Thank you for Making 2020 an Amazing Year!

As our semester winds down, I would like to take a moment to thank all of the incredible Service-Learning faculty, new and alumni, who’ve been deeply engaged in the program despite the pandemic putting a halt to external service-learning projects.

Even while adapting to remote learning, our faculty have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to best practices and a desire to find new ways to engage. I’ve been so inspired by their perseverance and creativity. With their help, we’ve been able to dramatically improve the remote capacity of our program, so from everyone in the Office of Experiential Learning, THANK YOU SERVICE-LEARNING FACULTY!

We look forward to kicking off the new year with you, and gathered here are some updates to look forward to.

Introducing the Service-Learning Fellowship Pathway

What does service-learning look like at ACC? What should it look like? We believe the people best equipped to answer those questions are you, the practitioners. Now, through our Service-Learning Fellowship Pathway, TLED is supporting you to do just that!

The Service-Learning Fellowship Pathway is intended for practitioners who are interested in broadening their expertise in service-learning while simultaneously giving back to our professional community. We’ve designed a three tier program for faculty to participate in that prioritizes research, practice, and collaboration:

• Service-Learning Fellows: By completing the Service-Learning Training either online or in our summer program, you’re already in! This preliminary training teaches you the fundamentals of service-learning theory and practice and grants you the credentials necessary for service-learning course implementation here at ACC.
• Service-Learning Research Fellows: After implementing your own service-learning course, you may have the urge to further investigate best practices and special topics in service-learning. SL Research Fellows spend one year developing their personal research proposal as a way to enhance community’s understanding of key issues for community college service-learning practitioners.
• Service-Learning Senior Research Fellowship: After deciding on their research topic, Senior Research Fellows have the opportunity to dive deeper, drafting their own literature review on the topic, mentoring new service-learning faculty, and completing the Fellowship pathway by presenting to the greater ACC community.

While our 2021 Research Fellowship Applications have closed, we invite you to check out the TLED Course Redesign Service-Learning Fellowship website to learn more about the Fellowship Pathway and how you can get involved. For those of you who did apply, thank you for your interest in the program! We plan to announce our decisions for the 2021 Research Fellows Cohort later this month.

Service-Learning Online Training:  Closed for Updates

If you’ve been thinking about starting the Service-Learning Online Training but haven’t been able to enroll, it is because we have temporarily closed enrollment for our 2021 course updates. Using your feedback and contemporary research, we will be making adjustments and updates to our content. Included in these revisions will be a more robust section on evaluating service-learning, an alignment with ACC’s faculty values, examples of service-learning projects across the disciplines, and more!

Faculty who have already completed the training will be added to the new Service-Learning Faculty Hub, a private resource repository site accessible only to trained service-learning faculty. Please contact Sabryna Groves at the email address below to inquire about these updates. We plan to launch the new training and Faculty Hub in January when we come back from our Winter Break, so stay tuned!

The ACC Service-Learning Lib Guide is LIVE!

If you’re thinking about applying for Service-Learning Research Fellowship, or if you’re looking for exemplary service-learning projects, look no further than our new Service-Learning Lib Guide! While our website is still the best place to learn more about our program, this lib guide was created to support service-learning research and practice. We feature useful databases for your research, links to open access journals and newsletters, and curated articles from every area of study to help anyone who is interested in service-learning advance their understanding. Check it out here!

Additionally, we’d love to feature contact information for faculty who’ve completed our training or fellowship pathway in order to showcase their work. If you’ve completed our training and would like your information added to our lib guide under your Area of Study, please complete this form.

Special thanks to Faculty Librarian James Loomis for helping put this guide together!

Reserve your Spot: GivePulse Orientation on December 14th

For those of you who are new to our newsletter, GivePulse is a community engagement platform that brings together community partners, service-learning practitioners, students, and more for meaningful local service. We have received very positive feedback from community engagement stakeholders across the college as we’ve introduced them to GivePulse, and now we’re hoping to incite the same excitement in you!

GivePulse will be hosting a free orientation to the platform on December 14th at 11AM. Please RSVP here to sign up. Whether you’re a faculty or staff member, GivePulse could be useful for your event and service coordination, we please take a look and share this link widely! We’d love to hear feedback from our cohort on how they’d like to use the platform. Additionally, check out ACC’s GivePulse page to see how we’ve been using the platform already!

eService-Learning Resources: Facilitating Online Deliberative Dialogues 

Facilitating reflective dialogues is a critical component of implementing service-learning, and sometimes those conversations can be challenging. Whether its because the topic is sensitive or because you’re still new to facilitating discussion remotely, it’s always useful to have additional tools in your toolbox!

Recently, Campus Compact presented on this topic in a video that you can review here. This presentation runs through some of the fundamentals of discussion facilitation including a model for the overall process as well as how to adapt these conversations for a digital context. For more information about this presentation  and resources for deliberative dialogue in your course, feel free to contact Sabryna Groves via the link below.

 

 Questions or comments about our
Service-Learning Program? 
Click the image above to visit our website, or
schedule a time to chat with our Coordinator!