The Center for Engaged Academic Learning

College of Literature, Science, and the Arts

The University of Michigan: An Encyclopedic Survey was first published beginning in 1942. For its 2017 Bicentennial, the University undertook the most significant updating of the Encyclopedia since the original, focusing on academic units. Entries from all versions are compiled in the Bicentennial digital and print-on-demand edition. Contents

1. The Center for Engaged Academic Learning 1

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The Center for Engaged Academic Learning

Envisioning a Center to Support Community-Based Learning

The Center for Engaged Academic Learning (CEAL) was founded in 2013 to support and help expand civic engagement by University of Michigan faculty, students, and administrators. Michigan’s long history of engaged learning dates back to the early development of experiential learning by John Dewey, who taught philosophy at U-M in the 1880s, and who later developed theories of active, student-directed learning that still inform the best practices of service learning, project-based learning, and community-based learning (CBL) today. By the 1920s, the University of Michigan Biological Station and Camp Davis Rocky Mountain Field Station were offering U-M students active ways to engage with biology, geology, and ecology. In the 1960s, student activists brought this approach to the social sciences, responding to calls by Civil Rights leaders and President John F. Kennedy by using their academic studies to promote social justice in their community. These students enlisted faculty support to connect their volunteer work in local schools, prisons, and hospitals to their classroom education, spurring the creation of Project Community in the Department 2 The Center for Engaged Academic Learning

of Sociology and Project Outreach in the Department of Psychology, innovative and long lasting programs now a half- century old. By the late 1990s, sixty-nine percent of U-M graduating seniors reported having participated in significant service activities during their undergraduate years. By 2008, this number had risen to eighty-three percent across U-M and ninety percent within the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. This broad and growing commitment to engagement made the issue a top priority during LSA’s curriculum review in 2007-2008, when the Dean’s Office and the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) held discussions in which roughly one hundred members of the LSA community offered their recommendations about how to support engaged classrooms and deepen students’ civic engagement. Conversations about experiential learning were occurring at the University level as well, with Engagement, Service, and Outreach selected as the theme one of the working groups convened in preparation for U-M’s 2010 reaccreditation. From both sets of conversations emerged common themes: the perception that U-M’s decentralized approach to engagement fostered innovation but hindered collaboration; the desire of instructors for increased mentorship and support; a commitment to making relationships with community partners mutually beneficial; and the wish to fully integrate CBL opportunities into rigorous academic curricula. As the deans of LSA considered this and other feedback over the coming years, they turned toward the idea of a center for engaged learning as one way to meet these various goals. Engaged learning in its various forms—creative arts programs such as the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), civic engagement opportunities such as the Semester in Detroit (SiD), foreign language mastery programs such as the Spanish Language Internship Program (SLIP), and departmental programs such as Psychology’s Project Outreach—were already hallmarks of LSA. And the deans wished to allow these programs to continue to function independently, rather than imposing a centralized model that would hinder innovation or obstruct each unit’s ability to tailor opportunities to its own The Center for Engaged Academic Learning 3 curriculum. By contrast, a center could provide a common point of contact for these and other initiatives that could act as a hub for students seeking opportunities, a source for training and support for faculty, a location for institutional resources, and an organizer of events designed to highlight and enhance engaged learning. These various activities would, most importantly, empower the center to support units, instructors, and students as they strive toward the full integration of education and action in their service-learning and CBL courses. Eighty-three percent of U-M graduating seniors in 2008 claimed to have engaged in service activities during their undergraduate years. A full sixty-eight percent had performed this service outside of class, meaning that most U-M students had few structured opportunities to reflect on the connections between community engagement and their academic learning or career. Early in the planning of LSA’s center, the director of the Residential College (RC), Charles Bright, offered a description of the efforts that he and his colleagues were already doing to draw out the connections between education and action in their courses. Rather than “one-off” experiences, they saw these opportunities as part of a sequential learning process, in which education in the classroom prompted multiple, overlapping forms of engagement outside of the classroom, which would in turn enhance learning in the classroom. In light of reflections such as these, the final name for the center emphasized academics as well as engagement. A vision document drafted by Angela Dillard, Charles Bright, Craig Regester, William (“Buzz”) Alexander, and Patricia Gurin in August of 2012 referred to the center by its current name: the Center for Engaged Academic Learning. Consulting the staff lists for similar centers at UM-Flint, Michigan State, and the University of Minnesota, those drafting this and other vision documents imagined multiple possibilities for the staffing and location of CEAL. In addition to a faculty director and an associate director or budget manager, they suggested administrative staff that the Center would share with a number of existing programs, such as PCAP, SiD, PALMA, Telling It, and Shakespeare in the Arb. They also considered 4 The Center for Engaged Academic Learning

hiring an internships coordinator, a grant writer, an advisor for student-led initiatives, a content coordinator or trainer, a programming coordinator, an assessment specialist, and staff support for website and communications. Eventually, these options solidified into a tiered proposal in which a small core of two to three staff members would build the office over its first two years, followed by five staff members plus work-study students in the years that followed. The Center would rely on shared services for human resources, financial oversight, and consultations on instructional technology. CEAL’s early years would be in a small office in East Quad near the Michigan Community of Scholars Program and the Residential College. Former Associate Dean Phil Deloria and Assistant Dean Evans Young were key in further shaping the ideas for the Center and they were instrumental in guiding its implementation. The directorship of CEAL was proposed as a full-time position with the market title of academic and research program officer. Once the office was established, the director would also have teaching opportunities related to the work of CEAL. Because of the centrality of academics to the mission of the Center, the director was to have a PhD and direct experience with liberal arts course development, community- based learning, campus-wide administration, and knowledge of a second language. In September 2013, the college offered the position to Denise Galarza Sepúlveda. Formerly a Spanish professor and chair of the Latin and Caribbean Studies Program at Lafayette College, Galarza Sepúlveda was well-recognized for her achievements in teaching, course design, and supporting minority groups, having also led initiatives that bridged academic study with local and international community-based programs. Discretionary funds provided by the outgoing dean Terrence J. McDonald also funded a full-time Program Coordinator position. CEAL opened as planned in Fall 2013 and during the Center’s first year in operation, the Director was joined by graduate students and one temporary staff person, who assisted with one of CEAL’s first projects: the transition of the Project Community program into the Department of Sociology. Still run by Sociology faculty, the program would now rely on CEAL for The Center for Engaged Academic Learning 5 community liaison, administrative, and transportation support. As CEAL’s portfolios have expanded, other temporary and permanent staff have supported this growth. In January 2014 the Program Coordinator position was filled by Desiraé Simmons, who had worked in the Scott/Ross Center for Community Service at Simmons College in Boston. In June 2015, the Center hired a regular part-time Program Assistant, Adrienne Sipkovsky, a U-M SNRE alumna previously employed in nonprofit management. The Assistant position became a full- time member of CEAL in June 2016. The Center has also employed two Master’s-level graduate students each academic year and those roles were filled sequentially by Fatema Haque, Jessica Cañas, and Joshua Rivera; the former two in the higher education program and the latter in public policy. Another temporary role created was that of Program Lead, which was designed to help develop CEAL’s curriculum and its capacity to offer student development workshops. Representing many disciplinary and professional backgrounds, the CEAL team also consists primarily of people of color, offering a diversity of perspectives that enriches the Center’s work.

The First Two Years

During CEAL’s first two years in operation, its staff laid the groundwork for the major elements of their current portfolios: supporting curricula, evaluation, and logistics for new and existing CBL courses and initiatives; development opportunities for undergraduate students; optimizing relationships with community partners; pedagogical support to faculty and graduate student instructors; and outreach and collaboration across the U-M campus. In these foundational years, the CEAL Director secured national and internal grants to help establish some of these new projects. With funding from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), CEAL created new partnerships and initiatives to serve as models for future projects. It also established the logistical and outreach support that were outlined as priorities for LSA engaged learning during the 2007-2008 curriculum review. For instance, in its first year CEAL partnered with Rackham 6 The Center for Engaged Academic Learning

Graduate School’s Arts of Citizenship Program—recently renamed Program in Public Scholarship (PPS—to develop a curriculum to train graduate students in the theory and practice of community-based pedagogies and offer them the chance to teach their courses to undergraduates in the Residential College. The Engaged Pedagogy Institute (EPI) was funded by a “Bridging Theory to Practice” grant through the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) with matching funds from U-M Office of the President. It began as a yearlong program and was later condensed into a semester-long training in order to be more inclusive of Master’s-level students. The EPI offers workshops and one-on-one mentoring, and course design consultation to ten to twelve graduate fellows from across campus each session. Each fellow develops a discipline-specific CBL syllabus designed for under-graduates. Fellows have come from disciplines as diverse as Social Work, Natural Resources and the Environment; American Culture; Art and Design; the Center for the Study of Higher and Post-Secondary Education; and Chemistry. As these graduate students learn about topics such as the foundations of engaged pedagogy, authentic campus-community partnerships, and the use of reflective pedagogies to enhance student place-based learning, they also meet with community partners to brainstorm potential course projects. The Residential College (RC) was a key partner in this initiative, offering a course competition in which EPI alums submitted their proposed syllabi to the RC Curriculum Committee. The winning course was funded by the RC and taught by the EPI alum in the winter term. This initiative furthered both the Program in Public Scholarship’s goal of providing more professional development for its graduate students and CEAL’s mission of creating more CBL opportunities for LSA undergraduates. An innovative aspect of the EPI is that fellows receive written feedback on their syllabi from undergraduate student leaders in CEAL, ensuring that student voice and input is included in each course from its inception. For academic year 2016, the EPI became part of CEAL’s base budget. These undergraduate leaders come from CEAL’s Student Advisory Group on Engagement (SAGE), another major The Center for Engaged Academic Learning 7

initiative started in the Center’s first two years. SAGE is comprised of a diverse group of sophomores and juniors with experience in community-based learning. SAGE members were nominated by LSA faculty and directors and represent an array or programs and disciplines, including:

• Program in the Environment (PitE) • Semester in Detroit (SiD) • Young People’s Project (YPP) • Michigan Community Scholars Program (MCSP) • Spanish Language Internship Program (SLIP) • Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) • Health Sciences Scholars Program (HSSP)

SAGE members receive professional development and leadership training in exchange for their work on CEAL initiatives. In one SAGE member’s words, “The most rewarding or helpful aspect of my participation in SAGE was that it helped me improve the way I work in groups, making me more aware of the group dynamics. Furthermore SAGE has helped me communicate to others the skills that I have gained through engaged learning experiences.” CEAL developed a SAGE peer focus group program for faculty and staff interested in gathering qualitative data about their engaged learning courses and programs. SAGE members design the questions and format for the sessions, facilitate sessions, take notes, and identify themes for a report to be prepared by CEAL staff. SAGE focus groups serve simultaneously as a leadership opportunity for LSA undergraduate students and as a capacity building service for LSA instructors and units. For students, participation in SAGE increases skills that society needs and employers seek, including collaboration in teams, working across differences, grappling with complex issues, and creative problem solving. Several units have already benefited from this near peer evaluation service, including Michigan Learning Communities such as MCSP, HSSP, and the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program (LHSP), as well as the U-M Chapter of YPP. These units and organizations have used SAGE focus sessions to gather 8 The Center for Engaged Academic Learning

information not only about the strengths and challenges of their program, but also about students’ motivations and expectations for joining and their suggestions for improvement. SAGE focus groups’ effectiveness has spread through word-of-mouth. Learning about the success of the MCSP session in November 2014, the HSSP and LHSP requested this service for Winter Term 2016. As CEAL and its partners designed these new initiatives for student development and pedagogical training, they also created new methods for outreach and logistics support to other units on campus. Taking up suggestions from the accreditation report and conversations in LSA, CEAL partnered with the LSA Dean’s Office and the Office of the Provost in Winter 2015 to begin the Course Tagging Initiative, which identifies and promotes CBL courses, making them easier for students to find and for administrators to track. Courses that meet certain criteria—bridging classroom education and community engagement through ongoing, mutually-beneficial relationships, and relying on a structured, reflective pedagogy to help students learn from these experiences-now receive a CBL tag in the LSA Course Guide. They also appear on the CEAL website clustered by themes to underscore the interdisciplinarity of this work. Those themes include Law, Human Rights & Criminal Justice; Community & Political Engagement; Engaged Language Learning; Empowerment through the Arts; Education, Literacy & Youth Empowerment; and Science & Public Health. The instructors and students in these courses can arrange transportation to off-campus community engagement opportunities through CEAL Ride. CEAL worked with LSA Instructional Technology to build this online transportation platform to facilitate training and coordination, to ensure adherence to risk management policies, and to track usage and help identify efficiencies. The success that CEAL had achieved was apparent in an evaluation completed by the School of Social Work’s Curtis Center Program Evaluation Group (CC-PEG) during its second year. Between October 2014 and June 2015, CC-PEG evaluators worked closely with the CEAL Director to evaluate the expansion and implementation of the Center’s services, assess The Center for Engaged Academic Learning 9 related learning outcomes, and track their impact. This evaluation included anonymous pre- and post-program surveys of EPI and SAGE members, who offered overwhelmingly positive reviews of these programs. All EPI participants reported having an increased understanding of CBL by the end of their fellowship term, both in terms of pedagogical strategies and of the principle of reciprocity with community partners. As one fellow remarked, “The EPI fellowship offered a much needed conceptual clarity on critical service learning–how might we begin to fundamentally and continuously challenge the boundaries of knowledge, identity, and privilege among diverse constituencies through teaching.” Likewise, SAGE members reported that they had gained new professional skills through their work, with one adding that it “feels like a family.” These reflections and the other findings of the CC-PEG evaluation provided information for CEAL to expand and refine its portfolios in the coming years. Because of this early evaluation work—funded by discretionary funds provided by former Associate Dean Deloria—CEAL has been able to integrate formative assessment in the design of every initiative it has created and to be proactive in enhancing programs and tracking the impact of the Center’s work.

Increased Outreach, Expanded Portfolios in Year Three:

As CEAL entered the 2015-2016 academic year, its staff had already made great strides toward the goals laid out in the 2010 accreditation report and LSA’s 2007-2008 curriculum review as well as pioneering initiatives aligned with emerging best practices. The primary portfolios of support are captured in the following chart: 10 The Center for Engaged Academic Learning

In one year alone, CEAL provided workshops to over 140 students, faculty, and staff. The Center’s workshops address a need for more robust student preparation and support for learning with communities. Focusing on three key areas—reflective practice, cross-cultural collaboration, and professional development—each workshop is designed to help students develop core competencies: (1) creativity, (2) intercultural intelligence, (3) civic responsibility and ethical reasoning, (4) collaboration and teamwork skills, and (5) self- agency and innovation. Faculty, staff, and student task forces organized by Vice Provost James Holloway developed these learning goals. CEAL also created site-specific training, like the workshop series designed to enhance co-learning in prisons for Project Community students. Moving into its third year, CEAL built on these successes, focusing on promoting pedagogical innovation and student development as it extended its initiative to more parts of the U-M Ann Arbor campus, as well as to other U-M campuses and national contexts. Over the course of the 2015-2016 academic year, CEAL staff provided one-on-one course design consultation to twenty-four instructors, resulting in the creation of four new courses and the enhancement of many others. With funds from the Associate Dean of LSA and the Office of the Vice Provost, the Center also established two new faculty support initiatives: CBL Course The Center for Engaged Academic Learning 11

Development Grants and a CBL Consultancy Program. In June 2015, the Center for Engaged Academic Learning awarded course design grants to three U-M faculty members to develop courses that will be part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. Antoine Traisnel (Comparative Literature and English Language & Literature), Ruby Tapia (English Language & Literature), and Jeff Morenoff (Sociology) participated this summer in the Inside- Out Training Institute. Through 60 hours of intense training these faculty worked on curriculum and developed teaching strategies to optimize the experience for the U-M Ann Arbor students and incarcerated people–that is, the inside and the outside students–who will be learning side by side within a correctional facility. As Professor Tapia noted: “The entire experience was transformative in many ways: the model teaching units and discussions with peers provided new, crucial angles from which to think about my research and teaching on the carceral state and the experiences of incarcerated individuals.” The first U-M Ann Arbor Inside-Out course was offered through the Department of Sociology in fall 2016 by Jeffrey Morenoff, who expressed his enthusiasm for this type of transformative learning model: “I have never been more excited to teach a class than I am heading into this semester.” To help further this work, CEAL now serves as the home for an Inside- Out Working Group comprised of faculty, professional staff, and graduate students from various LSA departments as well as other U-M colleges and schools. Other new courses are being planned, with the next one offered in Winter 2017 through the department of Classical Studies. Another new initiative is the Community-Based Learning Consultants Program, which combines pedagogical innovation with an opportunity for students involved in EPI and SAGE to further their professional development. Applicants for this position go through a two—part interview process and are given a series of professional development workshops. Faculty members interested in creating new CBL courses or integrating CBL components into existing courses can now request dedicated consultants through the Center. Originally proposed as a pilot with three consultants, CEAL has expanded the pool to 12 The Center for Engaged Academic Learning

be able to fulfill faculty requests. In the Spring and Winter 2016 term, the program has placed CBL Consultants with six faculty members in disciplines including History, Anthropology, English, Romance Languages and Literatures, the Residential College, and the Department of African and Afroamerican Studies. There are plans to expand this program as faculty demand increases. This 2015-16 academic year also saw CEAL forging new connections across southeast Michigan, deepening ties with community organizations, and giving students the opportunity to collaborate with their peers at the other U-M campuses. In February 2016, CEAL joined with partners at U-M’s three campuses—Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint—to organize the first annual Tri-Campus Summit, co-led by a committee of undergraduate student leaders from all three schools. The event goals were inspired by the theme from the 2016 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. symposium, #WhoWillBeNext, which had encouraged all members of the U-M community to consider their own ability to bring about change in the world. At the Tri-Campus Summit, students took up this challenge, leading sessions for one another on student finances and debt, campus activism and involvement, educational justice and equity, inclusivity and ally-hood, and self-care in social justice work. A video made during the summit shows some of the goals that students brought to the event, including collaborating with a diverse group of other students, exchanging ideas, and deepening their sense of empathy for one another’s experiences. Held at U-M’s Flint campus, the summit also offered an opportunity for student leaders to discuss the city’s water contamination crisis, which had entered national news a month earlier when Governor Rick Snyder declared the city in a state of emergency. The U-M Flint chancellor Susan Borrego opened the summit by highlighting the appropriateness of holding the event in Flint at this crucial moment. Later that day, one of the “Collab Lab” sessions dealt with the crisis, starting with a brief history of the city’s water problem and a discussion of environmental justice before opening into a planning session for students to collaborate on how to respond. Students who The Center for Engaged Academic Learning 13 participated in this session appreciated the opportunity to find ways to work as partners, moving past stereotypes about Flint and Ann Arbor students that might have led Ann Arbor students to “parachute in,” acting as self-declared saviors for their peers. As the U-M Ann Arbor student Darian Razdar reflected later in an opinion piece for the Michigan Daily: “I met students from the Flint campus who not only are committed to responding to their city’s water crisis, but are living it every day. Unlike many of us in Ann Arbor—no matter how much we think we know or want to help in this situation-these students have the experience of going to university while in the midst of one of the most public urban crises in the United States.” Another new initiative through which CEAL reinforced ties between U-M students and communities in southeast Michigan was the Engelhardt Family Fellowship, which supports LSA juniors and seniors as they intern with organizations addressing poverty in this region. The donation from the U-M alumnus Henry Engelhardt’s Moondance Foundation was converted into an endowment and received matching funds from the Office of the President. The fellowship began in the Spring/Summer term of 2015, with three students interning for two months at organizations in Detroit: YPP, Matrix Human Services, Forgotten Harvest, and Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice. These fellows worked at their internships four days a week, receiving a living stipend and housing at Wayne State University while implementing assessment and capacity building projects identified by the staff members at each site. Each week, the students met as a cohort, attending meetings, trainings, and academic sessions led by CEAL staff. The integration of professional development, CBL training, cross- organization collaboration, and hands-on internship work was designed to strengthen students’ leadership, research, and interpersonal skills while furthering the work of organizations dedicated to social justice issues. Students work in organizations that approached this issue from different frameworks, including human services, environmental sustainability, and food access. In the 2016 spring term, CEAL shifted to the fellowship to a model that promoted sustainability of community-based learning. Students were selected on the strength of a social 14 The Center for Engaged Academic Learning

justice project they co-designed with an existing community partner. As before, participants worked four days a week in their internships, with professional development workshops, one- on-one feedback, and cohort building sessions every Monday. In the new iteration of the fellowship students also developed a work plan and deliverables in consultation with their community partners and CEAL staff, while also creating individualized learning contracts to optimize their internship experience. These fellows partnered with organizations in Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Ypsilanti: The Young People’s Project (YPP), Mission: City, Ann Arbor Public Schools, the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative, the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, and the Neutral Zone. Restructuring the fellowship in this way has allowed CEAL to support more students while also putting an emphasis on co-creation and reciprocity, sustaining long lasting relationships between U-M and community organizations. While establishing new types of pedagogical support and student development initiatives, CEAL staff have also contributed to other conversations in higher education at U-M and across the nation, among them issues of campus diversity and public scholarship. Diversity has been central to CEAL’s mission from its inception. Community-based learning research shows that even when race, ethnicity and culture are not the explicit focus of a CBL course and reflection prompts do not raise those issues, students working in diverse settings write about and reflect critically on those topics. For this reason CEAL and its related efforts were included in the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion plan in relation to inclusive teaching and the race and ethnicity requirement. Many of CEAL’s community partners address challenges affecting marginalized communities, such as En Nuestra Lengua and YPP, which promote literacy among minority groups, and PCAP and Project Community, which work with prison populations. CEAL has also contributed to recent efforts to make the U-M campus a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive community. Both the Director and Program Coordinator are active on LSA’s Campus Climate Committee, with the former participating in the Inclusive Pedagogies Subcommittee and the latter in the Student The Center for Engaged Academic Learning 15

Leadership and Empowerment Committee and the Islamaphobia Working Group. Over the 2015-2016 academic year, CEAL also spearheaded various types of programming to promote and celebrate how engaged learning can contribute to an inclusive campus culture, including the first ever MLK Alumni Leadership Lunch, and the #WhatIDidThen and #WhatIDoNow Alumni Activist Panel. The Central Campus MLK Spirit Awards are now planned through CEAL and the Director convenes a selection committee consisting of representatives from the Schools of Business, Education, Information, Kinesiology, Nursing, Public Policy, Social Work (The Community Action and Social Change Undergraduate Minor), and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. The Director also established a new model for the Spirit Awards Ceremony that convenes nominees well before the award ceremony and gives them a platform through which to identify connections between each of their social justice efforts. All nominees then present in groups at the ceremony, focusing on their collective impact and their vision for the future. CEAL has extended its outreach to national conversations about public scholarship, in particular the public humanities. During the Fall 2015 term, CEAL staff, two EPI fellows, and two SAGE members presented in Baltimore, Maryland at the national Imagining America conference, an organization of practitioners and scholars in arts, humanities, and design committed to public scholarship and engagement with communities. There, they led a roundtable discussion on graduate and undergraduate collaborative learning around course design. In Winter 2016, CEAL partnered once again with the Program in Public Scholarship to host a series of conversations with the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), William “Bro” Adams, as part of a nationwide celebration of the NEH’s 50th anniversary. This event focused on the future of the public and collaborative humanities, consisting of three fishbowl style dialogues in which faculty, staff, and students from U-M talked with Adams about graduate training and professional development, community- campus collaborations, and engaged teaching. Participants in the dialogues included many participants in CEAL programs, 16 The Center for Engaged Academic Learning

including the CEAL director, SAGE members Katey Carey ‘17 and Lello Guluma ‘17, and EPI fellows Peggy K. Lee, Kush Patel, and Vivian Truong. Members of SAGE also presented on their focus group and program evaluation work at the Imagining America Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in October 2016. As this outreach has advanced national scholarly conversations, it has also had an immediate impact on the U- M community. As PhD candidate in the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archeology Elina Salminen wrote in a December 2015 blog post for Rackham Graduate School, CBL experiences offer graduate students a much needed chance to reflect on the full impact of their studies at a time when national critics accuse universities in general and the humanities in particular of isolation and irrelevance. Describing her own anxieties about whether and why her research matters, Salminen reflected how her experience as an EPI fellow had helped her answer these questions: “Through thinking about community-based learning and collaboration with organizations, I feel much more comfortable asserting the importance of my research and teaching. . . . By doing comparative work, my students and I can ‘take a step back’ to talk about slavery, misogyny, xenophobia, and about freedom, equality, and acceptance.” In other words, U-M community members have found that incorporating CBL into their courses makes learning more meaningful for both students and instructors, and for those undertaking the transition from one role to the other.

What’s Next?

In a May 2016 interview for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the outgoing president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Carol Geary Schneider, emphasized the importance of “a big-picture education that prepares [students] to deal with complexity, and prepares them to take ethical responsibility and civic responsibility for what they’re learning.” Referencing recent advances in the scholarship on teaching and learning, Schneider added that this broad education happens best through “high-impact practices:” research projects, The Center for Engaged Academic Learning 17 internships, service learning, and community-based learning (CBL), all of which deepen students’ education by connecting their studies in the classroom to problems that matter beyond its walls. In the weeks since her interview was published, Schneider’s remarks have already sparked conversation at colleges and universities across the United States, with one school implementing a summer workshop to discuss her recommendations and a piece in the Huffington Post proposing connections between high impact practices and the pressing issue of campus diversity. As Schneider herself observed, however, high impact learning strategies have a much longer history, with some institutions committing to expand their support of these practices as early as 2007. The result of conversations begun that year within the college of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts (LSA), the Center for Engaged Academic Learning (CEAL) is now entering its fourth year. Providing support for the experiential learning programs that have engaged U-M students for decades, CEAL has also developed an array of innovative new partnerships, placing U-M at the forefront of this rapidly expanding field. CEAL has partnered with representatives from the schools of Nursing, Business, Public Health, Law, Social Work, and Information to propose a Human Rights Collaborative (HRC), which will support domestic and international community- based and project-based learning experiences for undergraduate and graduate students. Through new and expanded internships, courses, volunteer activities, independent studies, and real and virtual global exchanges, students will gain a deep sense of social responsibility and build professional skills while furthering projects aimed at addressing human trafficking, gendered violence, and mass incarceration. Each course and internship will have a substantive reflection component, continuing the rigorous integration of academic learning and community engagement that has been CEAL’s trademark since its founding. Funding for the HRC is currently being sought to help implement this cross-disciplinary initiative. As the University of Michigan embarks on its third century, several signature units are collaborating to celebrate and help 18 The Center for Engaged Academic Learning

promote innovation through community-based learning. CEAL and the Centers for Japanese Studies (CJS) and Global and Intercultural Study (CGIS) are partnering with Penny Stamps School of Art and Design to plan an international symposium that sets forth a cross-disciplinary and community-based vision for a third century of engagement between U-M and Japan. Focused on addressing post-industrial challenges that will define the 21st century for both our countries, the two-day symposium-Post-Industrial Revitalization in Detroit and Regional Japan-will focus on CBL and maker spaces as vehicles for innovation and renewal. At a time when colleges and universities across the United States are turning to high impact strategies as a way to respond to concerns about the relevance of liberal arts education and the need to address pressing social justice issues, CEAL will continue to push the boundaries of what these strategies can mean for students, instructors, and community partners, placing U-M at the cutting edge of this movement.

Bibliography

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Learning Initiatives,” Teaching Sociology, Vol. 29, No. 2 (April 2001): 181-194. Razdar, Darian. “Michigan in Color: In Solidarity with Flint.” Michigan Daily, Feb. 17, 2016. Salminen, Elina. “Non scholae sed vitae 1: Adventures in engaged pedagogy.” Blog post, Dec. 14, 2015. https://www.rackham.umich.edu/blog/non-scholae-sed- vitae-1-adventures-engaged-pedagogy The University of Michigan Regents Communication: Action Request, Authorization to name the David M. Dennison Building, the Crisler Center Club, and the Crisler Center North Tunnel in Recognition of Ronald and Eileen Weiser. December 2014. University of Michigan. Accreditation Report 2010, 6. Engagement and Service Williams, Brian A. “Thought and Action: John Dewey at the University of Michigan.” Bentley Historical Library Bulletin, No. 44, July 1998.