Oct 13

Reading Reflection Five: Cultural competency and ethnic studies

How do your own cultural experiences and ethnic backgrounds influence your interest in community engagement, the types of projects you take on, and so on?  Compare your experiences to those discussed in the article. You can also write a different response, but you should compare your own personal experiences with those in the article. By Thursday at 1:30 PM.

Oct 08

Reading Reflection Four: Working with Community Partners

For Tuesday, you will read about how community partners select service learners, and in your service learning reflections from last week, you wrote about why you chose the site you did.  How do these criteria fit together?  In what ways might they conflict? Do the criteria community partners use to choose you make it easier, harder, better, worse, etc. for you to find a good site?  How well do the criteria the authors present match what you have seen at your site?  Answer one or many or none (think of your own) of these questions before 1:30 PM on Tuesday October 12.

Oct 04

Reading Reflection Three: Making great presentations

By Thursday October 7 at 1:30 PM, please tell us about one thing you learned from Thursday’s readings (about presentations) and how you could have benefited from it in the past…. be specific in your story about the past and in your connection to the reading.

Oct 02

Reading Reflection Two: Campus Compact

By 1:30 on Tuesday, October 5, please answer one or multiple of these questions:

1) Thomas Erlich (the author) declares that we cannot afford to educate a generation of students who only have knowledge with no understanding of how to use that knowledge to help the community.  What do you think about this statement?  How does it relate to what you learned about Kolb’s model of experiential learning?

2)  What role do you think organizations like the Carnegie foundation should have in setting goals for universities across the country?

3) Do you think administrators, faculty, staff, and students should work together or separately in advancing the role of UCI in the community?  What skills and resources do you think each of these groups brings?

Sep 29

Sample email text

You will want to customize this email… it would be a bit odd I suspect for these agencies if they were to receive the exact same email from each of you, but this will give you an idea.

Dear _________

I am writing, because I am enrolled in Dr. Hayes’s class on Civic and Community Engagement at UCI. I would like to do my service learning for this class at your organization. Specifically, I am most interested in helping with _________________, but of course, I am happy to help with whatever you need.  Could I come to visit/talk to you by phone [CHOOSE ONE, DON’T PUT THAT WEIRD SLASH IN] sometime this week or next? I need to have my service learning site finalized, and a service learning agreement signed by me and by you turned in to Dr. Hayes by October 12. [IF APPLICABLE] I am attaching my completed application to serve with your organization.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you/Regards/Sincerely/Best,

NAME

Sep 28

Reading Reflection One: Bowling Alone

Answer one of these questions … or make up a new question of your own and answer it :) Answers due as responses to this blog comment (please put your name in so I can tell who you are) by the time class begins on Thursday September 30.

(1)What is meant by social capital?

(2)What are some important types of social capital Putnam discusses?

(3)  What is the difference between bridging/bonding social capital?

Sep 27

How to use the wiki


The first thing to do when going to the wiki is to go to the page you want. At this time, there is only one page, but there will soon be more. So, click on Introduce Yourselves.

If you need to upload a new image (which you almost certainly do need to do), click on upload file in the left hand banner.

You will then see an upload page….. as you can see from the instructions on the upload page, you will need to know the name of the file you upload. So, make your life easier, and before you upload your picture name it FirstName.jpg or LastName_FirstInitial.jpg or whatever… you will be annoyed if you name your photo DIS0001.jpg and then someone else does the same thing and overwrites your image.

Click upload file. Once you see your file uploaded, remember the name, and click back until you get in the main page.

Now, the next thing to do is to click edit at the top of that page. If you don’t see edit, you need to log in to EEE, but you should most likely have already done that.

When you click edit, you will see a whole bunch of text like the pile below. Copy and paste someone’s entry and then replace your info into those slots. Remember when I said to remember the name of your image?  Thats because as you see below, the way you make the image in your line is to put two of these: [ and then the word Image, and then name of your image and then one of these | and then 100px (this makes it a reasonable size) and then two of these ]]

when you get done editing, scroll down to the bottom and click save page!

You are all done!

Go back and edit anytime you like.

Gillian


Sep 15

So you want to propose a new service learning site…

Hi everyone,

I have gotten a lot of great questions by email about working with service learning sites other than those on our class website.  Here is some information for those of you who might already have a site in mind:

(1)           You must already be engaged in regular service at the alternate site.

(2)           The site must be a formal service agency or organization—e.g., a government organization or incorporated, 501c3 non-profit organization.  You must have a supervisor who will oversee your service-learning placement.  You may not use a service club or more informal or independent service as your placement. In other words, no, you can’t go help your friend’s grandmother for course credit, but you can always do it just to be nice.

(3)           You must have opportunities for on-going and meaningful service at the alternate site for at least 15 hours over the quarter. These must be in addition to any hours you may be logging for other service commitments. In other words, if you are doing 100 hours of state-mandated service for that incident over Spring Break, you need to do a total of 115 to have 15 for this course.

(4)           All alternate sites must be approved by the instructor.

For an alternate site to be considered as your service-learning placement site for this course, please have your site supervisor complete and sign the service learning agreement.  If the alternate site is not approved, you must conduct your service-learning at one of the approved service-learning sites for the course.

I hope this helps!  Thanks everyone for the great questions… keep them coming.

Best,

Gillian

Aug 31

Welcome!

Welcome to US 10: Introduction to Civic and Community Engagement.  We are so glad you are here. Please check back VERY frequently for updated information, posts, and generally ways to get together and communicate as part of this class.

I am excited for a great fall quarter and hope you are too!

Gillian

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