Community Engagement and First Year Students: Exploring Initiatives that Deepen Impact

In the summer of 2015, Dr. Annie Jonas (Chair of the Education Department and Faculty Liaison to the Service-Learning Program at Warren Wilson College) and Dr. Ashley Oliphant (Associate Professor of English and Faculty Fellow for the Francis Center for Servant Leadership at Pfeiffer University) were selected as the inaugural Engaged Faculty Scholars by the North Carolina Campus Compact. During their one-year term, Jonas and Oliphant will promote and deepen the scholarship of engagement at their home institutions by implementing major service-learning initiatives (set to launch in fall 2016) in first year student programming. Jonas and Oliphant will work with faculty at their respective schools to incorporate civic engagement through service-learning in first year seminar courses and engage a variety of community partners, though the design of the specific curricula, reflections and assessments will differ at each institution. In addition to Jonas and Oliphant, the panel will also include Warren Wilson’s Brooke Millsaps and Pfeiffer’s Kelly Misiak. Millsaps, the Assistant Dean for Service-Learning, supports faculty with the development and implementation of service-learning courses and assists with the connections between curricular work and the expectations of the Community Engagement Commitment at Warren Wilson. Misiak, Pfeiffer’s Director of Service Scholars, coordinates all student service programming, both short-term volunteering and long-term service scholarship placements. The panel will convene to discuss the theoretical underpinnings of our ambitious service-learning projects, the institutional factors and conditions that made our proposals possible and the challenges and corresponding solutions that marked our journeys. By offering faculty perspectives from two disciplines as well as multiple administrative viewpoints, the panel will define how two small, rural North Carolina schools with limited resources managed to design, implement and assess extended service-learning experiences for large segments of the student population. A particular emphasis will be on first year student development as it relates to service-learning and community engagement. The unique context of each college will provide a backdrop for other institutions to consider how their unique campus contexts could complement community engagement initiatives. Warren Wilson, one of only 7 work colleges in the United States, delivers a curriculum grounded in the triad, an approach that integrates academics, on-campus work and service in the community. Pfeiffer University is founded on a 130-year tradition of service and learning