Promising Practices   Tags: dialogue_on_diversity, youth development  

Rhode Island College’s Dialogue on Diversity Committee Presents the

16th Annual Multicultural Conference

Civic and Community Engagement

Saturday, November 2, 2013

This year’s Promising Practices conference theme is “Engagement.”  The conference will explore contemporary efforts to engage students in the key social, political, economic and environmental challenges of our time.  The conference will showcase the broad range of contemporary approaches to engagement, from courses that include service or other community work requirements, to projects in which students investigate compelling local concerns, to participatory collaborations with community groups, to activist pedagogies, and beyond.  A special focus will be on the use of engaged pedagogies to (1) promote understanding of social difference, (2) achieve social justice, and (3) champion civic responsibility.  

 Howard Rosing, Ph.D., will deliver the keynote speech.  Dr. Rosing is the Executive Director of the Steans Center for Community-Based Service Learning at DePaul University.  He is a cultural anthropologist whose research is focused upon urban food access, economic restructuring, community food systems, and food justice movements in Chicago and the Dominican Republic. He is currently completing a study with DePaul students on community food systems development in partnership with non-profit organizations in four Chicago neighborhoods. Dr. Rosing also co-edited Pedagogies of Praxis: Course-Based Action Research in the Social Sciences (Jossey-Bass, 2007).

Pedagogies of Praxis - Nila Ginger Hofman (Editor); Howard Rosing (Editor)

ISBN: 9781933371092

Publication Date: 2006-12-09

Pedagogies of Praxis is about employing course-based action research (CBAR) in building public interest partnerships between institutions of higher education and local community-based organizations. Researchers have linked the use of CBAR to students gaining a greater sense of social responsibility by increasing their level of civic engagement. It motivates them to become passionate about social justice and produce new-and challenge existing-knowledge. Pedagogies of Praxis documents how CBAR, particularly within the social sciences, functions as an effective way of establishing and reinforcing partnerships among students, academic officers, and local communities. It compiles case studies-stories of successes, failures, and implications from such partnerships-from students practicing CBAR in Chicago's corner stores to how the model was applied in Liverpool, England. Students and faculty, guided through CBAR, learn how to develop advocacy strategies for marginalized communities through firsthand exposure to local-level politics and power imbalances in these communities. Contents include Participatory action research and the university classroom in a project on gender-related oppression in a racially diverse urban neighborhood An exploration of an anthropological service-learning program with premed students paired with inner-city youths Youth Take Charge: social action in a university-community partnership Discussion of students' experience with an urban geography project to help protect a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood Discussion of community-based learning while having to erase the boundaries within a university between traditional and nontraditional students Action research in a visual anthropology class Collaborative action research at Interchange: a UK model The outcomes of course-based action research in the community and what we can learn about how to do them well

According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, engagement is designed to “enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good.” 

We invite proposals for workshops (50 minute sessions) that showcase and critically reflect on particular approaches to civic and community engagement.  We aim to explore the range of contemporary civic and community engagement pedagogies, and so seek contributions that consider forms of engagement suited to diverse communities and educational contexts (from elementary to secondary to post-secondary) and that involve students with local, regional, national, and global communities.  We encourage presenters to consider the following guiding conference questions:

• What learning objectives should guide our pedagogical practices?

• What guidelines should we use when designing experiential learning activities that foster community engagement? 

• What unique challenges does engaged teaching and learning pose for educators? 

• How do we implement and evaluate our best practices? 

• How do we design pedagogical practices that encourage critical examination of social difference, social justice and civic responsibility?

• How do we measure community impact? 

• What positive/negative impact(s) does/might engagement have on understanding diversity?

Your contribution to this conference is important!  Proposals can be submitted until July 19th, 2013.  Please use the submission form below to submit your proposal.