2007 Civic Engagement Award Winners

To showcase and celebrate the civic engagement efforts of PSU faculty, departmental, programmatic units, and community-based partners, PSU’s Center for Academic Excellence recognizes exemplary civic engagement efforts. These awards acknowledge the importance of civic engagement in all facets of university life.

Excellence in Community-based Research

Excellence in Partnerships for Student Learning

Excellence in Departmental Civic Engagement

Excellence in Community-based Teaching and Learning

Excellence in Community-based Research

The following three faculty/community teams are recognized for providing pertinent data and responses to community needs with a focus on research. These faculty have contributed to community-based research with new, innovative ways that define, discover, and disseminate knowledge. Many of these research projects demonstrate a commitment to social action for social change via their community-based research activities, collaboration with community organizations, and democratization of knowledge.

Janet S. Walker, Graduate School of Social Work/Regional Research Institute

Janet Walker co-facilitates a national community of practice called the National Wraparound Initiative (NWI), which serves as a mechanism for simultaneously defining, discovering, and disseminating knowledge about an intervention strategy driven by bottom-up change in child- and family-serving human service agencies. Janet has brought her experience and connection to the NWI to her work with local partners, including, closest to home, Multnomah County’s Wraparound Oregon and the five-county Mid-Columbia Wraparound, helping them to connect with the NWI, to become active participants in the national dialogue, and to create their own local communities of practice for wraparound.

Erna Gelles, Institute for Nonprofit Management/Public Administration

Using theories of social capital this study explores an Institute for Nonprofit Management leadership program’s effect on emergent leaders of color working in community-based organizations. A network analysis uncovers professional ties within and between leadership cohorts over six years. The data provided helps makes recommendations for programs seeking long-term impact. There were several unanticipated study findings that inform how communities of color can best support leadership development. The conclusions are a critical piece of information as communities and organizations become more diverse and social needs within communities continue to persist.

Warren Harrison, Computer Science

Police officers have become dependent on the mobile data computer (MDC) carried in their patrol vehicles, and it has replaced traditional radio communications for routine services. Access to the MDC is lost once the officer leaves the vehicle. Warren Harrison leads a project funded by the National Institute of Justice, with collaboration from local police agencies to develop a prototype voice-driven MDC system accessed remotely via wireless headsets, allowing MDC access outside the car.

Excellence in Partnerships for Student Learning

The following community partner is recognized for helping PSU realize its motto: “Let knowledge serve the city.” This organization achieved this by: facilitating student learning in a community based context; providing venues for faculty to advance their community-based scholarship; serving as a co-educator with faculty; and suggesting creative ways to work with students and faculty in an educational, community development context.

Jabel Tinamit, Guatemala

Connecting Educational Communities takes students to Guatemala every summer to work in Mayan schools. PSU could not run this program without the help of our community partner, Jabel Tinamit, a language and service organization located in Panajachel, Guatemala. Besides providing PSU with the logistical support we need to safely and effectively house, feed, transport, and educate our students, Jabel Tinamit's status as Mayan educators helps us gain access to the authentic learning experiences our students value.

Excellence in Departmental Civic Engagement

The following departments are recognized for making engagement with community a central aspect of their departments’ aggregate approaches to student learning and scholarship. They achieved this by: using community-based learning to facilitate students’ integration of community work and reflection into their academic study; encouraging and rewarding the scholarship of engagement where community-based action, or applied research is pursued; providing support to key departmental/ programmatic initiatives which engage the community in efforts to fulfill the University’s mission.

Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning

At the core of the department's Community Development major is a three-term colloquium. The colloquium moves from theory to methods to field experience. Over the six years that the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning has been following this design for the colloquium, student teams have built a legacy of valuable and well-executed projects. The intentional overlap of engagement with community-based organizations across the three terms creates a functional coherence that helps students connect theory, methods, and practice.

Department of History

The Department of History has lead over a dozen community partnerships that have generated new knowledge, scholarship, and learning opportunities for students and faculty. These partnerships have produced public programs, on-line resources, new archival materials, and scholarly publications as well as external grants and awards. The Department’s MA track in public history has trained and placed students to serve the public as professional researchers, interpreters, and conveners of conversations about the past all around us.

Excellence in Community-based Teaching and Learning

The following faculty members are recognized for utilizing exemplary community-based teaching and learning strategies that enhance student learning and engage in public problem solving. They achieve this by: teaching at least one community-based learning course per year; joining theory and practice that results in students' understanding of relevance and application; facilitating reflective learning; understanding and facilitating civic learning outcomes for students; and demonstrating scholarship related to community-based teaching.

Vicki Reitenauer, Women’s Studies

Vicki has taught over 30 Capstone courses in her seven years at PSU. She is a national expert in facilitating reflection and has co-authored a student textbook, which highlights her best practices. In course evaluations her students’ remark at the care in which she treats each of them, the generosity of her time outside of class, and her dedication to helping them learn essential skills of citizenship including collaboration, community building, reflection, and relationship building.

Talya Bauer, School of Business Administration

Talya Bauer has been actively involved in community-based teaching and learning throughout her entire career at Portland State University. Community-based learning (CBL) is a strategy for joining theory and practice. Reflective learning allows students to learn from their success and failure. CBL helps students see the necessity and satisfaction of being involved in one’s community in ways that make a difference. Talya has successfully published two articles that focus on her work with students and community partners.

Susan Danielson, Department of English

Susan Danielson has been an innovator and practitioner in community-based learning at PSU since 1974. She has published and presented extensively across the country, gaining national praise for her work. A teacher of limitless knowledge and generosity, her course “Literature and Medicine” is on-going and joins PSU with that growing national field of study. Her commitment and scholarship continue, most recently with the publication of a ground-breaking book of essays that emerged from her work with students in community-based settings.

Sherril Gelmon, Hatfield School of Government

Sherril Gelmon is a faculty scholar who integrates community-based teaching, learning, and scholarship in all of her activities. Given her fields of health management, policy, and public health, she is committed to ensuring that students are exposed to community-based learning, are competent in synthesizing theory and practice, and develop civic learning outcomes, so they can be assets to society in their professional practice. Her scholarship focuses on community, whether related to educational program improvement, health workforce policy, or institutional change to support community-engaged scholarship.

Karin Magaldi, Theatre Arts

Prisoners, maginalized kids, Hungarian playwrights, off-campus theaters, older students-Karin Magaldi’s civic involvement with the theater community enable her to connect them all with her PSU students. In return she is active as a director, dramaturg, and Artistic Council member in many of the city’s theaters as well as presenting workshops and lectures to the larger theater community.