded and those that receive a public subsidy through tax exemption—should serve the public. From there, we can conclude that rankings should reward colleges and universities that serve the public well (even if they also reward other things). How do our current ranking systems do? Before answering, I want to note that rankings are on the agenda for people who care about the public purposes of higher education all over the world. I was recently at the Talloires Network Leaders Conference in South…

State Civic Education Policy Framework: A guide for policymakers

While many Americans might agree on the importance of preparing young people for democratic life, civic education receives relatively less attention than other school subjects. With guidance from civic education leaders from across the country, including Campus Compact president Andrew Seligsohn and Campus Compact of the Mountain West executive director Stephanie Schooley, the National Center for Learning and Civic Engagement developed the State Civic Education Policy Framework. This effort is intended to guide state policymakers as they address the complexities of preparing students for college, career and civic life. The State Civic Education Policy Framework captures the expertise and recommendations of meeting…

Worcester Community Project Center

The Worcester Community Project Center brings together into a more productive synergy two long-term WPI initiatives: I) Improving service to the Worcester community through enhancing outreach from WPI faculty, graduates and students, specifically through locally-sponsored interactive projects relating science, technology and society (which is a unique nine-credit-hour reqiurement for graduation for all WPI students) II) Improving the academic quality of interactive projects performed locally, by adapting best practices developed at distant residential project sites to enrich learning in projects sponsored by local agencies and carried out by students living on campus. The mission of the group is to assist local…

Highlighting courses that have a community-based learning component

In order to sustain and build a growing awareness of community-based learning beyond general education, we began the practice of noting with a special icon in the class schedule those courses that have a community-based learning component. Students in each of these classes as well as faculty who teach them, and their community partners complete a questionnaire that provides a self-assessed view of course effects on student learning and on the achievement of the goals mutually defined by the community partner and the faculty member. Contact: askunst@pdx.edu Website: http://www.pdx.edu/unst/senior-capstone

Newspaper readership program: encouraging lifelong reading habits and informed citizenship

Penn State has experienced considerable success in its attempt to impact the campus culture through an innovative newspaper readership program. The program provides national and community newspapers to students living in residence halls on 9 of 24 campuses of the University, with the goal of “”encouraging lifelong reading habits and informed citizenship.”” With preparation for a fourth year of distribution underway, assessment of the program clearly indicates that regular newspaper readership produces a broad range of information to help students understand the world and communities in which they live. Approximately 1.6 million copies of The Daily Collegian, The New York…

Presidential Seminar: “”The Individual, the University, and Responsibility within a Free Society””

Brown University has long prided itself on having a student body committed to community service and social change. And yet, Brown lacked a broad and formal way of discussing issues of ethics, civic responsibility, and community commitment. Upon becoming the seventeenth president of Brown, E. Gordon Gee announced that “Brown is a private university with a public purpose” and has challenged the Brown community to define that ideal. The Presidential Seminar is one vehicle used to discuss that ideal. The seminar is limited to 15 students and with the participation of Peter Hocking, Director of the Swearer Center for Public…

Studying the impact of service-learning

Service-learning seeks to impact not just what students write on a test, but what they value and what they believe dispositions that are a challenge to collect and measure. At Vanderbilt University, service-learning researchers Janet Eyler and Dwight Giles use a collection of socio-psychological scales such as personal efficacy, tolerance, and locus of control to measure values that service-learning purports to instill in students. By surveying students and correlating data to external factors, they seek to isolate the impact of service-learning on citizenship, social justice, civic responsibility and similar dispositions. Among their findings: service-learning appears to have particular effect on…

Designing & Delivering a Service-Learning Course

An online resource from Dr. Matt Roy, Assistant Provost & Director of the Leduc Center for Civic Engagement, UMASS Dartmouth, and Dr. Dwight Giles, Professor, College of Education and Human Development and Senior Associate with the New England Resource Center for Higher Education

Student Government Resource Center

The Student Government Resource Center provides student government and state student association leaders with the training and resources to succeed, from how to run productive meetings to how to win changes in campus policies. For thirty years, we’ve been teaching student governments the skills and know-how to accomplish their goals and be effective advocates for students.

Latest Edition of Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement

Read the latest edition of Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement, North Carolina Campus Compact’s peer-reviewed, online journal hosted by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Volume 4 Number 2 (2013) includes: Invited articles from Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Judith Ramaley, and Dr. William Muse; Submitted articles from Dr. Alexa N Darby, Dr. Frances Ward-Johnson, Gabrielle Newman, Margot Haglund and Tammy Cobb of Elon University and Dr. Julie Shackford-Bradley of the University of California at Berkeley; and Book Reviews from Dr. Susan Stinson and Dr. Cathy Hamilton of UNC Greensboro. Call for Submissions: Partnership 2015 Special Issue The editorial…

Beyond the Ivory Tower: Higher Education and The Franklin Project

Fall is a season full of hope and promise on college and university campuses when students arrive to begin a new academic year. They bring with them energy, talent and exuberance for their academic and co-curricular interests, and, increasingly, they bring a deeply held belief in their responsibilities to one another and their communities. American higher education has a long and distinguished history of contributing to the public good through teaching and research in every imaginable field, inspiring forward thinking and creative ideas that have enriched our culture and added to civic life. Today, there is a particularly exciting shift…

Colleges Must Educate For Political Engagement

Only 45% of young people age 18 to 29 voted in 2012, down from 51% in 2008, according to The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University. Voting is not the only means of civic engagement, but it is a significant indicator of people’s concern for making democracy work. Data show that young Americans have less positive and more negative feelings when thinking about the country than older Americans, attach less value to their American citizenship, and are less willing to engage in the range of activities, including voting, that are essential to make our democracy…

International Service Learning Reflection Journal

Service Learning Refection Journal

Service Learning Reflection Journal Margaret Sass, Purdue University This handbook in the Purdue University Learning and Service Engagement Series (PULSE) provides a guide for reflections and critical thought for students engaged in Service Learning courses. As you experience community service, you will be reflecting through questions regarding how you react and feel about those service learning events. Some questions will also be related to the logistics of your activities. Based on the methods used at Purdue, the handbook is also intended be of use to instructors at other institutions interested in leading their students through Service Learning projects. Sass, M. (2013)…

Preparing a Generation to do Public Work

Address to Ohio Campus Compact by Adam Weinberg, President, Denison University. Over the last twenty years, I have been an active participant in Campus Compact in New York and Vermont. I am excited to join the Ohio Campus Compact community. Like many academics of my generation, I owe part of my career to Campus Compact. When I arrived at Colgate University in the early 1990s, it was difficult to get a service learning class approved by the faculty. It was the leadership of Campus Compact that paved the way. As I scan the higher education landscape, I feel heartened by…

Anchor Institutions Task Force Edition of the Journal of Higher Education Outreach & Engagement

This volume of the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement emerges from the growing need to share experiences, challenges, successes and strategies of anchor institution-community partnerships. As interest in the role and value of anchor institutions for community and economic development continues to grow, so does the need to improve and share our knowledge about what it takes to create and sustain collaborative strategies. Read the issue.