Teaching for Social Justice and Responsibility, Continuing the Conversation
CIEL Fall Meeting at Hampshire College, October 19-21, 2006.

The consortium's annual fall meeting will continue the conversation begun last fall on conceptual frameworks and pedagogical practices in teaching for social justice. This year's meeting will be the largest in CIEL's history, with over 50 participants from the member campuses. As in previous meetings, the emphasis will be on deep sharing of ideas and practices, the conversation informal but informed.

Here are some of the highlights of the program:

A Conversation on Social Justice as Institutional Priority: Can We Practice What We Preach?

  --Social Justice Missions: Are We Practicing What we Preach?--Paul Burkhardt and Les McAllan, Prescott College

  --Creating Moral Communities--Rita Pougiales, The Evergreen State College

  --Where's The Social Justice in Service Learning?--Meta Mendel-Reyes, Berea College

  --A Post-Colonial Feminist Approach to Liberal Arts Education--Joe Parker, Pitzer College

Social Justice in a World on the Move: Processes and Impacts of Global Migrations

  --Flavio Risech and Vivek Bhandari, Hampshire College

  --James Loucky, Fairhaven College

  --Nancy Koppelman, The Evergreen State College

Opportunities and Perils of Working within Communities at Home and Abroad

  --Transformative Travel--Michelle Tooley, Berea College

  --Building a Regional Collaboration among Higher Education Institutions and Non-profits:  The Western      New York Service Learning Coalition--Ed Clausen and Danielle Woodman, Daemen College

  --Critical Reflections in Language Education: Pitzer's Community-Involvement Program--Ethel Jorge,      Pitzer College

  --Dialogic Education,Service Learning, and Community-Based Research: Learning from One's Mistakes--Bernardo Aguilar, Prescott College

Teaching for Social Justice: Engaging Students

  --Teaching Culture as an Act of Global Migration: The R-evolution of Hip Hop--Teri McMurtry-Chubb, Fairhaven College

  --But What Can I Do? Why Teaching or Social Justice Matters in the Lives of African-American Students--Carmen Walker-Harris, Johnson C. Smith University

  --Teaching Activism: A Learning Community Experiment--Marie Eaton, Fairhaven College

  --Teaching Postpsychiatry--Brad Lewis, Gallatin School

Teaching for Social Justice: Pedagogy

  --Teaching Social Justice through Film--Mike Rivage-Seul, Berea College

  --Linking Social Justice to Virtue Theory--Brent Robbins, Daemen College

  --Social Entrepreneurship--Linda Kuechler, Daemen College

  --Using GIS to Teach Community-Based Research--Rene Poitevin, Gallatin School

Impacts of the Socially-Conscious Curriculum

  --Assessing Student Outcomes in Early Childhood Education--Mary Fox, Daemen College

  --Senior Thesis Assessment from a Cross-Section of CIEL Schools--Carol Trosset, Hampshire College

  --What Happens at Evergreen?--Laura Coghlan, The Evergreen State College

  --Lessons Learned about Integrative Studies from NCC's Assessment Data--Nance Lucas and Janette Muir, New Century College

Teaching for Social Justice, Authors' Working Session: Teri McMurtry-Chubb and Marie Eaton, Editors

Working Session for Campus Development Officers

The Politics of Experiential Pedagogy

  --David Moore, Gallatin School of Individualized Study

  --Steve Weisler, Hampshire College

Participants are invited to submit written versions of their presentations for inclusion on the CIEL website. This is an evolving archive of the intellectual work of the consortium and attracts increasing interest of those interested in scholarship on teaching, learning, and higher education. Submissions should come to Karen Spear, CIEL Executive Director, at spear@lorenet.com.

Welcome to New CIEL Member Campuses

New Century College / University Life of George Mason University:  New Century College, in partnership with the University Life Office of George Mason University is the newest CIEL member. NCC is an embedded college in George Mason University , a state supported university of 30,000 students in Fairfax , Virginia . NCC awards a BA or BS degree in Integrative Studies, as well as minors in Non-Profit Studies and Multi-media Studies and a certificate in Leadership Studies. Students pursue a common first-year experience of 4 sequential, interdisciplinary courses. Participation in learning communities is central to the New Century program. After the first year, each student works with a faculty advisor to create a self-designed concentration that integrates 2 or more disciplines. Twelve units of experiential learning are also required, a requirement met variously through study abroad, service learning, field study, co-op, internships, and learning communities. The proximity of the campus to Washington , D. C. provides rich opportunities for participating in the work of government and the non-profit world, locally, nationally, and globally.

Students must demonstrate competency in 9 critical areas: communication, critical thinking, strategic problem-solving, valuing, group interaction, global understanding, effective citizenship, aesthetic awareness, and information technology. These competencies are assessed, in part, through semester-end and graduation portfolios. All facets of NCC education emphasize collaboration, self-reflection, and experiential learning.

New Century College serves as a center for the development of scholarship in teaching and learning. Core questions for faculty, staff, and students center around how students learn, improving learning, and advancing pedagogy.

Prescott College: Prescott College , in Prescott , Arizona , is a liberal arts college in the high desert of Arizona . It is an evolving experiment in rejecting hierarchical thinking for collaboration and teamwork as the cornerstone of learning. Like so many colleges founded in the wave of higher education experimentation that took place in the 1960's - 1970's, Prescott came into being to offer motivated students the opportunity to construct their own academic programs, to bridge classroom instruction and field-based learning, and to celebrate learning for its own sake rather than something driven by grades. In 1965 the Ford Foundation challenged a group of recognized innovators in higher education to come together and design an "ideal college for the future that would prepare students for contributing in an ever changing, and ever faster moving, world." Since its opening in 1966, Prescott has enabled more than 9,000 students to participate in its highly individual philosophy of higher education with its mandate to incorporate experiential learning into every course.

Also like so many colleges that emerged during this period, the optimism surrounding Prescott 's founding succumbed to financial distress. After an initial 8-year run beginning in 1966, Prescott was forced to declare bankruptcy in December 1974. Bankruptcy served as a challenge to the Prescott community to live up to the principles of action, personal responsibility, and shared governance that figured into its charter. Prescott 's faculty, staff, and students chose to work together to reorganize and resurrect the college through a remarkable achievement in volunteer labor and cooperation. For ten years, until accreditation was restored in 1984, Prescott operated out of a succession of temporary quarters with faculty and students alike taking on the administrative functions of the college alongside their academic work.

Much of what characterizes a Prescott education today comes from that period of constructing an education without the physical or even personnel infrastructure typically associated with a college campus - from what is only somewhat jokingly referred to as van-based education to creating an imaginative new campus out of essentially discarded buildings and recycled materials. The college's philosophy of experiential, self-directed, interdisciplinary education, focused on the themes of environment, sustainability, and social justice, is expressed in a particularly literal way. Field-based learning and outdoor education remain as organizing themes and driving values, with a concentration in the American Southwest, but with students working all across the country and internationally. Undergraduate degrees are awarded based on execution of a comprehensive learning contract, demonstrated competence before a graduation committee, and the completion of a rigorous senior thesis. Coursework concludes with the faculty's narrative evaluation of each student's work. Prescott offers a resident BA program, a limited-residency, community-based BA and MA, and Ph.D. programs for students living and working around the world.

CIEL Creates Stronger Ties with the Association of American Colleges and Universities

Following four years of regular panel presentations at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, CIEL is strengthening its presence as a voice in the national conversation on higher education. At the 2007 meeting, CIEL representatives have been invited to offer a pre-conference workshop on preparing faculty for interdisciplinary teaching and a panel presentation that explores what we have learned, collectively, about the impacts of experiential education. This advance helps CIEL further one of its principal missions of national outreach and dissemination of the distinctive practices that characterize innovative, progressive higher education.

Spring Student Symposium

Pitzer College hosted the second annual Spring Student Symposium, Global and Local Citizenship, on March 30 and 31. Thirty-two students from eight of the CIEL campuses presented on topics ranging from oral history to trade and sustainability in Indonesia to developments in diabetic drugs . Their presentations are profiled in a viewbook on the symposium, available through the campus coordinators at each institution or from Karen Spear, CIEL Executive Director, at spear@lorenet.com .

Johnson C. Smith University has graciously offerer to be the host site of the 2007 Spring Symposium. Details will be forthcoming.

Senior Thesis Assessment Project

Members of several CIEL campuses met in May in Chicago to read senior theses and develop an assessment rubric that might tell us something about what seniors have achieved. Steve Weisler of Hampshire College organized the event and Carol Trosset, who leads Hampshire's institutional assessment work, facilitated the meeting.

Eighty-one theses were studied, and the rubric that came out of the process seems useful as a tool for encouraging discussion among faculty across disciplines about what constitutes high-level senior writing. The goal of the assessment team as they developed this tool was to capture the full complexity of writing at its most successful levels. The refined rubric that appears below succeeded in differentiating superior senior writing in research-based projects from basic levels of competency described in more generic scoring instruments. Most other scoring instruments for use in freshman writing and even secondary schools employ much the same language for basic, intermediate, and high levels of achievement, which flies in the face of what we know about the significant differences in intellectual development from high school through undergraduate ;years.

As useful as the rubric may be for faculty, it may be even more valuable to seniors who are undertaking a thesis project to help them conceptualize goals for their writing, and to the advisors with whom they work.

Presentations at the Fall CIEL meeting and at the AAC&U national meeting will cover this work in more detail. A thorough discussion of the project appears on the CIEL website: www.cielearn.org. The rubric that was developed appears below:

Senior Thesis Assessment Rubric

CIEL Book Project on Teaching for Social Justice and Responsibility

Last fall's conference began a collaborative project to write a much-needed book on the conference theme of teaching for social justice and responsibility. Marie Eaton and Teri McMurtry-Chubb of Fairhaven College are serving as editors, and there will be a working session for the contributors at this year's fall conference. You can follow the progress of our work by using our Blackboard link at http://distance.daemen.edu . You may also contact the editors at the following addresses: Marie.Eaton@wwu.edu and Teri.McMurtry-Chubb@wwu.edu .

Newsletter Editor: Karen Spear, Executive Director, CIEL spear@lorenet.com