Features

Community Partnerships Bring Coursework to Life

Community-Based Learning courses, now supported in part by the strategic plan and a new office, are “win-win” opportunities for students and the community.

Logan Pisciotti ’19 discusses a project for Scranton Tomorrow with its executive director, Leslie Collins ’87, for his consumer behavior course taught by Abhijit Roy, D.B.A.

Students are immersing themselves in the real world of environmental psychology, community health and consumer behavior, among dozens of other topics. They are in neighborhoods and downtown, interacting with residents and agency leaders and getting in the weeds, sometimes literally, to serve and reflect critically as part of their courses. This academic experience, which involves students working with individuals, groups or organizations in ways structured to meet community-defined needs is Community-Based Learning (CBL).

“Our University has an obligation to engage with the community that it sits in, that it benefits from,” said Meghan Ashlin Rich, Ph.D., who serves as faculty coordinator for the Office of Community-Based Learning and is a faculty member in the Sociology, Criminal Justice, & Criminology Department. “In my own CBL courses, I want students to engage; I want them to be able to understand not just that their service is needed but why it is needed.”

Dr. Rich said balance between what students need and what the community needs is crucial to a successful CBL course. Faculty members who teach CBL courses have different views on why this kind of experiential learning is important to their students’ education, but they all agree that it has a real possibility of having a transformative effect on the student experience.

Kania School of Management professor Abhijit Roy, D.B.A. partnered with Scranton Tomorrow, a nonprofit, non-partisan community leadership and development organization, for his core marketing course on consumer behavior.

“It’s a win-win situation for everybody,” said Dr. Roy. “It benefits the students because they apply what they learn in class to a real situation, and the client benefits by getting their help.”

Thanks to seed money from the Strategic Initiatives Funding pool, the University’s Office of Community-Based Learning was created in fall 2017 to help better support faculty and more formally recognize this special academic activity. The office, which is supported by a board comprising faculty, staff and administrators representing academic, mission and community-related offices and departments, is also helping to determine more precisely the surrounding community’s needs.

“We are proud to support Community-Based Learning efforts through Strategic Initiatives Funding, which at its heart is all about prioritizing and advancing innovative and impactful projects — the difference makers — like this collaborative office,” said Kate Yerkes, assistant provost for Planning and Institutional Effectiveness.

According to a 2018 Economic and Community Impact Report, more than 100 Community-Based Learning classes were conducted at the University during the 2017-18 academic year alone. More than 60 faculty members from 16 academic departments engaged students in these courses in a variety of activities related to their academic study and in collaboration with community partners. Community-Based Learning is a way for students to live out the University’s Jesuit and Catholic mission, what St. Ignatius of Loyola meant when he said, “Love is shown more in deeds than in words.”

“These activities are bringing students face to face with challenges in our region, helping them to apply their skills and, most importantly, learn from community agencies long at work addressing such issues as poverty, education and economic revitalization. The collective efforts of our faculty, students and

community organizations working together have a multiplier effect,” said Julie Schumacher Cohen, chair of the Community-Based Learning Board.

With an eye toward more faculty collaboration and support, the Office of Community-Based Learning ran an inaugural annual faculty workshop in summer 2018 that included cross-disciplinary conversations and presentations by community partners. Since its inception, the office has provided nine faculty mini-grants, engaged 65 faculty through seminars and events and is working on a University-wide CBL course designation that will help to spur even greater CBL activity.

A Community Agency Workshop is planned in spring 2019, in collaboration with Campus Ministries’ Center for Service and Social Justice and the Office of Community and Government Relations, to bring area nonprofit and public sector organizations together to explore how they can work together through community-based learning and other forms of experiential learning.

Jesse Ergott, NeighborWorks Northeastern Pennsylvania president, spoke at the recent faculty workshop about the real impact a partnership between a nonprofit and The University of Scranton can have on the community.

“Working with the University has really helped us to leverage expertise in a way that has helped us to build our program,” he said. “We did not start with the organization experience we needed, so this partnership really allowed us to avoid mistakes we would have made without it.”

“Our University has an obligation to engage with the community that it sits in, that it benefits from.”

—Meghan Ashlin Rich, Ph.D., Faculty Coordinator, Office of Community-Based Learning

Writing in the Real World

Kim Pavlick, Ph.D. (front row, left) with students in her fall Newswriting course.

Several downtown businesses and students in a journalism course taught by communication professor Kim Pavlick, Ph.D., have benefited from a project partnership with the Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce. Students interviewed and wrote feature articles about businesses, from a new ramen shop to Electric City Escape, for the Chamber website, giving businesses more press and visibility and the students writing and real-world interviewing experience.

“You can’t teach journalism in a bubble,” Dr. Pavlick said.

The newswriting project is not one that people often think of as a “service” experience, but, Community-Based Learning can involve both direct service with social service agencies and special projects that build capacity at a nonprofit, raise awareness or otherwise address a community need or issue.

Wolfer Honors the Muddle

A community commitment nearly always guarantees some disarray, but Loreen Wolfer, Ph.D., professor of sociology, criminal justice and criminology, is among those who welcome and honor the muddle, now being relieved, in part, by the new office. CBL “does get challenging, complicated and messy,” Dr. Wolfer said. But the real world itself is messy, which is perhaps why it’s an ideal place in which to apply otherwise esoteric classroom concepts.

She has worked most closely in the past couple of years with Outreach — Center for Community Resources to make headway on recidivism intervention at the Lackawanna County Prison. High rates of relapse into criminal behavior have long been part of a complex problem in the criminal justice system.

By designing surveys and extracting, coding and analyzing data, Dr. Wolfer and students in two of her methods and statistics classes have, in the past, helped the center to examine its offerings to determine whether they truly make sense for released prisoners.

“Most students don’t think they’re going to be doing a lot of data collecting in their ‘real’ job,” Dr. Wolfer said, so CBL really works for these students. “It helps them see the utility of what they’re doing. It really drives home to students that what they’re doing will be used by a real agency.”

Sustainable Behavior & Storytelling

For her course on fostering sustainable behavior, Jessica Nolan, Ph.D., a psychology professor, partnered with The Greenhouse Project at Nay Aug Park, whose mission is to grow a “sustainable community through education, wholesome food and healthy active living.”

To aid The Greenhouse Project in its mission, especially in increasing awareness of programs, the students first studied sustainable behavior, and then used tools associated with community-based social marketing. They were tasked with things such as designing an intervention message, setting up a booth at the Earth Day fair on campus and even selling plants.

The project, said Dr. Nolan, resulted in her students’ “reflective thinking about their personal and civic responsibilities and involvements within their communities.”

Other CBL courses that Dr. Nolan has taught have included her psychology of diversity students interviewing diverse members of the Scranton community, including Congolese refugees, building empathy and community between students and residents. After the interviews, students write stories about the community members lives in the first person.

“We’ve done variations of this storytelling project. We’ve found that there is value in telling your story and hearing it,” said Dr. Nolan. “Not only is it effective in inducing empathy in students, it gives the community members a sense of being heard. We underestimate the power of being heard and telling our story to someone who is deeply listening.”

Students from Jessica Nolan’s course on sustainable behavior stand around Jane Risse (center), director of The Greenhouse Project.

The Evolution of the Humanities Center

Strategic Initiatives Funding has helped fund the HumanitiesInitiative, an idea that originated at a July 4 party in 2017 during a conversation between Adam Pratt, Ph.D., assistant professor of history, and Matthew Meyer, Ph.D., associate professor of philosophy. A little more than a year later, with support from Brian Conniff, Ph.D., dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, University President Scott R. Pilarz, S.J., announced a more expansive endeavor — the Humanities Center.

“One traditional aspect of the humanities that makes the need for such a center now is the degradation of civil discourse in our nation,” said Father Pilarz in his State of the University address in January. “The study of the humanities can pave the way for us to rediscover and engage in conversation around complex issues.”

The Humanities Initiative has already provided research funding for students and sponsored programs. Hear from the faculty members whose mission it is to raise the profile and advance the study of the humanities at Scranton:

“From its beginnings in the 16 th century, Jesuit education has been grounded deeply in the liberal arts, with a special emphasis on the humanities. With the Humanities Initiative, we are demonstrating some of the ways that this same tradition will distinguish our University in the future.”

—Brian Conniff, Ph.D. dean, College of Arts & Sciences

“This is a faculty-led grassroots initiative to pool resources for the good of our disciplines, the good of our students, the good of the University and the good of the world.”

—Adam Pratt, Ph.D. assistant professor of history

Pilgrim Travelers. Enlivened Educators.

Faculty and staff follow in the footsteps of St. Ignatius and other important Jesuits to enrich their own lives and others.

By Ryan Sheehan, Assistant Director, Jesuit Center

Faculty and staff at the Sanctuary of Loyola in Azpeitia, Spain.

In the later years of his life, St. Ignatius Loyola referred to himself as “the pilgrim” — as one on a lifelong quest for spiritual formation and fulfillment. His journey as a pilgrim traveler was deeply physical and spiritual. Ignatius’ spiritual pilgrimage began after he sustained serious injuries during the battle of Pamplona in 1521 and lasted until he took his final breath in Rome 30 plus years later. He never could have imagined how God’s transformative grace would change the course of the Church and the world as he sought to follow Christ more closely in his day-to-day life.

Since the summer of 2017, the University’s Jesuit Center has taken groups of faculty and staff on the “Footsteps of Ignatius Pilgrimage” to Spain and Italy to visit the important sites in the life of St. Ignatius and other prominent Jesuits. The faculty and staff cohorts begin with a nine-month on-campus Ignatian Leadership Program, designed to prepare participants for the experience along the Camino Ignaciano — the path of St. Ignatius — from Bilbao, Spain, to Rome, Italy.

“This journey broadened my knowledge about the founding of the Society of Jesus and was a rare combination of fascinating geography, aesthetic beauty, historical significance and, most important, provided a religious and spiritual context to what it is to be part of a Jesuit institution,” said Abhijit Roy, D.B.A., professor in the Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurship Department.

The Current-day Pilgrimage

The Footsteps of Ignatius Pilgrimage is designed to offer University employees a truly unique experience: an opportunity to take part in an authentic religious pilgrimage. Prior to taking the first step on the Camino, participants are asked to read seminal works on the early Jesuits and Ignatian Spirituality (The First Jesuits; The Autobiography of St. Ignatius Loyola; Men for Others) in order to prepare intellectually and spiritually for the journey. Once in Spain and Italy, we travel to the cities and locations venerated as sacred to the spiritual conversion and development of Ignatius and the Society of Jesus.

The faculty and staff at Scranton have long dedicated themselves to our Jesuit and Catholic mission in order to provide our students with ongoing transformational educational experiences. Ours is a community rich in those committed to the values and ideals of Jesuit education and its founder, St. Ignatius. The opportunity to connect our vocations as educators to the very places that Ignatius lived continues to animate and enliven our understanding of our responsibility within this tradition.

“While I have long been familiar with the history of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the opportunity to ‘walk in his footsteps’ and see first-hand the Loyola family castle, the cave at Manresa and the Virgin in Montserrat brought a new depth of meaning and understanding to that history and to my own connection to the Jesuit tradition,” said David Dzurec, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of the Department of History. “These experiences were made all the more powerful because I was able to share this pilgrimage with a group of colleagues who have become my friends.”

The sanctuary of Montserrat where Ignatius surrendered his sword at the altar of Our Lady of Montserrat.

Our pilgrimage begins where Ignatius began his: at Loyola Castle, the birthplace of Ignatius and, more significantly, the place of his conversion during his convalescence after the battle of Pamplona. From there, our groups travel to Oñati,

— Ryan Sheehan