![EX[L] Center For Community Engaged Learning](/global/application/velocity/shared/images/logos/stacked-ua.svg)
New opportunity for faculty:
Creating Entrepreneurial Classrooms
The Creating Entrepreneurial Classrooms initiative for faculty at UA will award 10 innovative projects up to $10,000 each, to help students across disciplines build an entrepreneurial mindset and leverage creative problem solving as part of their career path or to build their own future.
EXL/ITL Pedagogical Exploration Fellowship
Request for Proposals- $5,000 fellowship for professional development
The EXL/ITL Pedagogical Exploration Fellowship (PEF) awards the recipient $5000 to support one year of focused professional development that aligns with Institute for Teaching and Learning (ITL) and EXL missions and the faculty member’s own disciplinary trajectory in experiential learning.
A primary goal of the fellowship will be to advance scholarly engagement with the EXL Center. In addition to stimulating the faculty member’s research and teaching practices, this engagement should do one or more of the following: explore and further develop relevant pedagogical philosophy, build capacity and/or enhance the effectiveness of EXL, and enrich pedagogical communities of practice on campus.
Download the application guidelines
The origin of the Fellowship
Dr. Matt Lee (formerly UA Sociology) is the newly appointed Director of Empirical Research at Harvard University’s Program on Integrative Knowledge and Human Flourishing. An inspiring teacher and scholar, Dr. Lee will be missed as a part of the EXL and UA community. While at UA, he was instrumental in the development of the EXL Center and served as a founding member, and then chair of the Faculty Advisory Council. His many innovative courses engaging students’ “heads, hearts, and hands” and his generous participation in a teaching community of practice have had a lasting impact on the way experiential learning happens at UA. Dr. Lee led by example, dedicating his sabbatical time to the sort of activity this Fellowship seeks to encourage. The Fellowship is founded in his honor and it is our hope that his insights and approach to teaching and research will catalyze further growth and development among faculty here.
The EXL/ITL Faculty Fellowship awards the recipient $5000 to support one year of focused professional development that aligns with both EXL objectives and the faculty member’s own disciplinary work.
A primary goal of the Fellowship will be to advance scholarly engagement with the EXL Center. In addition to stimulating the faculty member’s research and teaching practices, this engagement should do one or more of the following: explore and further develop relevant pedagogical philosophy, build capacity or enhance the effectiveness of EXL, enrich communities of practice on campus.
Faculty-Driven Initiatives
Request for Proposals- Facilitate faculty research/scholarship
Recognizing the pedagogical guidance and mentoring of Political Science Professor and Director of the Center for Conflict Management, Bill Lyons, the Faculty Driven-Initiatives program is available to faculty who seek to facilitate their research/scholarship through pedagogical innovation that emphasizes experiential learning (team-based, inquiry-driven, hands-on, community-based, participatory, etc.).
All tenured, tenure track (TT), and non-tenure track (NTT) faculty are invited to apply.
Download Requests for Proposals
The origin of the FDI
Dr. Bill Lyons (Professor of Political Science, Director of the Center for Conflict Management, and Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences) has developed a variety of innovative approaches to teaching in his own practice while also serving as a mentor to other faculty. Additionally he has played both leading as supportive roles in the evolution of teaching and learning at UA offering ideas and energy to a wide range of initiatives across the past 20 years. In his teaching as with his research, he is sensitive to power dynamics and the voices of the individuals who have “come to the table.”
Lyons’ engagement with EXL began before the Center itself. He was one of the core group of faculty who worked with administrative leadership to frame the Center’s goals and helped develop its structure. Throughout his work with EXL, Lyons has emphasized the importance of using available resources to identify and work to solve problems faculty face in successfully carrying significant teaching loads while engaged in rigorous disciplinary research. To that end, the Faculty-Driven Initiatives serve to support such efforts. One of the earliest such efforts has evolved into the Unclasses.
Grants for Community-Engaged Courses (CECs)
The EXL Center at UA is pleased to be able to offer small grants (up to $1000 each) to support UA courses that incorporate community engagement through community-based research and/or service-learning.
For an instructor to receive funding, the course must include all enrolled students in some form of engagement with local or regional community partners (Akron and Northeast Ohio).
Grant guidelines and application
- Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis each semester until funds are depleted. Please allow 2-3 weeks for processing and evaluation.
Past Community-Engaged Courses
Principles of Social Media
In Dr. Amber Ferris' class students learned and applied Principles of Social Media by working with and fundraising for the Central American Medical Outreach (CAMO) non-profit organization in Orrville, OH.
The course focused on social media events, social media boosting/ advertising, and the challenges of turning social media engagement into real life engagement.
Students successfully planned a fundraising event and created a media campaign for the organization.
Legal Aspects of Corrections
Dr. Pat Millhoff’s Legal Aspects of Corrections class involved engagement with incarcerated women and their teenaged children at Northeast Ohio Reintegration Center.
While focusing on their curricular content, the students found the lived experiences of the women and their children contextualized their course material revealing the complexities and ambiguities.
After an event at the Center in which students met with women and children, four women came from the prison to campus to talk further with the class.
Foundations of Museums & Archives
Dr. Jodi Kearns’ students in Foundations of Museums & Archives I, processed two archival collections from beginning to end, from opening unprocessed boxes and original sorting to creating series and writing the finding aid. This course used CEC funding for the archival supplies.
An important product of this semester-long work is that the Bernard Saper papers and the Sidney Bijou papers are now open and available to researchers onsite at the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology.
Below are links to the students’ work and these two newly-available collections.