About the CEL
The Communities of Engaged Learners Initiative
Distinguishing Utah Valley University
Introduction
With the transition of Utah Valley State College to Utah Valley University in July 2008, the university is in a unique position to be distinguished as an engaged learning and teaching institution. At the same time, a new initiative, emphasizing engaged learning activities, was emerging based at other similar universities around the country. Accordingly, UVU instituted “The Communities of Engaged Learners.” This initiative is central to the university transition process. As part of its transition to university status, UVU is committed to building upon our existing strength of preparing students who contribute to the health of the community; institutionalizing Engaged Learning strengthens that part of our identity in the wider community
This document contains four sections. The first examines the history of the relationship between higher education and community. In this section, we lay the theoretical groundwork for building a Community of Engaged Learners. The second outlines specifically how engaged learners differ from typical learners in a post-secondary education situation. The third section looks at the function, roles and responsibilities of the UVU Center for Engaged Learning. Finally, the fourth section will outline and define the procedures for obtaining a grant from the Center for Engaged Learning (ie, mission, model, definitions, criteria and process, management and accountability, and timeline).
| In this document Community Engagement is defined by the Carnegie Foundation as “the collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.” The foundation further defines Curricular Engagement as “the teaching, learning and scholarship that engages faculty, students, and community in mutually beneficial and respectful collaboration. Their interactions address community identified needs, deepen students’ civic and academic learning, enhance community well-being, and enrich the scholarship of the institution. | "Education must be local—that is, it must be designed for and owned by local communities, if it is to provide a meaningful learning experience for all students. At the same time, learning must satisfy extra-local standards. Given the opportunity, individuals, including and perhaps especially, students, set higher personal standards and goals than others are likely to set for them." -Stanford University Statement on Engaged Learning
“The goal is to create “communities of engaged learners connected in meaningful ways to the world we live in while developing students of strong character and ethics." -President William A. Sederburg, 2007 |
Community and Higher Education
A history of the university in western civilization goes back to the 11th century, where universities were affiliated with the Roman Church (Stegner, 1964 or Rudolph, 1990). The function of the university was to provide a literate special population from which the Church could draw clergy. In the medieval world, education was not for the masses. As political entities (cities, states and kingdoms) began sponsoring higher education, they hoped for a social, political and economic “payback” from education. That payback came in the form of a better social environment and economic opportunity. Particularly as the industrial age has been replaced by the age of information, political entities have seen the advantage of sponsoring higher education to build an economically productive workforce.
| No longer is just an educated population the goal. In the new paradigm, the process of education needs to engage and benefit the community. | In Utah, Mormon pioneers continued the process of education during their migration trek west, and soon after arriving in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake established both K-12 and higher education (Stegner, 1964). Many of the current state-operated institutions were founded by early pioneers as a centerpiece of their communities. |
Political entities sponsoring higher education have, in the past, been content to see the advantages of higher education as general and inexplicit. Today internal and external forces are pushing higher education to be more explicit about the relevant benefits to a given community. No longer is just an educated population the goal. In the new paradigm, the process of education needs to engage and benefit the community.
The engagement movement has not just come as a result of political pressure. Internally, as higher education deals with more complex questions, institutions need to find a way to improve the quality of learning while continuing to be relevant to their sponsoring community and state. Educational theorist Parker Palmer has written that all learning occurs in the context of a community. Palmer posits that, in order to learn, we must place knowledge into the context of a relevant social engagement by applying it to a real problem. For Palmer, engaged learning is not only a better way to learn, it is, in the end, the only way to learn (Palmer, 1997).
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Alexander McCormick As community contact and engaged learning has grown within institutions, support for engaged learning has grown externally. In 2006, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching identified some seventy six U.S. institutions of higher learning for its new Community Engagement Classification. Alexander McCormick, Director of Carnegie Classification says, "It [engaged learning] represents a significant affirmation of the importance of community engagement in the agenda of higher education. Institutions in this category engage faculty, students and community in mutually beneficial and respectful collaboration. Their interactions address community-identified needs, deepening students' civic engagement, enhance community well-being and enrich academic scholarship. They create applied learning opportunities that build partnerships that benefit both campus and community. They focus on creative collaborative capacity within the institution and a mutually beneficial exchange, exploration and application of knowledge within the community” (Shulman, 2006). |
“Their interactions address community-identified needs, deepening students' civic engagement, enhance community well-being and enrich academic scholarship” |
“Finding new and better ways to connect with their communities should be a high priority for higher education institutions today," says Lee S. Shulman (2006), president of the Carnegie Foundation. "The campuses participating in this elective classification provide useful models of engagement around teaching and learning and around research agendas that benefit from collaborative relationships.”
Communities of Engaged Learners at Utah Valley University
Many examples of engaged learners already exist at Utah Valley University. For example, theater professor Terry Petrie and his student Adam Sley wrote and produced a performance based on the diary of African American slaves. The performance not only benefited the local community, but it preserved a critical part of American history and displayed the stories of an often overlooked population.
A second example comes from the Department of Dental Hygiene at Utah Valley Universtiy. Each semester students and faculty go into elementary schools with “at risk” populations and provide free dental hygiene screenings and teeth cleanings to children. In the process, the students learned how to interact with real patients, how to work on real patients, and receive feedback from their instructors in real time. The community and children benefit from their service.
| Sponsoring regions expect regional universities to be tied to their geography and the specific needs of the sponsoring population. | These examples are but a small sample of what is already occurring. More than thirty communities of engaged learners have been identified at Utah Valley University ranging from Service Learning, Volunteerism, internships, mentoring programs, Athletics, student involvement, Outdoor Education, Technology, General Education, Capital Reef Field Station and The Center for the Advancement of Leadership. |
Utah Valley University proposes a unique initiative for enhancing existing and creating new communities of engaged learners that has three essential elements identified in Figure 1. The first element is people of integrity. People of integrity is essential to the initiative because it illustrates how we must go beyond ethics, and help students identify and make real their own values in the context of a community. This means more than just an academic debate about right action; it means that students must understand how their behavior affects others in real ways.
The second component of this model is related to a stewardship of place. In recent years regional universities are called upon to be stewards of place (Wilhelm, 2001). Sponsoring regions expect regional universities to be tied to their geography and the specific needs of the sponsoring population. Universities that embrace the charge of being stewards of place go beyond providing education for workforce needs and provide cultural and social benefits to the community as well. Stewards of place maintain an active dialogue with political, social, and religious institutions to contextualize and enhance the learning of student populations. Stewards of place see themselves as more than social critics, but as social activists helping to address regional problems large and small. At Utah Valley University community is defined as a local, state, regional, national and global level. Engaged learning activities may take students and faculty to the far reaches of the world or they may be very close to home.
The third element in this model is professional competence. Professional competence is the key to individual success and economic relevance. Students who become professionally competent are not only more likely to be gainfully employed, they are more likely to be contributing members of society, have satisfying lives and be self-sustaining adults.
“The people of integrity acting as stewards of place using professional competency to develop a form of scholarship that gives immediate and sustained benefit to the community and to those who serve.” - William A. Sederburg
The Executive Director, effective June 28th, 2007, is Dr. Jack R. Christianson. He can be contacted at 801-863-8037 jack.christianson@uvsc.edu