Faculty Fellows

To address the challenge of political disengagement among young people and advance the field of service-learning by focusing on dilemmas inherent in teaching for political participation, California Campus Compact partnered with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to bring together 23 outstanding tenured and tenure-track California faculty members from academic disciplines as diverse as engineering, political science, English and agriculture as Faculty Fellows in our Service-Learning for Political Engagement Program.

Through this two-year program, which began in July 2007 and concluded in June 2009, Fellows developed, implemented and evaluated courses that use service-learning to increase students’ understanding of and skills and motivation for political participation.

During the course of the program, Fellows developed: 
• Collaborative relationships with more than 90 community organizations
• Service-learning opportunities focused on political engagement for more than 1,600 students
• Models of service-learning for political engagement in 13 academic disciplines

Fellows disseminated the results of their work and lessons learned to colleagues on their campuses and across the state and nation through publication in a variety of journals and presentations at conferences, including the Western Region Campus Compact Consortium Annual Continuums of Service Conference, the National Conference on Volunteering and Service, the Annual Conference of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Association for Asian American Studies Conference, the Annual California Asian Pacific Islander Policy Summit and the Annual Meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association.

Download a brochure about the California Campus Compact-Carnegie Foundation Faculty Fellows: Service-Learning for Political Engagement Program, including a list of the 23 Faculty Fellows.

If you are interested in learning more about the California Campus Compact Faculty Fellows program model, please contact Piper McGinley.

“I am one of two Faculty Fellows on my campus, and we both serve as role models for other faculty. There are some faculty who have never heard of service-learning and for them, we serve as role models to show it is possible to implement service-learning in any course. For the faculty who already do service-learning, we expose them to a new way of thinking about service-learning in terms of breadth and scope.”

Lynne Slivovsky
California Polytechnic State University,
San Luis Obispo

 

“My service-learning course [European Thought and Culture] has garnered the attention of the university president, my college dean, the directors and staff of both the Cal Poly Honors Program and Student Community Services as well as other faculty and students – all of whom contributed to the course’s success. I have used the lessons learned from this course to design new ones that make political engagement a centerpiece and to encourage my colleagues both inside and beyond the College of Liberal Arts to consider developing similar courses of their own. Only this past week, one of my colleagues in history indicated that she would like to develop a global service-learning project. My colleague Lynne Slivovsky and I scarcely knew one another before accepting this fellowship, but have now worked together on designing three separate, broadly interdisciplinary projects for which we are seeking outside funding. If any one of these projects comes to fruition, I will be involved in service-learning for political engagement during every quarter for the next two to three years.”

Tom Trice
California Polytechnic State University,
San Luis Obispo

 

“Students in my Sociology 123 course worked with the League of Women Voters to interview board members to start an oral history of political engagement for the local chapter of the League. Through participating in this project, students were transformed from skeptics to believers in the power of an individual agency to make transformative changes to policy and politics. As one student noted, ‘I was amazed at learning how much I did not know. … We noticed that all of the women we interviewed were very involved citizens. League members saw this experience as a productive exercise in self-reflection and a productive way to connect with students.”

Marcia Hernandez
University of the Pacific