Check out this article on an innovative community engagement course at UVA (shared by Professor Michele Deitch).

Are you a grad student seeking summer funding? Do you know anyone who is?

The Social Justice Institute of the DDCE Community Engagement Center is seeking applicants for the Activist Research Grant Initiative. This is a summer research grant awarded to full-time UT graduate students whose research projects serve as direct political engagement. Activist research is defined here as a scholarly project that advances social justice in collaboration with a community-based partner. For the purpose of this grant, such collaborations may be carried out locally, nationally or internationally. Applicants from all fields of study may apply.

For more information, please download the application on the Social Justice Web site. Should you have any questions, please contact Dr. Eric Tang, erictang@mail.utexas.edu.

In an effort to recognize excellence in community service, the Volunteer and Service Learning Center of The University of Texas at Austin will be hosting The Tower Awards.  We invite you and your colleagues to nominate any outstanding student, staff and/or faculty member, or university course that has made an impact on society through service in the 2010-2011 school year.

This annual event celebrates the commitment and dedication of UT Austin volunteers who commit their time and attention to improving the Austin Community.  The seven award categories are as follows:

●       Outstanding Student Volunteer – recognizes excellence in service by an individual student

●       Outstanding Faculty/Staff Volunteer – recognizes excellence in service by a faculty/staff member

●       Outstanding Student Organization – recognizes excellence in service by a student organization

●       Outstanding Faculty/Staff Organization  – recognizes excellence in service by a faculty/staff organization

●       Outstanding Service Project – recognizes innovation and effectiveness of a community service project

●       Outstanding Academic Service Learning Professor – recognizes excellence in a commitment to Service Learning

●       Outstanding Academic Service Learning Course – recognizes excellence and innovation in the incorporation of community service with classroom knowledge

Nominations can be completed online at http://blogs.utexas.edu/towerawards/nominations The nomination deadline is Friday, April 8, 2011 at 5:00 PM.  If you have any questions, feel free to contact the VSLC at 512-471-6161.

Award winners will be announced at the Tower Awards Ceremony. The ceremony will take place Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 6:00PM, Quadrangle Room in the Union.  Formal invitations will follow for nominees and nominators.

Jessica Nittolo paced back and forth with excitement during a visit to the Austin Pets Alive! shelter one day last fall. Nittolo, a freshman business major at The University of Texas at Austin, was at the shelter to meet a temperamental tabby named Venus.

But Venus didn’t share her enthusiasm. A brown blur darted into a far corner when Nittolo stepped into the enclosure. Tentatively, Nittolo crept in closer. Her reassuring coos were met by silence from under the chair where the cat had taken refuge.

Nittolo bent down and allowed a more gregarious feline to nuzzle her hand. “Venus’s shyness might stem from abuse in her past,” she said. “A lot of these animals have dark histories. I can’t blame her for not wanting to open up to a stranger when she might have suffered for it before.”

A few minutes later, Venus poked her furry head out from the corner. She still didn’t seem eager to be stroked or held, but Nittolo deemed the event a small victory. “This socialization is great for her.”

Nittolo’s visit was part of a collaboration between local animal welfare non-profit Austin Pets Alive! (APA!) and a School of Undergraduate Studies course, “Leadership, Ethics, & Animals,” taught by English professor Dr. Jerome Bump. While studying animal ethics and first-person writing, the students also wrote creative biographies for adoptable cats and dogs. The biographies—posted on the APA! website, Petfinder.com, and Craigslist.org—helped find homes for the animals. In return, students left the course with a valuable new appreciation for the power of writing.

Motivating students to write, Bump said, is the greatest challenge facing instructors of undergraduate composition courses. Service learning experiences like the partnership with APA! transform a classroom exercise into an empowering real-world skill. “I don’t think you’ll find a more compelling reason to write than to save the life of an animal,” Bump said. “This partnership creates a sense of purpose not possible in the classroom. It gets students excited about writing.”

Service learning differs from volunteering in that it directly links community service to class content. The animal bios’ emphasis on descriptive, first-person writing aligned closely with the academic goals of the course, helping students master the literary concept of the “sympathetic imagination,” or the writer’s ability to identify with the object he or she describes. After studying this idea in readings from Keats and Adam Smith, students put theory into practice when they write from the perspective of an animal.

At a second meeting a month later, Nittolo discovered not only that Venus had come out of her shell, but also that she was scampering around the cattery like she owned the place. “I’m a diva and I know it. Give me treats and I’ll love you forever. Hey, I’m gorgeous, so I deserve it. … Since I’ve arrived at the APA! cattery, I’ve had a huge transformation,” Nittolo wrote. Venus is still waiting for a home, but most of the 31 other cats and dogs for which students wrote bios have already been adopted.

Jill Peterson, volunteer director of dog marketing at APA!, said that creative bios are instrumental in helping animals get adopted. “The bios give potential adopters the critical information they need when looking for a new companion … [they also] move people and tap into their emotions,” she said.

APA! has garnered accolades in the Austin community since it was founded in June 2008.  Every cat and dog in APA!’s care is rescued from the euthanasia list at Town Lake Animal Center (TLAC). To date, APA! has saved the lives of 6,670 animals, helping TLAC decrease its euthanasia rate from 45% to 17%. Austin is inching closer toward the ambitious goal of becoming a “no-kill” city, in which at least 90% of animals entering shelters will be adopted.

The service learning partnership worked out so well last semester that Bump will continue the same project in his upper-division animal humanities course this spring.

“I’ve enjoyed this experience so much that I’m going to keep volunteering with APA!,” Nittolo said. As a member of the new student-run club Students Hooked on Austin Pets Alive!, Nittolo now serves as an ambassador for both APA! and the benefits of service learning. “The class required some extra time and work, but it was worth it to know that we made a difference,” she said.

Check out these statistics from the Office of Academic Service Learning’s professor survey:

Total number of ASL courses (Fall 2010 &  Spring 2011): 55
Total number of students who served in Fall 2010 ASL courses: 490
Total number of service hours performed by those students: 11,125
Average number of service hours per student (Fall 2010): 23

11,125 total service hours: wow! If one person served 24 hours a day for 15 months, his or her total service hours would still be fewer than those performed by UT-Austin ASL students in just one semester. (And that number is actually slightly lower than reality, since our survey did not have a 100% response rate.)

In this photo from the 2010 Digital Summer Camp in Mart, UT senior Matt Portillo and a young fan hang out by the Art Co-Op, Mart Community Project headquarters (Photo by Chris Friedrich)

Something big is happening in the little town of Mart, Texas (pop. 2,273). Since summer 2010, the Mart Community Project, an interdisciplinary collaboration between UT’s departments of Social Work and Rhetoric, has been working together with Mart residents on a number of artistic, cultural and economic revitalization programs, from a summer media camp to a community garden.

On November 20, Principal Investigators Paula Gerstenblatt, a graduate student and teaching assistant in the School of Social Work, and Sean McCarthy, a doctoral student in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing, held a Digital Media Blitz in Mart. At the event, undergraduate students from Dr. Alice Batt’s Writing for Non-Profits academic service learning course and graduate students from Dr. Dorie Gilbert’s Global Development social work course met up in Mart to take photos, interview residents, make collages, and gather other multimedia documentation of life in Mart for publication on a digital Google map. The following interview with Sean McCarthy took place a few weeks before the event.

Tell me about yourself.

I’m a doctoral candidate in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing (DRW), and my research area is digital literacies: how new media is changing the way we write and participate in public culture, in particular how we use new media to effect social change. I’m also an assistant director at the Digital Writing and Research Lab that is run by the DRW. At the Lab, we run five technology-enabled classrooms, we run project groups dedicated to the exploration or writing practices online, and we develop and run lots of workshops and other activities throughout the year. We just hosted the recent DJ Spooky talk on campus.

How have you collaborated with Dr. Batt’s Writing for Non-Profits class?

My involvement with Alice’s Writing for Non-Profits class began in fall 2009, when we paired that class with one that I was teaching called Writing in Digital Environments. Alice and I used wikis (editable websites) to enable our classes to get to know each other, share resources, and build final assignments for three non-profits. Alice’s students wrote grant proposals, and we developed a range of multimedia materials for the two of the groups, including googlemaps and short videos. This collaboration resulted in us winning an IITAP award last year. Here are some of the materials we built:

With NAMI, Recovery is Possible (YouTube clip)

What NAMI Means for those Involved (YouTube clip)

Austin Area Food Pantries (GoogleMap)

Social Services (GoogleMap — note: these maps have between 1,000 – 4,000 hits! A slightly larger audience than your typical student assignment!).

In what ways are you and Dr. Batt collaborating now? What is the Mart project?

We’re not teaching together at the moment, but I am involved in another partnership between classes, namely, Alice’s class and a Global Development Social Work graduate class. It’s the same structure as before: Alice’s class is writing grants, and the social work class is doing fieldwork in a small town in Mart, where I am a researcher in a community engagement project called the Mart Community Project. We received a $25,000 grant to implement a number of art, digital media, and community development projects in this small, impoverished Texas town. The TA for the Social Work course, Paula Gerstenblatt, is the principal investigator in this project and I joined the project as another principal investigator soon after. That’s how we got Alice’s class involved. Because I had worked with the Writing for Non-Profits course beforehand, we decided to replicate the structure that we had developed last year to include the Mart project. So, while I’m not teaching either of these courses, I’m working closely with students from each class, with Alice, and the professors who are running the social work class!

What will happen at the media blitz event in Mart? What learning outcomes are you hoping for for your students, and what service outcomes are you hoping for for the community?

During the summer, I did a three-week digital literacy summer camp in Mart with a bunch of middle school students (here’s the website they made that contained a lot of the materials they developed – I’m so proud of them!). We’re going back on Nov. 20 with representatives from both the Global Development and Writing for Non-Profits classes to do a media blitz where we will capture lots of photos, movies, interviews, and other stuff to put onto a digital googlemap. It’s very exciting, because it brings two classes from UT — one grad, one undergrad — to a small town where they will learn some core digital literacy skills and do good work for and with the community in Mart.

Alice and I are constantly trying to find new ways to bridge the gap between students and the community, classes within the university, and the how the university interacts with the populations in and beyond Austin. We’re thrilled to be working with the Mart Community Project, and look forward to many more collaborations of this kind in the future.

Dr. Kristie Loescher began teaching at The University of Texas at Austin in 2002, but she discovered the value of service learning years earlier.

Loescher, now a senior lecturer in the McCombs School of Business, had just started her first job in healthcare administration. She was eager to tackle a major assignment: completing an analysis for the hospital’s radiology department, which was investing in a new CT scanner.

Loescher had performed similar tasks in economics class, but in college she had always been given crucial data on which to base her calculations. Now she had to gather her own numbers—and she was unprepared for the challenge.

The project, she said, was a wake-up call to the messy, unpredictable nature of the business world: “In classes, students are given enough variables to solve problems, and they can typically rely on the information being correct.  But in the work world, we often have to make decisions based on incomplete information.”

Today, Loescher prepares students in her Leadership Issues course for the challenge of transferring academic skills to the working world. “Service learning projects support students, first by alerting them to the realities of applying class concepts in working environments and second, by giving them a head start on building the skills required to translate theory into practice,” Loescher explained.

Each Leadership Issues student serves in a leadership role with a non-profit organization for a minimum of 12 hours. Carolyn Fowle, a senior Management major who took the course last year, coordinated an after-school science education program for Girl Scouts of Central Texas.  Not only did she recruit 90 at-risk students to join the program, but she also managed seven teachers at four schools, which dramatically improved her communication skills, Fowle said.

In one meeting, a group of teachers voiced their dissatisfaction with the program’s small budget and told Fowle they were considering leaving.  Despite feeling overwhelmed and unsure how she could help, Fowle remembered  Loescher’s lectures on the importance of active listening.  “I applied the lessons from the course by listening first, and then taking action.”

The course’s emphasis on reflection and frequent self-examination has inspired her to seek leadership positions after graduation, Fowle explained. “I now understand that to be a leader is to be constantly learning. With the skills I have acquired in Dr. Loescher’s class to reevaluate myself with self-reflection, I really can make the difference I want to make in the world.”

Serving at non-profit organizations helps business students see “what the world needs from them,” explained Loescher.  Working for a compelling cause uses students’ compassion and empathy—traits any good leader must exemplify, Loescher said: “Leadership is both rational and emotional. Business school already does a good job of teaching rational thinking. This course teaches how to lead with the heart.”

This article is the second in a new series, Spotlight on Service, from the Office of Academic Service Learning. Do you know an instructor, student, or community member whose involvement in academic service learning deserves recognition? Please contact ASL Coordinator Rose Cahalan at  r.cahalan at austin.utexas.edu.

ASL Graduate Assistant Katasia Jordan, left, listens as Dr. Loriene Roy, Professor in the School of Information and Center for Women's and Gender Studies, speaks about her experience with ASL.

On November 10th, the Office of Academic Service Learning held its biannual Faculty Learning Community, an informal networking event for colleagues involved or interested in exploring ASL pedagogy. The event, held in the Teresa Long Lozano Institute of Latin American Studies, brought together professors, non-profit leaders (thanks for stopping by, Texas Campus Compact!) staff and friends for casual conversation and informal networking. In years past, at least one interdisciplinary team-taught course has evolved out of this event, so we can’t wait to see what our fabulous faculty dream up next. Thanks to everyone who attended, and be on the lookout for information about our next event in the spring.

Students in Professor Jane Tillman’s Community Nutrition class will hold a food drive from November 12 – 19. For details on the drive and how you can contribute, check out this flier from the School of Human Ecology and an informational video produced by students.

The canned goods drive, which benefits the Capital Area Food Bank, is the culminating project of Nutrition 332: Community Nutrition, an academic service learning class that combines theory and practice to raise students’ awareness of food insecurity.

When Tillman previously taught Community Nutrition in fall 2009, her class conducted a campus-wide survey to assess students’ attitudes and perceptions regarding issues of hunger and community nutrition. Of 1,091 students asked “What comes to mind when you hear the term ‘food insecurity?’” 41%, the largest single percentage, answered “Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.” In reality, food insecurity is a situation in which an individual does not always have access to safe and healthy food. According to 2008 statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, at least 14.6% of American households are categorized as food insecure–the highest percentage since data collection began in 1995.

“The survey showed us just how very limited students’ knowledge of food insecurity was,” Tillman said. “Once we collected that data, we were able to spend more time getting the message out about intervention.”

The students expand their knowledge of food insecurity issues from “all angles,” Tillman said, from completing academic research on governmental nutrition policy to taking in guest lectures from staff members at Austin nonprofits like Meals on Wheels. In addition to coordinating the food drive at the end of the semester, the students also complete a minimum of eight  service hours in a hunger-related capacity at a community nonprofit.

Samina Qureshi, a senior nutrition major, said that planning the food drive gave her valuable practical experience. “The food drive [lets us manage] the steps of assessment, program planning, intervention and evaluation,” all tasks, she explained, that are vital for future nutritionists.  Qureshi noted that the course has confirmed her desire to earn a Master of Public Health degree with a focus on nutrition.

In addition to exposing students to the issue of food insecurity and giving them a head start on the work nutritionists do, the course’s service component is also a chance to practice professional skills applicable in any field, such as delegating tasks in a group, said Rachel Hertenberger, also a senior nutrition major. “Professor Tillman is a brilliant delegator,”  said Hertenberger, adding that she felt inspired by Tillman’s moral resolve.

“Professor Tillman may appear quiet and soft-spoken, but she will stand resolutely by what she believes in and what she wants. I think this steadfast quality is what makes her the right fit for [this course] because the field of community nutrition revolves around a moral incentive to better the lives of those around you,” Hertenberger explained.

This article is the first in a new series, “Spotlight on Service,” from the Office of Academic Service Learning. Do you know an instructor, student, or community member whose involvement in an academic service learning project deserves recognition? Please contact ASL Coordinator Rose Cahalan at  r.cahalan at austin.utexas.edu.

According to the 2010 National Survey of Student Engagement, released today, students in service-oriented fields of study participate in service learning at higher rates. The survey examines rates of student participation in “high-impact activities,” including service learning, research, study abroad, internships, and culminating senior experiences, according to major.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the majors most likely to participate in ASL were nursing (78%), physical education (75%) and education (69%).

Check out the full results, available free online in PDF form, for much more on student engagement.

(Image courtesy http://www.nsse.iub.edu/)