Join us for the Poster Session & Networking Happy Hour to learn more about these topics! 
Hors d'oeuvres provided, cash bar

• How CSUSB Utilized Three Divisions and Friendly Competition to Encourage Civic Engagement
  This poster presentation aims to explore the significance of fostering civic engagement among college students and proposes a multidimensional approach to encourage active participation in civic life. Civic engagement plays a pivotal role in cultivating responsible citizenship, enhancing community well-being, and shaping democratic societies. Our non-partisan campaign examines the factors influencing college students' engagement levels, including social media usage, voter education, and community-based initiatives. We present a comprehensive framework that integrates technological advancements, student programming, and community partnerships to empower students and cultivate their civic consciousness. Through cross campus collaborative efforts and evidence-based strategies, we aim to provide practical recommendations for educational institutions, policymakers, and community organizations seeking to foster a culture of civic engagement among college students.
  Camelia Fowler
• Engaging Students in Civic Dialogue, Debate, and Engagement: Democracy Day as a Promising Practice
  This session focuses on the hugely successful and popular annual event during Johns Hopkins University’s New Student Orientation called Democracy Day. Colleges and universities are uniquely positioned to provide young people opportunities for civic dialogue – a cornerstone of academic freedom – and for democratic formation, shaping how they think about their future participation in society. Early exposure to these opportunities matters for incoming new students. Democracy Day is a partnership between faculty, student affairs, and community partners to expose incoming new students to the tenets of pluralistic democracy, civic engagement, and informed debate, especially in divisive political times.
  Emily Calderone, Stephen Ruckman, Luis Sierra Moncion
• 2019-2023: Looking Back to Chart a Path Forward with Community-Engaged Technical Writing Instruction
  This poster reports on data collected since 2019 using both control and intervention sections of a technical writing service course at a land-grant, R1 institution. Despite the challenges presented by COVID, between 2019 and 2022, our institution piloted, expanded, and now comprehensively (all sections) delivers a community-engaged (CE) technical writing service course. Community-engaged pedagogies have been a cornerstone of effective technical writing instruction for decades. Recently, more critical considerations from community engagement literature have prompted the field to reflect on the impacts (both positive and negative, and everywhere in between) that these endeavors have on nonprofit community partners and student learning outcomes. This poster offers an overview of one research project attempting to explore these impacts.
  Johanna Phelps
• The High Road Fellowship Program: 15 Years of Successful Engaged Learning and Applied Research
  Cornell University ILR Buffalo Co-Lab founded the High Road Fellowship Program in 2009, a premiere, place-based, cohort model of engaged learning and applied research for undergraduate students. With over 285 alumni, the fellowship annually brings 23 Cornell students to Buffalo, NY, to work with community partners during the summer. In 2007, the Co-Lab incubated Partnership for the Public Good, a community-based think tank with 365+ partners building a more just, sustainable, and culturally vibrant region through research, policy development, and engagement. This long-standing partnership allows students to build relationships and work collectively, tackling awesome challenges facing the U.S. and the world. Equally important are community outcomes; the fellowship adds needed capacity to nonprofit organizations combatting challenges of the region.
  Kristin Ksiazek
• Professional Development for Students in Civic Spaces
  The goal of this promising practice is to help attendees identify and develop effective methods to equip students with the knowledge and skills they need to participate effectively in civic life. This discussion will be used to help attendees understand the importance of civic engagement and its connection with professional development. It will inspire attendees to become active citizens committed to making their communities more civically engaged and to create an enhanced curriculum that allows critical takeaways for career development. Attendees should be able to successfully define the connection between professional development & civic engagement, identify different ways that students can participate in civic life, and leave with a plan to incorporate professional development into their curriculum.
  Naomi Barbour, Lauren Schueler
• Bee the CURE: growing science self-efficacy science civic engagement in community college students
  Power of place course-based undergraduate research experiences (PoP-CUREs) allow students to conduct authentic research for and with a local community and are uniquely positioned to support development of students’ community engagement. "Bee the CURE" is a PoP-CURE offered in conjunction with the Tucson Bee Collaborative (TBC) through an introductory biology course at Pima Community College (PCC). In this research partnership, students identify bee species using specimens collected by volunteers from the Museums and communities from across the Tucson area, which happens to be a bee biodiversity hotspot. Students publish their results to the Barcode of Life Database and also present their findings to the community in a poster session. Students who participate in the program demonstrate an increase in research self-efficacy and science civic engagement.
  Amy Dunbar-Wallis
• Accelerating Community Engagement: A new model for faculty development and co-creative learning
  This workshop will examine how University of Arizona faculty, staff, and local community members come together to conceive a new model for community-engaged teaching and learning, faculty development, and curriculum design. Specifically, this workshop will address key programmatic components of the Experiential Learning Design Accelerator, including incentivized faculty training within a community of practice to explore reciprocity and mutual benefit, iterative development in student-facing assignments, co-design and execution of effective learning tools, and meaningful assessments of learning and collaboration through IRB-approved instruments. The Accelerator model provides faculty and their community partners opportunities to authentically practice empathy to cultivate sustainable relationships, and training emphasizes the power of prototyping ideas and concepts to surface actionable insights that guide the iterative process of curriculum development.
  Annie S. Kurtin, Megan Forecki
• Creating a community of belonging, civic skills for college and career
  The Community of Belonging project aims to help heal our communities by providing a series of training modules to help community members develop the skills of citizenship that appear to be so lacking right now. The focus is on producing civic education modules appropriate for a workplace. The project seeks to remind ourselves why it is important in a democracy to have respectful conversations, to develop the skills to be able to have those conversations, and to encourage people, including ourselves, to put those skills to use in everyday practice.
  Deanna Villanueva-Saucedo, Brian Dille
• The CLAS Voyage: Elevating civc and community engagement in a career-connected liberal education
  After a multi-year strategic planning, the GVSU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) is addressing faculty-driven values and equity gaps by centering experiential learning, such as civic and community-engaged learning, in all majors. This initiative, the CLAS Voyage, focuses on building experiential learning unavoidably and resourcing to support participation by all students, regardless of financial or cultural capital. This launches in and through a campus-wide collaboration and will improve the student success and liberal education outcomes for our students.
  Kris Pachla, Bradford Dykes
• The Student Story: Developing An Intentional Assessment Plan Of Student Learning
  In the summer of 2022, Michigan State University’s Center for Community-engaged Learning (CCEL) revisited its mission and vision to detail strategic priority areas and create a plan for ensuring civic and community engagement as “the way forward” at MSU. Born out of these efforts, CCEL staff engaged in a process to develop learning outcomes statements (LOs) for student learning as a result of participating in the scaffolded suite of CCEL programs. This poster session will depict the process of shaping learning outcomes, compiling an assessment plan, and reflecting upon the implementation of an assessment pilot phase.
  Michelle Snitgen, Stephanie Brewer, Tina Houghton
• Ecomedia and DIY Citizenship Colorado
  Ecomedia Colorado engages interdisciplinary and intergenerational groups in rural Colorado to generate cooperative dialogue on local environmental issues and create spaces where meaning-making and creative representation of scientific data becomes possible. This project involves a web-based application powered by CitSci.org to collect observations and media from contributors about water and ecology, hosting workshops to curate this media and make collages, and an interactive projection showcase where visitors can use gestures to explore the digitized collages."
  Kimberley Bianca Hettinger
• Racial Justice & Housing Justice in Boulder County
  CU-BAHRI aims to increase affordable housing availability, especially for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, while helping to build racial justice in Boulder. In the process of doing so, we support undergraduates by engaging them in community-based research, which is not commonly integrated into university learning experiences for undergraduates. Our CPAR approach strengthens the appeal of research for underrepresented college students, who benefit from participation as they consider potential career paths in the social sciences and come to see themselves as researchers. Sharing our findings on public radio keeps our community, to whom we are accountable, constantly central in our minds.
  Sabrina Sideris, Areyana Proctor
• Dynamic Programming for Collective Impact: Emory and the Atlanta Community
  Emory’s Center for Civic and Community Engagements includes a wide variety of programs, all with the strategic mission of growing our future leaders while making positive change in our local communities. Recognizing that both Emory students and our collaborative partners differ in their needs, interests, and capacity to engage, CCE programs facilitate flexible opportunities for engagement. We find that students engaging across CCE programs, often progressing from limited-time commitments to immersive experiences, demonstrate substantial growth both in content knowledge and leadership skills. For community partners, the cross-collaboration in geographies and, at times, programs leads to more substantial and long-lasting impacts for the Emory engagement.
  Kate Grace, Brian Pirapakaran, James Roland
• PROJECT HERE: A framework for implementing collective strategies and enhancing impact
  This session highlights a framework that structures community-engaged efforts to elevate the collective impact of focused efforts. While in its pilot stage, this project also includes a partnership between a public university and a private college and their unified commitment to collectively flood a community with faculty and students to enhance the well-being of citizens and a local community. This framework highlights collective efforts and gives faculty, staff, students, community members, and organizations an “on-ramp” to engage in meaningful ways. Often those that want to be engaged are not sure how or what is happening that might be of interest to them; this framework gives visualization to efforts and allows for engagement at various levels.
  Julianne Gassman, Kristina Kofoot, Kristin Teig Torres
• Walking, listening, questioning: Dismantling walls between us and our host urban community?
  As part of a mentoring for social justice program, our team walked through the urban community surrounding campus, discussing systemic issues it faced and learning from community organizers fighting for change. While questioning the university-community divide and negative associations students have about our host community, we wondered: Can we convey our learning to others? After a year of working together, we created and publicized a self-guided community walk that highlights voices of community-based organizers and structural issues facing the community. In this session, we share our process and takeaways, inviting others to reflect on their perceptions of and relationships with surrounding urban communities. How can we challenge our preconceptions about communities around us and invite others to do the same?
  Marina Feldman, Amisha Mukhopadhyay
• The Power of Peer Leadership: Curricular and Co-curricular Engagement with a Food AccessInitiative
  We are Community Work & Learning at St. Catherine University—a minority serving institution founded by and for women. We build curricular and co-curricular partnerships that meet the needs of our wider community, foster belonging on campus, and support our university’s values of community and social justice. We will discuss how Community-Engaged Learning courses (curricular) and our Community Leaders program (co-curricular) engage with our campus-adjacent partner, the St. Kate’s/CSJ Food Access Hub. We show how these programs provide mutual benefit to one another while advancing community needs and fostering student learning. Key takeaways include how these programs leverage the power of peer leadership to foster a sense of student belonging and to support food security on and beyond campus.
  Sophie B. Hunt, Mollie Pierson, Jasmine Koch, Ann Koller
• One Vision - Preparing Students for Lifelong Civic Engagement
  When you're a Spartan, you're part of something bigger than the campus' 5,200 acres. We're a global community of more than 500,000 strong, and we're passionate about making the world a better place. Through our strategic partnership between the MSU Center for community-engaged Learning and the MSU Alumni Office, Spartans learn from Day 1, that serving with your community is an essential component of being a “Spartan for Life.”
  Tina Houghton, K.C. Keyton
• Civic Service Learning as Place Based Education
  This poster session explores college student interns’ evolving understanding of and relationship with their urban environment and institutions in the context of their service in the Civic Changemakers civic and community engagement initiative. First, we provide an overview of the program. Next, we draw on a series of interviews conducted with student interns to explore the complex interplay between civic service, personal perspectives, and urban environments before discussing the implications of these findings for civic service initiatives and service member education.
  Samuel Burmester, Rachel Talbert
• ENACT: The Educational Network for Active Civic Transformation
  ENACT: Educational Network for Active Civic Transformation is a national non-partisan program based at Brandeis University engaging undergraduates at colleges and universities in state-level legislative change by learning to work with legislators, staffers, and community organizations to advance policy in experiential courses. It is becoming a major voice in addressing challenges to American democracy by engaging young people around the country in civic activism built on knowledge, cooperation, justice, and integrity. ENACT has built a national network of faculty fellows, students, staff, and alumni and serves as a strategic and information hub for state-level players that enables them to connect with counterparts throughout the country.
  David Weinstein
• Exploring the Impact of Social Work Field Education on Community Partners
  The social work profession seeks to improve the quality of life and well-being of diverse client systems, particularly those who are vulnerable, marginalized, or oppressed. It is a basic precept of social work education that the two interrelated components of curriculum—classroom and field—are of equal importance within the curriculum and contribute to the development of professional competence. Although the transformative effects of community-based learning have been established for student learners, less is known about the impact of field education on the organizations that host students. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 community partners. Findings yield new insights regarding the impact of field education on community partners and their target populations, pointing to strategies to build long-lasting, reciprocal university-community collaborations.
  Jennifer Spaulding-Givens, Paul Clark
• The Marshall Fire Story Project
  The goal of this collaboration between CU Boulder and the Louisville Historical Museum project was to create a community archive of experiences with the Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado, and the aftermath. The Story Project provided a space for affected individuals to share their stories and offered the entire community a place to have their voices heard and added to the historical record.
  Kate Goldfarb, Jason Hogstad
• Strategies for Supporting Service-Learning Students towards Wellbeing
  Campus Connections (CC) is a mentoring program for youth and a service-learning course for college students. The innovative design includes multiple strategies to attend to the wellbeing of mentees and mentors. Research demonstrates the effectiveness of these strategies. Findings of two studies will be presented that highlight the efficacy of the strategies. Study #1 is a quasi-experimental study comparing students who participated in CC as mentors with those who did not (N=533) include improved flourishing, self-compassion, and wellbeing. Study #2 outcomes demonstrate improved student success indicators (higher persistence and graduation rates, faster degree completion, and higher GPAs). Attending to both academic success and wellbeing for students participating in service-learning is imperative as campuses support the next generation of engaged professionals.
  Jen Krafchick, Toni Zimmerman, Shelley Haddock, Lindsey
• Co-creating community-engaged Curricula: UArizona’s Experiential Learning Design Accelerator
  This poster describes the University of Arizona's Experiential Learning Design Accelerator and its impact on our campus and local communities. It will examine how faculty, staff, and local community members come together to conceive a new model for community-engaged teaching and learning, faculty development, and curriculum design. The poster will address key programmatic components of the Accelerator and explore themes of reciprocity and mutual benefit, the co-design and execution of effective learning tools, and meaningful assessments of learning and collaboration through IRB-approved instruments. The Accelerator provides faculty and community partners opportunities to practice empathy when cultivating relationships, and emphasizes the power of prototyping ideas and concepts to surface actionable insights that guide the iterative process of curriculum development.
  Annie S. Kurtin