What Resources St. Edward’s Provides
Through discussions with faculty regarding their community-engagement work, I have found that many people develop projects on their own. They have found their own partners and developed longstanding relationships with these partners. I applaud such work. However, these partnerships often receive little attention outside one’s class or department, and other faculty members, who may be interested in developing similar work, are unable to benefit from their colleagues’ expertise. On one hand, St. Edward’s needs to do a better job of advertising resources available to faculty. On the other hand, the university needs to develop a robust and sustainable infrastructure to support faculty involved in such work, to share their strategies with other faculty members, and to publicize successful community-engagement endeavors with stakeholders outside the university community.
The Office of Community Engagement, ATX Hack for Change, and the CTE Faculty Fellow for Community-Engaged Teaching & learning serve as three important resources for developing and sustaining community-engaged teaching and learning. Their work is key to developing such an infrastructure. The Office of Community Engagement is particularly useful to faculty who want to develop or tap into longstanding service-learning partnerships. ATX Hack for Change offers an opportunity for faculty to develop project-based work with a finite end, which means that the partnership may last for part of a semester, the whole semester, or multiple semesters. Finally, the Faculty Fellow serves to make faculty members aware of existing resources and to advocate for faculty interests related to community engagement.
Office of Community Engagement
https://www.stedwards.edu/office-community-engagement
Lou Serna, the Director of the Office of Community Engagement, has done tremendous work in building ongoing partnerships with community organizations and offering co-curricular service-learning opportunities to students. These partnerships reflect a servant-leadership perspective where students carry out work needed for the day-to-day functioning of a partner organization, and then students reflect on their work by considering how it relates to both their personal values and their educational experience. To reiterate, the Office of Community Engagement offers the following resources for faculty implementing community-engaged learning and developing a university-wide infrastructure:
- They maintain longstanding partnerships with community organizations.
- They focus St. Edward’s engagement work into areas of Austin most in need.
- They work with students to reflect on their engagement activities and connect it to their St. Ed’s experience.
- They provide technology resources for faculty to tracking student work through Volunteer Connect.
ATX Hack for Change
Developed by David Waldron and the Office of Instructional Technology, ATX Hack for Change culminates around a yearly hackathon hosted at St. Edward’s every June. (This year it’s June 2-4.) The hackathon is structured around projects initiated by local organizations or Austinites, and each project addresses local issues and needs. Prior to the hackathon participants read about the projects being undertaken that year, and they choose which project to work on. During the event, they join a team, which comes together to develop practical strategies to address the issue and develop prototypes of their solutions. The event attracts participants from many different walks of life and with many different skills (including community organizers, writers, makers, coders, activists, engineers, researchers, etc.). Often times, the projects carry over throughout the year and return to the hackathon the following year. Faculty might participate in the hackathon, and then bring the project from the hackathon into their courses.
Prior to the hackathon, ATX Hack for Change also offers a series of workshops to prepare participants for the event:
| April 5
Hackathon 101 Workshop Location: Google Fiber 201 Colorado St 6:30-8:30 pm |
April 12
Hackathon Tech Workshop Location: Google Fiber 201 Colorado St 6:30-8:30 pm |
April 19
Coding 101 Workshop Location: Devboot Camp 1705 Guadalupe St 6:00-7:30 pm |
| April 28
Volunteer Kick Off Location: WeWork Congress 600 Congress Ave 6-8 pm |
May 4
Team Dynamics Workshop Location: WeWork Congress 600 Congress Ave 6-8 pm |
CTE Fellow for Community-Engaged Teaching & Learning
https://sites.stedwards.edu/communityengagement/
Finally, as the CTE Fellow, I serve as an advocate for faculty engaged in community-based learning projects and as a resource for those who are interested in developing such work. Over the past year that has meant developing a deeper understanding of how this work happens at St. Edward’s and assessing faculty needs. To that end, I have attended over 70 meetings and events related to community-engaged teaching and learning. These meetings include serving on committees, such as the GERC Experiential Learning of Social Justice committee and the Austin Working Group for the 2022 university strategic plan. My approach to such work has been to advocate for strategies that begin with the work faculty and students are already carrying out in the classroom or through co-curricular activities and considering how this work comes together.
If you are interested in addressing your community engagement project, please contact me. Additionally, I will be coordinating two working groups for faculty over the summer and during the 2017-2018 academic year. One group will be composed of faculty members and staff engaged in service-learning projects with longstanding partners coordinated through the Office of Community Engagement. The other group will be composed of faculty and staff engaged in project-based approaches to community engagement. If you are interested in either of these groups, please contact me.