MAKING USE OF AVAILABLE RESOURCES

I had my first meeting yesterday with 10 students enrolled in my Urban Education Course -the course I selected to work on for my project. I was very worried and not sure if the students would agree to the service learning (SL) component that I later decided to include as part of the course. The SL Coordinator at PC, Heather Whitney, was invited to give a presentation on the format of the SL program and she did a great job. All my students were excited about the SL component of the course. YEAH! However, two students had conflict with respect to the day/time for the SL. I am working on what to do for them.

I met today with one of my resource persons, Nick Longo, Assoc Professor of Public & Community Service Community Service Studies and and Program Director Global Studies and shared my course syllabus with him and got some great feedback on how to get my students engaged in the SL. I am using two books (required) for the course: 'Our schools suck' by Alonso, Anderson, Su & Theoharis and the book by Jonathan Kozol, 'The shame of the nation'. Recommended readings include the book 'A hope in the unseen' by Suskind that was recommended by one of us, Anne Seitsinger-thanks Anne. First assignment for students is to describe their K12 schools and indicate if it was an urban school or not and explain why. So long.

Ideas for Moving Forward

Thanks again to you all for an interesting first session!  At the end of the session, we discussed ways to move forward on the fellowship program, to support both your individual projects and the fellowship concept itself.  Rick and I talked today, and discussed some of the "next steps." Here are the ones we identified, but please feel free to add, subtract, or clarify as needed:

1. Find ways to collaborate.  This includes both our professional collaboration (book, articles, conferences, online content) and a desire to enhance our students' opportunities to share their work with an audience that is wider than instructors, classmates, or individual institutions.  Cmapus Compact has some existing venues, but there may an interest in developing specific projects and venues.  Let's continue the discussion.
2. The Fellows can be an excellent opportunity to provide support and guidance to each other in the work we do in engaging students in community.  Would it be worthwhile to set up smaller "working groups" of colleagues with similar projects?  If so, should we do this before the November meeting? (Lori - the tentative date is Friday the 18th of November, sometime in the 4-7 pm range (with dinner!).
3. It would be great to share techniques/approaches/ research/ common work in some way.  The first step is to read each narrative provided by fellows in their application and to continue the conversations started yesterday.

One last thing I thought of - would the people who were not able to share their projects fully wantto write an entry doing so here?

That is enough for now...