Conference on Curricular Community Engaged Learning
May 05, 2023
Open gallery
The fourth annual Conference on Curricular Community Engaged Learning presented by the Service-Learning Program in the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning recently took place on the IU Bloomington campus — the first time it has taken place since 2019 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The center provides comprehensive services to support teaching and learning at IU Bloomington, including the Campus Writing Program, Service-Learning Program, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, course design, and learning communities. The Service-Learning Program consults with faculty and community on using community-engaged learning in classes to connect the community to campus resources and bolster student learning.
The conference included a plenary session, multiple presentations from faculty, students and staff, opportunities to share and discuss ideas, and awards. Michael Valliant, director of the Service-Learning Program, said the conference had 70 registrants, the most it’s ever had.
“The original end-of-year celebration was simply a symposium where we would invite people to present posters and we would give out the awards,” Valliant said. “But it seemed really clear that there’s a lot of work going on like this and that people really want opportunities to gather and talk and confer and share the work they’re doing in community-based learning.”
Valliant opened the conference with a brief speech and encouraged attendees to interact and learn one another’s backgrounds. Caleb Waugh, a member of IU’s Board of Aeons, whose team studied community-engaged learning for campus during the academic year, gave a presentation on the team’s findings.
Other presentations included sessions from English, anthropology, the Jacobs School of Music, Spanish and Portuguese, informatics and the Eskenazi School on topics of reflection, community-engaged learning during the pandemic, fashion design, language education and music pedagogy.
Valliant said he hopes that presenters and those who teach community-engaged learning see that their work is significant both to campus and the community while forming connections to work together. Additionally, he said the motivation to participate in community-engaged learning can be personal for those who take part.
“These are very meaningful activities that they get involved with,” Valliant said. “I hope that they come away with a sense of the network of people who are on campus doing this work so they can collaborate together.”
The awards given out at the conference included the Community-Engaged Learning Partnership Award, ACE Award for Exceptional Facilitation of Community-Engaged Learning and Excellence in Community-Engaged Learning Student Award.
Recipients of the Community-Engaged Learning Partnership Award were:
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Katie Silvester of the Department of English and Jan Bays of Jill’s House.
- Angie Wong of the School of Public Health-Bloomington and Anna Martin, the life enrichment director at Bell Trace.
Recipients of the ACE Award for Exceptional Facilitation of Community-Engaged Learning were:
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Zoe Verteramo, senior.
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Daylan Segura, junior.
- Emmy Mercer, sophomore.
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Caroline Pennington, freshman.
Recipients of the Excellence in Community-Engaged Learning Student Award, given to both undergraduate and graduate students, were:
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Mariana Luna, undergraduate.
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Megan McCool, graduate.
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Marissa Guarriello, graduate.