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Campus Compact's Engaged Department Institute Initiative
Learn more about becoming an Engaged Department
The California State University has been pleased to offer, in partnership with national
Campus Compact and
California Campus Compact, the Engaged
Department Institute for CSU academic departments in 2001, 2002, and 2003.
The Institutes were designed for academic departments interested in the department as a
unit of engagement and change. The purpose of the institutes was to help participating
departments develop strategies to (1) include community-based work in both their teaching
and their scholarship, (2) include community-based experiences as a standard expectation
for majors, and (3) develop a level of unit coherence that will allow them to model
successfully civic engagement and progressive change on the departmental level. The
institutes were facilitated by national experts and covered topics such as:
- the academic and civic effectiveness of community-based work;
- discipline-specific models of service-learning integration;
- supporting community-based work on both the faculty and the student level;
- assessing community-based work on both the faculty and the student level;
- community-based work as a vehicle of curricular integration; and
- the community partner as departmental resource; the department as community resource.
A departmental team generally consisted of the following: the department chair, three
faculty members or two faculty members and the institution's service-learning coordinator,
and a non-profit/public sector community partner with which members of the department have
already worked or would like to work. Academic departments that benefited most from this
experience were those where community-based work was already well established on an
individual faculty basis and where moving to greater institutionalization at the department
level could represent an important institutional step.
The CSU Chancellor's Office has partnered with UCLA's Center for Service-Learning
Research and Dissemination within the Higher Education Research Institute, to conduct a
follow-up study on the impact of the participating teams from 2001. To learn more about the
study, see the executive summary and
full report (.pdf).
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