Academic Civic Engagement

Students munch on freshly pulled carrots during a field visit to Common Harvest Farm in Osceola, WI with Bill Moseley’s Geography 232 class.

Students in Maria Fedorova’s Revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union and Valeriia Witzig’s Advanced Russian courses went to the Museum of Russian Art. The Civic Engagement Center helped plan the trip with support from the Project Pericles grant.

As part of the Democracy in Action course, students urged fellow students to engage the historical U.S. 2020 General Election.

Using the History Harvest Model, Professors Rebecca Wingo, Amy Sullivan, and Crystal Moten partnered with Rondo Avenue, Inc., the representative council of the Rondo neighborhood. The History Harvest is a student-driven digital archive that seeks community contributions, empowering the community to stake a claim over their own digital identity, memories, and history.

Each year, the Community Engagement Center strives to provide necessary resources and support for faculty who would like to incorporate civic engagement in their curriculum. In the 2021-2022 academic year, 17 Macalester departments offered 40 courses with civic engagement components taught by 32 different professors. These figures shift slightly from one academic year to the next, but overall, experiential learning is a strong component of the Macalester student experience. Interested faculty can complete the form above, and Cait Bergeon ([email protected]), Faculty Engagement Program Associate in the CEC will be in touch to assist you. Cait works with faculty to offer guidance, establish, or tap into partnerships with local community organizations that are relevant to their courses.

Macalester is a long-time leader in linking academic learning to community involvement. High quality community-based learning (CBL) brings forth multiple layers of learning, teaching and problem solving.

Student work such as tutoring, research, analysis, or problem solving holds reciprocal benefits for the students and their community partner. Aligning learning objectives with an existing community need is a critical step in these real world, engaging learning experiences.