Faith & Service-Learning Series Kicking Off
Two recent conferences have prompted considerable pause and reflection. During the weeks to come we’ll share reflections and many resources from the 5th Annual Cornell Global Service-Learning Institute. But this week we’ll kick off a series of posts relating to faith, values, and service-learning with a summary of lessons and insights from Messiah College’s 7th National Faith-Based Service-Learning Conference. Those posts will include contributions from: Faith and Service-Learning: Embracing Difficult Questions by Jessica Friedrichs, a Faculty Member in the School for Social Change and Coordinator of Service-Learning at Carlow University. Teaching Catholic Social Thought through Global Service-Learning by Rachel Tomas Morgan, Associate Director of…
Love Literature, Stop Censorship, Buy a Book, Build a Better World
Comments, emails, and tweets from Wednesday’s post on Arizona banned books have led to very specific opportunities to address this issue, right now. This is one of the easiest ways to make an important difference ever announced, so I hope you’ll join me in taking part. Here’s the deal: The Arizona State Government strong-armed the Tuscon Unified School District into shuttering an innovative educational intiative and closeting a broad set of important works of philosophy and literature. The Mexican American Studies Program, according to an independent auditor, encouraged an ethic of peace, improved students’ educational outcomes, and shared the complex, nuanced…
Buy a Banned Book, Read, Build a Better World
The bottom line: Many mind-opening, empathy-inducing, and freedom-enhancing books are effectively banned in the US right now. Let’s buy them, read them, discuss them, and share them. Just click here to do so. As many of you have heard, this past academic year the Tuscon Unified School District shut down the Mexican American Studies Program to comply with Arizona State Superintendent John Huppenthal’s declaration that the program was in violation of a state law banning, among other things, classes that promote resentment toward a race or class. While an independent auditor’s report (mentioned in the Denver Post or featured in full…
Twitter Roundup: Civic Engagement, Service-Learning, Volunteerism
With an admitted bias toward university civic engagement, Wednesday night I mined the twittersphere for indication of who ‘our’ biggest social media representatives are. And by our I mean those individuals who are compelled by the idea that universities must serve as institutions dedicated to democracy and social improvements. What I found was – a surprising lack of leadership. Please write in and let me know who I’m missing. Here’s the rundown: First, a couple Twitter observations: some people or institutions get followers because of reputation alone, but most get followers due to a combination of reputation and frequency of…
5th Annual Global Service-Learning Institute at Cornell Imminent
In case you’ve missed it, an engaging opportunity for deep thinking and reflection on global service-learning is just around the corner. Here’s the institute announcement from New York Campus Compact: Do you currently teach a global/international service-learning course? Are you considering developing a global service-learning course and/or program? Do you want to transform an international course into one that is community-connected? Then this is the institute for you. This intensive institute will provide faculty, adminstrators and professional teaching staff with the reflective space and time to discuss and develop an action plan in the following areas: how to buy shares…
Genius, Vision, Ignorance and Expertise: Invisible Children’s Kony 2012
What is good global civic engagement? What are its assumptions regarding human dignity and emerging global community? How much expertise must global civil society participants exhibit, if any? How do our students’ study abroad experiences relate to their lives at home? These questions were at the heart of Invisible Children’s (IC) Kony 2012. And these questions illuminate several insights from the emerging field of global service-learning, while also highlighting the difficult questions with which we continue to wrestle. (I’d like to include an aside for regular readers: My apologies for not posting this earlier. Several editors seemed interested in this…
Ecotoxicology
Course Description: Graduates (~5) and upper-level undergraduate students (~15) from Biology, Chemistry and Geology will learn about the various classes of toxicants (including those naturally occurring), how toxicants move in ecosystems and within organisms (humans, animals, and plants). Lectures will cover chemical transformations and mechanisms of toxicity. This course will also introduce the students to how controlled toxicity experiments are conducted, how data is reduced, and the power of statistical analyses to identify significant effects. A case study approach will be utilized in lecture and labs to examine the toxic effects of acidification, heavy metals, PCB, insecticides, and environmental endocrine…
Sustainable Design Field Camp
SYLLABUS CGN 4931 Sustainable Design Field Camp (Special Topics Course) OR EEL 4903 Sustainable Design Field Camp (Cross-listed) (Summer C 2012) Course Lectures: 6/19, 6/26, 7/3, and 7/10 for 2 hours in evening Field Dates: July 16 to July 31 Maximum Number of Students: 16 Instructors: Dr. Christopher J. Brown, Cell Telephone: (904) 742-0191 Dr. Alan Harris, Cell Telephone: (405) 818-9909 Dr. John Nuszkowski, Telephone: (904) 620-1683 Office: CCEC, Rooms 2100 & 3122 Email: christopher.j.brown@unf.edu; alan.harris@unf.edu; john.nuszkowski@unf.edu Class Hours: Weekly 2 hour seminar and 6 field trips Office Hours: TBA I. TEXTBOOKS AND OTHER READINGS Required: Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge for…
Attempting to Understand Culture from the Domestic Classroom: Teaching Resources
Culture is a deeply challenging concept. Of course, it is easy enough to memorize many of the definitions assembled about it. The challenge is teaching about something so deeply embedded that it itself determines how we teach, learn, and think – and influences our abilities to attempt to see past it. That’s the fun and creative part too. I’ll share some related resources and links below, including useful definitions, an activity, and a few audio and video pieces that are helpful for this classroom discussion. Of course, many of us prefer to engage the culture conversation by taking students out…
Power, Privilege, and Film
Development history demonstrates that many efforts to do good have led to unintended, negative, and even disastrous outcomes. Communicating just how this works – and that this is not an isolated historical issue but an ongoing, embedded development concern – is far more challenging than simply asserting that it has happened. In March I emailed the Higher Education – Service-Learning list asking for films that portray the unintended consequences that often accompany development efforts planned and executed from un-reflective positions of power and privilege. The response demonstrated the extent to which many other individuals are searching for these kinds of resources,…
Evaluating Development Interventions: Esther Duflo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zvrGiPkVcs Esther Duflo shares her insights as MIT economist and director of the Poverty Action Lab, where she and colleagues have developed randomized evaluations to answer critical questions relating to poverty alleviation. Mentioned in the previous post on teaching resources and evaluating development interventions.
Kony 2012 and Policy Prescription. More Teaching Resources to Step into the Bigger Picture
The viral video phenomenon does contain a policy prescription: capture Kony. While much of the debate and criticism relates to concern with misrepresentation or lack of agency for Ugandans in the video, focusing analysis on the action suggested for governments involved is also important. General speaking, policy is deliberate action or inaction by a government to achieve a goal. And in broad terms, policy analysis often takes the form of: In respect to a specific population (X), does an intervention (Y), achieve the desired results (Z)? The field of international development has been notoriously free of policy evaluation that tightly…
Teaching Resources: Responsible Advocacy, Kony 2012, Invisible Children, and Humility
When have I known all there is to know about a policy question? Probably never. I don’t imagine I’ll ever known all there is to know about the effects of action or inaction by states, armies, corporations, or people populating large regions of the world. As a PhD-holder, I’ve spent probably too many years reading about the effects of policies across various cultural contexts, the statistical models used to track them, and the decisional models used to predict them. Aside from that – and I think more importantly – I’ve worked in community development in ten different countries and dozens…
Teaching Resources: Development
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w Much of the buzz around Kony 2012 and Invisible Children comes from a deep desire to build a better world – a place more equitable and just for all children. I’m therefore sharing Hans Rosling as an excellent resource for introductions to what’s happening and has happened as far as tracking development is concerned. A few things that I think are highly relevant about this video. Rosling begins by surveying his students and colleagues. Seeing a gap between the world as it is and the world as we perceive it, he insightfully states, “the problem for me was not…
Relevant Teaching Resources, Kony 2012 & Invisible Children – "The Danger of a Single Story"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg Novelist Chimamanda Adiche’s incredibly compelling and extraordinarily relevant Ted Talk on the many questions surrounding representation is a great starter for reflection about how to respond to Kony 2012. It should be abundantly clear that “if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.” (This is further discussed in the previous post, but at the time I was not able to embed videos).
Teaching Resources and Lessons: Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 as Teachable Moment
Many development workers, development professors, development bloggers, and even (far more importantly) several Ugandans, are not pleased with the Invisible Children Kony 2012 campaign. But, as this excellent overview in The Guardian makes clear, the debate is ongoing. As the debate unfolds, I wonder: What can we learn from this experience, now? And how might it lead us to better advocacy and development work? By any measure relating to public movement building, Invisible Children’s work is incredibly impressive. Yet, as I mentioned yesterday, if they do not capitalize on their profound marketing capabilities by creating a public more informed about…
Joseph Kony & Invisible Children Top the Charts
What is responsible advocacy? That question burns behind the controversy surrounding Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign. And readers at this site might also wonder about the appropriate role of educational institutions – teachers and professors, along with their students – in addressing, considering, or contributing to advocacy for social justice. A Quick Recap: Invisible Children is an advocacy organization founded in 2003 when three young men from Southern California made a film about child soldiering in Northern Uganda. They swiftly found themselves at the center of a US youth-movement to raise awareness about Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (culpable for child…
What DO we know about Global Service-Learning?
Duke and Washington University academic-practitioners Eric Mlyn and Amanda Moore McBride recently penned a commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, International Volunteer Service: Good Intentions are Not Enough. It’s a good, balanced piece that does expose some of the best practices and inherent risks in global service-learning, but it does not demonstrate the growing community of scholars and practitioners engaged in rigorous consideration and evaluation of global service-learning. Though we don’t anticipate regularly updating this site until April, we thought this was a good time to share some of these numerous emerging resources. There is clearly a growing group…
Green Urbanism and Urban Gardening
Course Description and Goals: The block of courses is about doing something about the environmental issues we face – a task that, of course, will require research, analysis, organization, and writing, but that must also result in practical action. The goals of the course are to encourage you to become an active citizen in your own educational process and our wider community; to learn about, analyze, critique, and apply some of the historical and contemporary interdisciplinary thinking regarding green urbanism and urban gardening to a particular community project; to immerse yourself in one local attempt to bring Cincinnati closer to…
Community and Political Power
Course Objectives This course is really about sources and uses of power in civic or public life. What is common and what is different between political power (power exercised by an elected government (executive, legislative and administrative) and community-based power, i.e., power derived from civic associations, formal and informal, intended to affect civic life? What is the interaction between political and civic power? The focus will be on local government and community – where decisions often seem to have a more proximate and immediate impact on our lives. Political Power will look at: What does it take to get elected…
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