Implementation Guide: Student and Staff Efforts to Make Academic Connections

If your campus is not yet ready to consider a minor or certifcate in civic engagement, you may want to consider some other options for expanding academic connections to the Bonner Program or your service program. This might include involving faculty in your co-curricular service proejcts or trips, designing coures, creating an advisory board, and so on.

Check out this guide, which especially highlights strategies that student leaders may be involved in doing alongside staff, as well as valuable resources such as definitions, examples, weblinks, and more.

• Making Academic Connection Guide

The FIPSE Civic Engagement Minor or Certificate Project

Since 2003,with the help of a grant from the Department of Education and its FIPSE initiative, five colleges and universities involved with the Bonner Foundation Program have worked to create a civic engagement academic certificate or minor. The purpose of this initiative has been to develop a complementary academic track to a comprehensive community service based program, like the Bonner Program. The schools involved in this pilot project include: Mars Hill College (NC), The College of New Jersey (NJ), Washington and Lee University, UCLA (CA), and Portland State University (OR). In addition a team of senior level and distinguished faculty have participated in the conception and development of this initiative. This group includes professors from the University of Minnesota, Duke University, Michigan State University, Rice University and Wagner College (NY). Finally, another set of institutions—including Colorado College (CO), Lynchburg College (VA), Morehouse College (GA), Rutgers-Douglas College (NJ), Saint Mary’s College (CA), University of Alaska Anchorage, Wagner University (NY), and West Chester University—have also been inspired to create civic education related programs and have begun to develop their own initiatives.

As a result of this work, we have been able to create a great deal of new resources for campuses. These explain how to approach, conceive of, and create such an academic program. In this guide, you will find frameworks, profiles of the academic programs of involved campuses, sample syllabi, and more.

• Civic Engagment Academic Program Resources

Additional Campus Best Practices

• Berea College Service Learning Class [pdf]
• Berry College Grassroots Education Alliance of Rome (pdf)
• Davidson College Writing for the Community Class (pdf)
• Middlesex County Community College Service and Research Corps (pdf)
• The College of NJ Trenton Youth Community-based Research Corps (pdf)

Resources on Community-Based Research

CBR resource website: www.cbrnet.org

CBR-related Articles:

• Community-Based Research: The Next New Thing by Randy Stoecker
• Participatory Research and Community Organizing by Sue Sohng
• Article on Community-Based Research
• "Thinking about CBR, Some Questions as We Begin," keynote address by Randy Stoecker

CBR-related Books:

Community-Based Research & Higher Education: Principles & Practices by Strand, Marullo, Stoecker, Cutforth, & Donohue	Reearch Methods for Community Change by Randy Stoecker

Other CBR resources

 

Other Service-Learning Resources