An Excellence in Civic & Community Engagement Programming Award

Thursday, August 6th at 1:00 PM ET (12:00 PM CT / 11:00 AM MT / 10:00 AM PT)

Join us this summer for a deep dive into the 2026 Campus Compact Programming & Partnership Impact Award winners. This session, you will hear from the UC Boulder Teaching East Asia through Picture Books program.

Spanning three years to date (2024-2026), the program trains University of Colorado Boulder students as interns who developed research and teaching skills, commitment to global education, cultural diversity, and civic mindedness through service. Each CU student works on a picture book that focuses on a specific region of East Asia and a theme (natural sciences in 2024, geography in 2025, and biography in 2026). Mentored by staff from the Program for Teaching East Asia, the interns do research, develop a lesson and activity based on their book, and practice the needed skills to work with young students across Colorado.

To date, the program reached 64 classrooms in 2024 and 49 in 2025 with more visits planned for spring 2026. Our interns have brought China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia and Taiwan to more than 2,200 K-12 students as of the fall of 2025. Creating a better cross-cultural understanding can never begin too early. Bringing awareness of different cultures into K-12 classrooms helps to develop more inclusive societies as children begin to comprehend that they are part of a global citizenship that must strive for mutual understanding.

Lynn Kalinauskas

Lynn Kalinauskas earned a PhD in Chinese Literature from Yale University in 1995. Since then, she has been working in universities, first as a lecturer at the University of Alberta (1995-1997). She was the Program Coordinator for the Richard U. Light Fellowship Program (1997-1998) at Yale University.  She then managed Yale's Council on East Asian Studies (1998-2001). Upon moving to Colorado, she became Associate Director for the Center for Asian Studies (2001-2005) at the University of Colorado Boulder. She implemented and managed grant-based programs designed to improve and expand undergraduate Asian studies at the university. She then became the National Administrator (2005-2023) for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA). At the same time, she taught Chinese Civilization at the University of Colorado Denver (2008-2019). In 2020 she began working at the Program for Teaching East Asia at the University of Colorado Boulder to create and teach professional development courses for K-12 teachers as part of its NCTA mission. In April 2023, she became Director of this program as well as Co-Director of the NCTA. In this new position, she is responsible for programming, including fundraising, grant administration, new program development, and teaching. Lynn received a Fulbright International Education Administrators Awards for Taiwan in 2024 and the Campus Compact Excellence in Civic and Community Engagement Programming Award in 2026.