Community Engagement Resources at IUPUI and Connecting with Indianapolis
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 Being social is essential to both healing and learning. At this time, we need to both heal and cultivate learning. How do we do that when we must limit physical interaction? What’s an instructor to do when what and how you teach is rooted in community engagement?
Take a minute. Your students and community partners need one. So do you.
Be flexible and patient with yourself, your students, and community partners. Take stock of what you are experiencing. Develop your own self-care strategy. Signal the importance of this to your students. Touch base with community partners to see what their capacity is and if a project needs to be sunsetted and how to do this humanely.
Focus on what’s meaningful, not only what’s expedient.
While the immediate concern is just getting students through the spring semester, as we look ahead to summer, it’s important to ask “What is worth prioritizing at this time? What is most important for us to model for our students right now”? How we respond is not only a question of methods. It is also one about the ethos we enact with students and the communities we live in and serve. Consider which values matter most in how you and your students inhabit the classroom and community, including online. Use these values to help you prioritize. Here are some alternate teaching and learning strategies specific to civic and community engagement that may help.
Reach out. You are not alone.
While we are all working virtually, we are all navigating uncertainty and isolation together. Please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Service-learning and community-engagement across the curriculum: Morgan Studer (ude[dot]iupui[at]sehguhom) and Mary Price (ude[dot]iupui[at]6ecirp).
Support for other high impact educational practices is available through our partners in the Institute for Engaged Learning.
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The Office of Academic Affairs, working with Mary Price from the Center for Service and Learning, has developed a Public and Engaged Scholarship Review Committee. Public and community-engaged scholarship is a growing trend in 21st century scholarly work. This type of scholarship is at the core of the values and goals of IUPUI. However, the nature of that work is sometimes not fully understood by colleagues who are not themselves publicly engaged. This work is often collaborative, transdisciplinary and digital. This work is also often conducted by women and people of color. Misperceptions among peers regarding the purposes, processes, and products of diverse forms of scholarship, like public and community-engaged scholarship, can lead to negative impacts on the career success of our colleagues, especially our colleagues from marginalized faculty groups. This is a problem in the academy and one that we need to proactively address at IUPUI. It is in this spirit, we have created the Public and Engaged Scholarship Review Committee (PESRC).
The inaugural Public and Engaged Scholarship Review Committee consists of members who are senior colleagues with experience in promotion and tenure across the campus. This committee will review dossiers submitted by faculty members who perform publicly engaged scholarship. These reviews will be done only at the request of the faculty member and will be added to the dossier by the faculty member at the faculty member’s discretion. The goal is to have faculty members with expertise in the methods, challenges and impacts of publicly engaged work to serve as reviewers to help others on campus better understand this scholarship as faculty members undergo the year three and promotion and tenure processes.
This year, the committee focused solely on providing formative review of tenure line candidates who are undergoing the year three review. If you are a public or engaged scholar, please keep this review committee in mind as you begin to craft your personal statement. This group will help you to address how your public and community engagement enhances the value and impact of your scholarly work, including relevant community(ies), publics, and audiences and how you may strengthen or further develop your work in light of your trajectory towards tenure and/or promotion.
Please reach out to Senior Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Margie Ferguson at ude[dot]iupui[at]osugrefm if you would like additional information.
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Indianapolis is a hub for many cultural and educational organizations. To add to the list of the organizations you may already know of, below are five hidden gems!
Given the ongoing COVID-19 situation, these organizations may need support. Visit their respective websites to see how they are addressing the pandemic.
Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library
The KVML houses artifacts from Vonnegut’s life and honors his contributions as a writer and activist with early roots in Indianapolis and produces language and visual arts programming.
Madam Walker Legacy Center
The now-revitalized building was the headquarters of Madam C.J. Walker Hair Care and Beauty Products. This building now provides educational programs and serves as a community venue.
Garfield Park Conservatory and Sunken Garden
Garfield Park houses a conservatory and Sunken Garden worth visiting to see hundreds of tropical plants and classical garden landscaping.
Indiana Historical Society
The Historical Society “collects and preserves Indiana’s unique stories; brings Hoosiers together in remembering and sharing the past,” (Indiana Historical Society).
Conner Prairie
Conner Prairie is a cornerstone of arts, science, history, and interactive learning in an outdoor museum setting.
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“Work on BIG ideas. Don’t spend all your energy on the daily responsibilities.”
- Submitted by a former new faculty member.
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Need-to-Know for New Faculty
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Many of us spend a lot of time writing for academic audiences, but have you ever tried communicating your work to the general public? The Conversation is a nonprofit publisher of news, commentary, and analysis written by academics and edited by journalists for the general public.
An article was published on the site by Melissa Cyders (School of Science), and pieces authored by Gabriel Filippelli (School of Science) and Tyrone Freeman (Lilly Family School of Philanthropy) have been picked up by The Washington Post and Time, respectively.
If you have a bit of time to write an 800 to 1000 word piece for a mass audience, this is a terrific way to raise awareness of the outstanding research and creative inquiry projects that IUPUI faculty lead.
IUPUI faculty can register to write for The Conversation via this link.
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