Poster Sessions

Confirmed Sessions

Bringing Hope to Colombia in the Midst of Systematic Violence & Injustice: American University Students in Colombian Peace Communities

Maria Franco, Graduate Student, American University

Since 2000 the US has provided over 7 billion dollars to Colombia in mostly counter narcotic and military aid. However Colombia's 45-year internal conflict endures and the country remains one of the world's largest humanitarian crises. As such through American University's Alternative Break Program students partnered with the NGO Witness for Peace to learn more about the conflict and our role in its continuation. Together we traveled to Colombia, trekked to targeted Peace Communities, witnessed the violence, and return to Washington DC to advocate for urgent policy reform. This session will discuss the experience of the student's, their struggles and empowerment, as well as the potential for growing and advancing student, University, NGO, and community relations across borders.

Community Based Research on Resiliency and Immigration

Amelia Swanson, Graduate Student, University of Miami

As a graduate student, my research interests are centered on issues of resiliency, trauma and immigration using community based research. I am particularly interested in community-based research as a way to facilitate direct benefit to communities impacted by issues being researched. A community-based approach is used in implementing an intervention program to promote resiliency in immigrant youth in South Florida through a partnership with a community agency and middle school. Some of the goals of the project are to promote resiliency among youth, empirically evaluate a community-based program, and develop a partnership that promotes sustainable change. Another project that utilizes a similar approach is a partnership with a community agency that provides therapy for trauma survivors. By evaluating a program focused on immigrant women, the project hopes to increase community and academic knowledge of an effective treatment for a traditionally under-researched population.

From Issue to Impact - A model for deepening student leadership & community engagement

Presenter: Debra Kiliru

How do we get students from all over the world to understand the issues surrounding their new campus and be able to make effective contributions to the overall wellbeing of the community? The Heart of the Issue Workshop is a 10 week student-led program that partners with area organizations in order to increase students' breadth of engagement and depth of understanding within one pressing local issue.   It challenges student to move beyond direct service, by incorporating policy work, advocacy, site visits, and dialogue with community leaders and on-going reflection.  After the program, students report an increased sense of belonging, responsibility and commitment to the local community.  They also say they have gained an understanding of root causes, strategies to influence policy, as well as skills in team building, networking and social media. In addition they enhanced a number of skills including critical thinking, goal setting, reflection, problem solving and communication.  The presentation will outline this issue-based approach to community and campus collaboration with examples from various issue areas.

A Graduate Student's Experience with Community Research

Krithika Malhotra, Doctoral Student, University of Miami.

In the world of academia, traditional research methodologies have been emphasized and utilized for years, often at the cost of ignoring community-based methods. Working in the community, with the community, and for the community are essential pieces of the puzzle with regards to improving our community. The Partnership for Domestic Violence Prevention is one such example, wherein we are developing a teen dating violence prevention program primarily for Hispanic youth, based on the needs identified by the Hispanic community. Another such project is the Fathers' and Children's Initiative, a social movement to increase the involvement of fathers in their children's lives. The abovementioned projects both use Community Based Participatory Research as their methodological framework. These partnerships highlight how the university can utilize its resources and talents by using research as a forum to address and benefit the needs of the community in which it exists.

Grow Great Citizens through Community-based Learning

Presenter: Julie Merten

Students are graduating into a world that demands a dynamic work-ready individual with a practical skill set. Professionally prepared students are more important than ever. The required skill set of a successful practitioner is constantly evolving and academic requirements should advance to better prepare students. This session will discuss an innovative course to have students operate a business to plan, implement and evaluate a health program for a community non-profit. The course can be modified for any discipline. The students, instructor and community partner work side-by-side to develop and implement the program. Throughout the process, the relationship between the University and community is strengthened.

Immigrant Children's Affirmative Network: Promoting Resilience in Youth

Presenters: Rachel Becker, Amelia Swanson

The number of children to immigrants has increased in the United States in the past twenty years and many of these youth reside in Florida. The Immigrant Children Affirmative Network (ICAN) works to coordinate the University of Miami, a local non-profit that provides art-based and educational programs, and a local underperforming high school in a project to promote the well-being and positive youth development of these immigrant youth. The ICAN program utilizes a semi-structured group format that incorporates input from youth participants, youth facilitators and graduate student facilitators to achieve these goals. This program is based on positive youth development research, particularly emphasizing the five Cs of positive development as well as the five Cs of empowerment. The implementation of the ICAN program provides an example of a partnership that affords a variety of benefits to the partners, including the participants, youth facilitators, community and university partners.

The Indiana University Student Outreach Clinic - An interdisciplinary student run clinic with School's of Medicine, Pharmacy, Law, Social Work, Dentistry, and Business

Gregory Martens, Medical Student, Indiana University School of Medicine

The Indiana University Student Outreach Clinic (IU-SOC) is an academic-community partnership on the near-East side of Indianapolis that provides preventative screening, acute and chronic medical care, laboratory testing, STI testing, medications, legal aid, social work, and dental care to the underserved. The clinic provides students a setting to better appreciate social, cultural, and financial influences on healthcare delivery. It also offers the opportunity to expand clinical decision-making skills, explore healthcare administration, and understand resources available for patients within the community, as well as an opportunity for professional students across multiple disciplines.

An Innovative Framework: The Community and Educational Well-Being Research Center

Presenters: Rachel Becker, Krithika Malhortra

This poster will outline the work of an innovative university center, the Community and Educational Well-Being Research Center (the CEW). The CEW seeks to pair the talent and resources of the university with the needs and challenges of the community. Two specific partnerships will be presented, focusing on: the implementation of community-based participatory research (CBPR), the role of and impact on graduate students, cultural considerations, and conceptualizations of the contribution of community agencies. Given the sensitive nature of one topic, domestic violence, special considerations were necessary for the forging of a collaboration. The second topic will explicate an iteration of CBPR, based on the work of Juan Marconi Tassara. This research identifies the strengths and resources of the different partners, then utilizes a pyramidal structure to organize their specific contributions. This poster aims to provide an analysis of the CEW's approach to partnership development.

Intentional Partnerships: Preparing the Early Child Teacher to be a Community Leader

Presenter: Katrina Hall

This presentation will provide an overview of an early childhood teacher training program designed to move students through the five components of community-based learning: outreach, instruction, immersion, apprenticeship, and research. The curriculum, based on feedback from our stakeholders, is redesigned to provide students with designated community partners, outside of the public school system, to promote civic engagement. Presenters describe how they work to help students use and engage in inquiry and research to positively impact the lives of children and families. The program is based the idea that student engagement is key in long-term learning and meaningful higher education experiences (Kuh, 2003). Providing students with opportunities to participate in critical activities in the classroom and the community at large is an important aspect of their ability to apply practice, think critically, and develop leadership skills in their discipline (Pascarella & Terinizin, 2005).

Launching a National Survey to Assess Student Learning Outcomes of Community-Based Research

Presenter: Trisha Thorme

Community-based research (CBR) grows out of mutually beneficial partnerships between members of the community and of higher education institutions. As the practice of CBR grows interest in documenting its outcomes has increased. We seek to codify the impact of CBR on student learning and developed a CBR Student Learning Outcomes Survey. The project began with individual interviews and focus groups with 70 undergraduates and faculty at six colleges and universities nationwide discussing perceived benefits of CBR. Based on analyses of these interviews, five CBR outcome constructs were derived: academic skills, educational experience, civic engagement, professional skills, and personal growth. The presentation will include information on those constructs, survey development, and a pilot of the survey in Spring 2009. We will share the instrument and invite comment on its uses and our plans for a national study of CBR outcomes.

Let [Our] Knowledge Serve the City: Student Leaders for Service at Portland State University

Presenter:  PSU's Student Leaders for Service program

Student Leaders for Service (SLS) was founded in 1999 to enhance student civic engagement and community-based learning experiences and to actively strengthen Portland State University's community-higher education partnerships.  What began ten years ago as four students has since evolved into a 25-student, award-winning, internationally-replicated program (by American University in Cairo, Egypt and University of Science in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam). SLS's mission is to cultivate a body of engaged student leaders who foster meaningful connections between the university and community, making manifest PSU's motto, "Let Knowledge Serve the City." Through a year-long placement with a community partner, a weekly leadership development meeting, and opportunities to engage fellow PSU students in community-based work, SLS offers programming that directly contributes to student success and provides opportunities for students to: explore theoretical and practical approaches to service, democratic citizenship and community building; engage in critically self-reflective placements with local organizations; and develop effective communication skills, as well as teamwork, leadership, and diversity awareness skills.

The Process of Establishing and Sustaining a Partnership between Academia and Community

Presenter: Angela Sun

This partnership was for a study on palliative care for Asian community, which begun through a previous project, and solidified by the current study. Both partners saw the need and believed the study is a fit for the partnership, for expertise from both parties can be synergistic. Research team was formed. Both parties engaged in proposal development. Tasks were divided according to their expertise. Community partner will lead as the study PI while the academic will provide guidance and expertise in research theory and methodology. The research plan, budget, human subject protection protocol were developed by both. Community was responsible for soliciting support from its network, draft sections of proposal related to the community's skills, and grant submission process. Academic's tasks were to draft sections on literature review, theory and methodology. The grant proposal is now approved and funded. Expertise from each party contributed to the study's success.

Rebuilding Trust and Community Partnerships: Lessons Learned from Research Mis-steps

Presenter: Michelle Montgomery

Two cases have recently been publicized as examples of research mis-steps: the Henrietta Lacks (HeLa) story, describing the origin of the widely used HeLa cells from a sample taken without permission or knowledge from a poor Black woman, and the Havasupai experience, in which samples collected for diabetes research were used for other purposes without permission or knowledge of the tribe. The reaction to these cases - in which sharing of de-identified samples was done in compliance with current research regulation indicate that there is still a need for research practices to nurture trustworthiness and respect for participants. A discourse analysis of these cases was conducted through the lens of Critical Race Theory to illuminate the social and historical experiences of Blacks and American Indian communities. These outcomes suggested mis-trust maybe more likely among disadvantaged people, and therefore threaten the potential for research to engage disadvantage populations.

SouthCoast Serves: Building a Regional Infrastructure for Service

Presenters: Matthew Roy, Deirdre Healy

Our presentation will examine how the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has entered into a collaborative partnership with over 40 community based organizations, called SouthCoast Serves (SCS), to build a culture of service in our region. The SouthCoast Serves collaborative believes that by encouraging service/volunteerism in schools, businesses, and communities, we can take responsibility for our region's future and foster an ethos of service. The vision of SCS is to engage our region as a place where people integrate service into their everyday lives while building capacity for community based organizations - a vision that is replicable. It is through our collective resources that we approach the unmet needs of our community using an asset based community development model (McKnight, 1993). SCS promotes effective and efficient strategies, shares best practices and maximizes organizational strengths that assure true reciprocity in community-campus partnerships.

The Sticky Side of Service: Ethical Issues in Cross-Cultural and International Service Learning

Presenters: Peter Leung, Jun Xing, Aaron Leung, Wilson Xing

Service learning, like any learning, is not culture-neutral but deeply imbedded in the political and cultural systems of a given society. Both learning and service activities relate to human differences, due to race, gender, ethnicity, class and other cultural dynamics. It
also involves power differentials throughout the teaching and learning process. In the larger context of developing campus-community partnerships, this poster presenation intends to: (1) highlight specific benefits of cross-cultural and international service learning for
all the stakeholders; (2) outline four broadly defined ethical issues within campus-community partnerships; (3) showcase a few potential pitfalls in building campus-community partnerships; and, (4) recommend a future code of ethics for service-learning practioners
and scholars in developing and maintaining campus-community partnerships.

Toward a framework for understanding community-based partnerships as essential to social justice teacher education

Michael Bowman, PhD student, University of Washington, Seattle

Social justice teacher education programs aim to prepare teachers to provide high quality, equitable opportunities to learn to all students, to advocate for the transformation not only of individual classrooms but of whole schools, and to consider their work as connected to broader networks of people and organizations engaged in supporting children, youth, and families. While a number of approaches have been advocated over the past two decades to meet this aim, there is increasing interest in ‘immersion' experiences in community or non-school settings. However, teacher education programs cannot afford to

be romanced by the ideal of community engagement; they must work to build partnerships that advance teaching practice by making explicit the relational and pedagogical expertise found in both the University and community organizations. This poster outlines the findings of a three year research study on the partnership between the University of Washington's Teacher Education Program and a set of community-based youth organizations in the Seattle area. It also suggests a restrictive-expansive framework for the development of future partnerships.

University-Entrepreneur Partnership to Enhance High School Student Personal Financial Literacy

Presenter: Kevin Corcoran

This presentation provides an overview of a collaboration-involving university, entrepreneur, high schools, and funding agencies-designed to enhance high school students' understanding of personal decisions regarding financial planning. This focus is particularly relevant given state mandates for "personal finance" programs in high schools, a mandate teachers feel underprepared to deliver. This model features the Portfolios Investment simulation, an engaging, realistic (incorporating math models used in option pricing), relevant, and memorable learning experience that overcomes many hurdles to effective school-based finance education. Formal and informal assessment suggests an engaging experience, enhancing student (and teacher) understanding of personal financial. Program implementation--with over 70 high schools (inner city, suburban, and rural), as well as with corporations and organizations, the National Football League, Fidelity Investments--suggests transferability.