CAMPUS PROFILE

(Swannanoa, North Carolina)

Warren Wilson College is located in Asheville, North Carolina. The leadership team for the Community Engaged Learning Initiative includes Annie Jonas who is Director of Faculty Community Engagement, Julie Wilson who is Director of the Writing Studio and Jen Mozolic who is chair of the Psychology department.

The initiative includes two projects that will increase and sustain community engaged learning in the curriculum. One project will build and implement a curriculum for Warren Wilson students and community partners to create and distribute podcasts focused on understanding and solving local social and environmental issues. This project builds on a successful two-year partnership between the involved faculty and a local third grade teacher creating audio projects as part of an integrated social studies-writing unit.

The projects are archived here: https://sites.google.com/view/thetruthpod/home.

To date, the team working on this project (Julie Wilson, David Bradshaw and Kelsey Duffy) has created a basic template for the curriculum, recruited three faculty who will be trained in the use of the curriculum and will be supported to include the curriculum in their courses over the next year and half. The courses involved are Social Entrepreneurship, The Art and Science of Flourishing (a Psychology course) and Advanced Spanish. The faculty involved with this initiative teach within the Business, Psychology and Global Studies departments.

Specifically, the Bonner Community Engaged Learning Initiative is enabling this team to develop a sustainable base curriculum for socially engaged podcast production that can be readily adapted in different course and community contexts. The curriculum will include learning objectives, lessons, activities, and evaluation criteria that will save time for faculty and partner leaders. Within the curriculum, they have identified two important outcomes that will be embedded in this new curriculum: co-creation of the audio podcasts between students and community partners and distribution of the final products to relevant community audiences.

The second project is centered in the Psychology department at Warren Wilson and is focused on creating a structured pathway for students to develop foundational knowledge and research skills that will prepare students to become research fellows with Hinds’ Feet Farm, a local nonprofit serving individuals with acquired and traumatic brain injuries. Fellows will take the lead in designing, conducting, and disseminating research to support Hinds’ Feet Farm in their mission to provide holistic and person-centered programming to support those living with brain injuries.

Although Hinds’ Feet Farm has been a collaborative partner of the WWC Psychology Department for over ten years, this Community Research Consulting Corps program offers an opportunity to strengthen this relationship by providing the organization with well-trained and faculty-mentored research fellows, in addition to the standard student volunteers. Additionally, highly motivated WWC students will leverage their foundational knowledge about brain injuries and research methods to engage in meaningful community-based research work during their time at Warren Wilson.

To date, the team working on this project (Jen Mozolic, Cristina Reitz-Kreuger and Erica Rawls) have created research assistantship positions in the psychology department, created a system and application for students to apply for these stipend positions and have selected the first three students who will serve in these roles. Additionally, the team has identified specific research and data analysis goals in conjunction with the community partner and have identified the first research projects the research assistants will engage in over the next six months.

Both of the Community Engaged Learning Initiative projects are making progress toward our larger goals of institutionalizing community engaged learning within the curriculum and also offering us models for how to truly collaborate with community partners in both process and in the creation of unique and beneficial products.