Community engaged teaching and learning fellowship
I (Gavin) joined the university’s community engaged teaching and learning faculty fellowship program in September 2024. A two year program run by the Leduc Center for Civic Engagement, the fellowship brings faculty at the university together via a series of scaffolded programming, discussion, and collaborative work sessions to help faculty interested in developing or extending service learning opportunities as part of their pedagogy and in their courses. As someone who integrates community members within my teaching and has a public-service focus to my service work at the university (primarily but not solely at supporting the regional fisheries assessment and management processI have been hoping to take part in this program for several years. For various reasons this hasn’t panned out but this year I signed up. With an idea of perhaps expanding our stock assessment practicum course into something more structured and sustainable, and to add some additional elements to my science communication course.
The first year of the fellowship involved monthly meetings with our cohort (new fellows in AY24 and last year’s new fellows), following amazing and thoughtful new programming developed by Leduc director Matt Roy and Nick Longo, faculty at Providence College, with short preparatory readings and videos, facilitated small- and large-group reflections on materials and understanding of motivations . We touched on a range of topics, including “Building Reciprocal Partnerships when designing Community-engaged courses”, “Assessing Impact when Reflecting on Community-Based Teaching & Learning”, “Facilitating Better Discourse”, and “Asset-Based approach for Centering Community”. Making space and time for intentional thinking about how we do this work is so important, and I really appreciated the time that Matt and Nick put into investing in this space and facilitating these conversations with us. Crucially, this programming also connects me with colleagues in other Colleges at the university to learn from each other - often in our teaching we (faculty) are the only ones in our role in the room. I find so often that these sessions and the readings named things that we all are already doing in our classes and service work, but that the common language helped us talk through things together. I’ve also been excited to use some of the readings/videos in my class and share these with my students directly. Thanks to Nick and Matt for allowing us to share these resources this way (Forking as a worldview). I am looking forward to implementing some of the ideas I developed ‘out loud’ with my colleagues this year in a revised model for our stock assessment practicum course in the upcoming academic year.