Members of the University of Iowa Obermann Working Group, an interdisciplinary group of faculty/staff, are engaged in working with community partners in research/grant settings focused on immigrant families and health related issues. Our own experiences have led us to more seriously consider how community partners' roles and contributions are often overlooked in publicly engaged work related to education and research. In this pre-conference workshop, we will share results of a focus group study with our community partners. We will share strategies for more effectively communicating with community partners, building productive relationships, and actively involving community members in the collaborative process. We intend to speak to those individuals new to community engagement who seek to partner with individuals and communities.
The pre-conference workshop will be very interactive. Workshop leaders will begin with a fishbowl activity to engage attendees in the issues surrounding community partners in publicly engaged research. We share the results of our research with our own community partners and then move to small group discussion where members will discuss cases that both complicate and extend effective partnerships with community members. We close the session with strategies for effective communication, relationship building, and the ethics of campus-community collaborations.
Though the world is connected more than ever before through online platforms and social media, one-on-one connection and empathy for our neighbors is slowly disappearing. J.R. Jamison founded The Facing Project with New York Times bestselling author Kelsey Timmerman as a way to (re)connect people through stories to strengthen communities.
What initially started out as a project in their hometown of Muncie, Indiana, to collect the narratives of those living in poverty, The Facing Project went national – with the organization now connecting writers, storytellers, artists, educators, and community leaders in over 30 communities across the country to build community and learn from the first-person stories of their neighbors. Hailed by The Huffington Post, Harlem World Magazine, NPR, and Soul Train as one of three oral history projects to watch, The Facing Project is providing a model, tools, and a platform for communities to arm themselves with stories to begin crucial conversations on social justice issues—neighbor to neighbor, community to community—by discussing solutions and healing through their own narratives.
Join J.R. in his Deep Dive Session as he shares the story of The Facing Project, and how the model has impacted communities and developed spin-off initiatives with homeless populations and human trafficking victims (among others). Participants will be led through a workshop on how to start a Facing Project in their communities, including how the model connects well with college student learning.
Learn what two national-level researchers discovered during a decade of assessing service learning outcomes for 3,274 students at 26 community colleges in 18 states. Like a prism that breaks a beam of light into multiple colors, one semester’s service learning experience concurrently affects students’ academic learning, civic engagement, retention, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, workforce skills, leadership development, and community impact. With the prism effect in mind, one of the researchers will share an evaluation of community college responses to Campus Compact’s 2014 national membership survey. A review of the survey results suggested most prism outcomes are addressed in colleges’ strategic plans, yet practitioners often fail to use that fact to leverage more institutional support for their programs. Participants will learn how to use the prism effect of service learning as a means for viewing student and programmatic outcomes and gaining administrators’ support.
The purpose of this session is to advance conversations around Experiential Learning (service learning, civic engagement, internships, etc.) and the increased priority of professional development. Institutions of higher education are facing increased pressure to simultaneously graduate employable students, critical thinkers, and engaged citizens. Those who work in community engagement inherently see the professional and personal development students experience and their increased sense of citizenship and leadership, but how can we more effectively collaborate with our career planning peers and administrators to align our goals? The presenters of this interactive session represent a variety of institutional types and have wrestled with this question from a diversity of perspectives and campus reporting structures. This breakout session will foster dialogue with attendees about their work in this area, best practices that have been developed, and other relevant elements of this important conversation – e.g, the history of higher education and how it’s goals ebb and flow with national community and economic challenges. Through the mutual sharing of resources and best practices, we hope that this can serve as a collaborative time for all session participants to learn from each other on how to combat the siloed perception of community engagement for the good of the field and of our students.
