CAMPUS PROFILE

(St. Joseph, Minnesota)

The College of St. Benedict (CSB) and St. John’s University (SJU) are two small liberal arts colleges with a unique partnership. CSB is a college for women located in Saint Joseph, MN and SJU is a college for men in Collegeville. CSB and SJU share a coordinated academic program.

At CSBSJU, they are in the second year of the Bonner Foundations’ Community Engaged Learning initiative (CEL). The primary focus is on developing new and revising existing courses to provide CEL-based learning opportunities where students develop connections between concepts and skills developed in the classroom and services needed by community partners. Their long-term goal is to develop an academic pathway, such as a certificate or minor, that connects and scaffolds CEL-based courses.

The 2020-2021 CEL initiative centers on a cohort of three faculty members developing CEL pedagogy led by Bonner Program Director Adia Zeman Theis and Bonner Faculty Fellow Ted Gordon. Below is a brief description of each cohort member’s CEL coursework in development:

Dr. Sophia Geng, Associate Professor of Chinese is collaborating with the Coalition of Asian American Leaders (CAAL), a non-profit that serves Minnesota’s diverse Asian American communities. She is developing three tracks through which students in Asian Studies courses can serve CAAL, including:

Track 1: Asian Minnesotan History Timeline. Work with Kara, CAAL's Senior Manager of Social Justice Leadership, to build out a historical Asian American timeline specific to Minnesota. Students will have the opportunity to research and summarize significant events for Asian American communities in Minnesota. It will be used in future CAAL workshops and presentations. 

• Expected skills/interests: archival research, research of historical resources, ability to summarize and distill complex information 

Track 2: #MinneAsianStories Storytelling Project. Participants of this project will work with Julia, CAAL's Communications & Marketing Coordinator, to support CAAL's annual Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month storytelling project #MinneAsianStories. This may entail conducting audio interviews of Asian Minnesotans, support for podcast production and identification of additional stories and voices from students and their local communities. 

• Expected skills/interests: interviewing, communications, audio editing (optional) 

Track 3: Advancing CAAL's Legislative Priorities. Participants of this project will support CAAL's Community Priority Issues team as they work to advance legislative changes that benefit the development of Asian American communities in Minnesota, through the end of Minnesota's 2021 legislative session. Current legislative priorities include growing investments in BIPOC-led nonprofits, ethnic studies, post-conviction relief for those facing deportation and strengthening hate crimes legislation. The specific focus will vary depending on what bills are moving at that point in the session. 

• Expected skills/interests: verbal and written communication skills, interest in policy and the political process

Dr. Corrie Grosse, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies is revising her Climate Action Workshop course to incorporate opportunities for students to engage in a solidarity work project with regional organizations aimed at furthering racial and climate justice. The solidarity work is composed of projects that the organizations identify as areas of need. The students work with the organization for 10 hours and complete a reflection paper for my class. In the past, some BIPOC-led organizations that Dr. Grosse reached out to have not had capacity to collaborate. It is a broad trend that BIPOC-led organizations receive less funding than other groups. Dr Grosse sees Bonner’s CEL initiative as an important step toward addressing this problem. She views this initiative as an opportunity to broaden her knowledge and skill set in effective community-engaged learning practices and enabling her to share resources in a way that will enable collaboration with these groups. In future iterations of this class, she plans to have several BIPOCled organizational collaborations that my students can choose to engage with, and to cultivate relationships with these organizations so that our collaborations can be ongoing.

Dr. Terri Rodriguez, Professor of Education is developing a project entitled “Book Clubs with College Buddies”, which partners CSB/SJU with the St. Cloud Community Outpost (COP House). This partnership engages college students in facilitating book clubs centered on racial justice with young adults in grades 4-12 who utilize programming at the COP House. The COP House represents an award-winning, community policing initiative where issues of racial justice are central and mission driven. The project is embedded in EDUC 216: Exploring Justice through Young Adult Literature. This course is required for middle and secondary English education students and also fulfills general education requirements. It explores aspects of the human experience and concepts of justice through discussion and analysis of young adult literature (YAL). YAL is an exploding field of literature written specifically for young adults (ages 12-18) that addresses often edgy or taboo contemporary social issues. Participants explore themes of identity and community as well as concepts of justice including environmental, social, political, economic, and educational justice. Framing justice broadly through community and identity necessarily entails key attention to racial literacy in US contexts. The YAL selected for the book clubs purposefully engages participants with representations of real and assumed socially constructed identities and communities from the perspective of young adults. The course aims to promote a pedagogy of discomfort where issues such as racism, immigration, dis/abilities, and homo/trans/xeno/Islamophobia are centered. Participants use this class as a “brave space” where they can speak openly and honestly--and with intention and humility--about how engaging, rigorous literature can impact equity and justice-focused work within schools and communities. A goal is that college students and the young adults with whom they engage at the COP House will benefit through constructive dialogues and their ongoing development of racial and equity literacies.