Professional Development and Resources

Smith Center for Global Engagement
Academic Civic Engagement
For Faculty

For Faculty

Professional development, literature on academic civic engagement, teaching resources, and publishing opportunities.

Workshops and Communities of Practice

Engaged Departments

In the Engaged Department process, several or all faculty from a single department are led through a year-long process of becoming an “Engaged Department.” This often builds upon preexisting efforts and allows space for deepening the work and relationships with partners.

What does being an “engaged department” mean? It’s mobilizing a department to commit deeply to engagement with communities, local and global, outside of the academy and to building the next generation of changemakers through its experiences (curricular, co-curricular, and scholarship). Embedded within this work are meaningful experiences in civic action and opportunities for deep reflection, including discussions on ethical engagement with communities AND vocational discernment. The nature of vocation, as St. Olaf currently conceives of it, is inextricably linked to our relationships with others and a quest for our actions to be directed towards the common good; therefore exploring vocation means deeply understanding the ethics involved in community engaged efforts.

What is the Engaged Department process like?

The process absolutely negotiable depending upon a number of variables for each individual department, but it is an intentionally slow process that provides sustained learning, conversation and investigation before any actual implementation. It is not envisioned that ALL faculty are “engaged” with local and/or global communities in their teaching and scholarship (it’s not in everyone’s vocation or interests!), but that the department as a whole supports those who are through its resources and recognition. A longer process provides the necessary time, too, to build relationships with potential partners outside of the St. Olaf community. Here’s a flow chart graphic that depicts what one process could look like over the course of a year:

Flow chart document process for engaged departments

How can this work be sustained? Additional financial support may be available if brand new courses were to be developed as part of the engaged department effort and for acquiring supplies, as needed. Ongoing support in the form of course implementation and course development grants from the ACE office will be prioritized for engaged department work in the future.

Which departments are currently participating in this process?

Four departments are currently participating:

Physics (implementation phase)*
Music (planning phase)*
Art & Art History (planning phase)#
Asian Conversation (planning phase)#

Want to learn more? Please email Alyssa Herzog Melby (melby1@stolaf.edu) for more information about the process or to get started.

* denotes funding for the process was provided by the Lutheran Center for Faith, Values, and Community‘s NetVUE grant on student vocational reflection.

# denotes funding for the process was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities American Rescue Plan grant, “Reflecting on How to Create a Just World: Ethical Engagement with Community through Humanities.”

Accounting, Biology, Composition, Communication Studies, Environmental Science and 10 more disciplines. AAC&U’s “Series on Service-Learning in the Disciplines”. Case studies on service learning. Available to borrow from the ACE Program office.
Business, Humanities, Social sciences, and STEM – The New York Times in Education Teaching Toolkit – The New York times collected examples of exemplary teaching with newspapers from colleges and universities that are part of the American Association for State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). Course profiles detail all aspects of the course.
Education – Milwaukee Public Montessori Peace Summit: Nurturing Roots of Progress in Troubled Soil (Peace Summit PowerPoint) – “The Peace Summit is a free, annual, one-day event that serves as a catalyst to promote greater peace in our community. The Peace Summit gives families, from neighborhoods throughout the city, the opportunity to communicate, collaborate and take action.” – Milwaukee Public Schools
Political Science – Teaching Civic Engagement: From Student to Active Citizen (Political Science) – This website extends resources in the corresponding book written primarily for a political science educator audience. The website provides concrete examples of how educators from fields ranging from American government to comparative politics have built methods of teaching active citizenship into their coursework.
U.S. Latina/o Literature – Marisel Moreno (Notre Dame) reflects upon “the power of community-based learning to transform students’ attitudes toward literature, especially minority literatures.” In this article, she describes her thought process as to why she chose to use this pedagogy, what the assignment was, and how her students responded.

Civic Prompts: Making Civic Learning Routine Across the Disciplines (pdf). “This article by AAC&U offers a process, or set of prompts, through which faculty can begin to increase student learning by defining discipline-specific civic lenses that explore the public purposes, civic inquiries, and actions embedded in their fields.” – AAC&U website for online version of this article.

Teaching Methods – This page links to descriptions of engaged teaching methods that can be adapted to all disciplines from the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College.
Service-Learning – This series of pages is also from the SERC library of teaching materials. Included are the what, why, how, and examples of service-learning assignments. The examples are science-based, but seeds of ideas can be gleaned for all disciplines and the best practices for service-learning apply across the curriculum.

Campus Compact Resources – Find blog posts, books and publications, sample syllabi, and campus civic action plans. Use search and filter functions to narrow resources.

Anchor Institutions Task Force Literature Review (pdf) – Annotated bibliography of literature written in 2013 and 2014 focusing on the role of anchor institutions in community and economic development. Articles in this collection discuss and analyze the community engagement of anchor institutions, particularly colleges and universities.

Submit a Teaching Resource

Email Alyssa Herzog Melby, Assistant Director for Academic Civic Engagement, if you have a teaching resource that you would like to contribute to the St. Olaf ACE Teaching Resources Collection.

Publicly Engaged Scholarship and Teaching

This issue of Diversity & Democracy examines the levers for and barriers to faculty and student participation in publicly engaged scholarship and teaching, particularly in the arts, humanities, and design fields. Published in partnership between AAC&U and Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, the issue showcases best practices for advancing publicly engaged scholarship through classroom and community collaborations, tenure and promotion policies, and higher education leadership.

– Association of American Colleges and Universities –

Table of contents

New Directions for Institutional Research

Special Issue: Assessing Civic Engagement
Volume 2014, Issue 162

How does one assess community service, community engagement, civic engagement, and the impact of service learning on a college campus? Why is it important? How does one measure this somewhat elusive phenomenon that is defined in many different ways? The purposes of this volume are to review contemporary research and practices in the assessment of civic engagement in higher education for students and faculty at-large, as well as to highlight campus-specific practices at three diverse institutions.

– Editor’s Note –

Table of contents

Selected Journals

AAC&U’s Liberal Education (American Association of Colleges & Universities)

Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning (University of Michigan)

Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and CIvic Engagement (University of North Carolina Greensboro)

Public: A Journal of Imagining America (Syracuse University)

Social Change (Sage Publications)

The Journal of Social Change (Walden University)

93 Potential publishing opportunities

By Gary Homana, 2007. Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). – While slightly dated, this is a comprehensive list that includes many details such as a description of each publication, editor, publisher, and more.

Research in service-Learning publishing list

Organizations That Support Academic Civic Engagement in Higher Education

Center for Information and Research on Civic Engagement (Tufts University)
CIRCLE (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) conducts research on civic education in schools, colleges, and community settings and on young Americans’ voting and political participation, service, activism, media use, and other forms of civic engagement. It is based at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University.

Visit CIRCLE

Since 1994, the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning (MJCSL) has been the premiere national, peer-reviewed journal publishing articles written by faculty and service-learning educators on research, theory, pedagogy, and other issues related to academic (curriculum-based) service-learning in higher education.

Visit Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning

Project Pericles is a not-for-profit organization that encourages and facilitates commitments by colleges and universities to include education for social responsibility and participatory citizenship as an essential part of their educational programs, in the classroom, on the campus, and in the community.

Visit Project Pericles