The Center for Engaged Academic Learning

The Center for Engaged Academic Learning The Center for Engaged Academic Learning College of Literature, Science, and the Arts The University of Michigan: An Encyclopedic Survey Copyright © 2015 by the Regents of the University of Michigan 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 [1] 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

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