News: 2009 Civic Engagement Awards

9th Annual Civic Engagement Awards Celebration
2009 Award Recipients

To showcase and celebrate the civic engagement efforts of Portland State's faculty, departmental and programmatic units, and community-based partners, Portland State University recognizes exemplary civic engagement efforts. These awards acknowledge the importance of civic engagement in all facets of university life.

Excellence in Community-based Research
Peter Collier, Sociology
Barbara Friesen, Regional Research Institute

Community Geography Project
Excellence in Community-University Partnerships
The Healthy Eating Active Living (HEAL) Coalition
Green Empowerment

Excellence in Departmental Civic Engagement
NEW Leadership Oregon
Business Outreach Program

Excellence in Community-based Teaching and Learning
Priya Kapoor, Communication
Cynthia Gomez, Chicano/Latino Studies
Harrell Fletcher, Fine & Performing Arts
Masami Nishishiba, Public Administration
Scott Burns, Geology

Excellence in Community-based Research

The following faculty/community teams are recognized for effectively responding to community needs with innovative research. These faculty have contributed to community-based research in new ways that define, discover, and disseminate knowledge. Many of these research projects demonstrate a commitment to social action for social change, collaboration with community organizations, and democratization of knowledge.

Peter Collier, Sociology:
Principles of social justice and social sustainability demand improvement of degree completion rates for underserved groups like first-generation students. Yet while first-generation college student enrollment increases, their academic success and retention rates remain low. The Students First Mentoring Program (SFMP) is a targeted intervention that promotes first-generation student success through expertise development and mentoring. During their program participation years, SFMP freshmen demonstrate higher yearly retention, average GPA, and number of credits earned rates than "all other PSU Freshmen."

Barbara Friesen, Regional Research Institute:
For five years a team of faculty, students, and researchers from Portland State University's Research and Training Center on Family Support and Children's Mental Health have been engaged in a dynamic partnership with the Native American Youth and Family Center and the National Indian Child Welfare Association. The Practice-Based Evidence research partnership has empowered stakeholders to tell their story with defensible rigor and helped increase access to human services resources for Native Americans.

Excellence in Community-based Research

Community Geography Project:
With support from the US Deparment of Education, the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies, collaborating with a PSU interdisciplinary team, partners with the Portland, Beaverton, Tigard, Hillsboro, and Forest Grove school districts to develop new ways of teaching American History. Teachers evaluate and interpret historical evidence through construction of narratives and integration of geographic data (Google Earth). Through assessment, the team seeks to understand how moving teachers from consumers of information to collaborators in historical scholarship can empower students.

Excellence in Community-University Partnership

The following community partners are recognized for helping PSU realize its motto: "Let knowledge serve the city." These organizations achieved this 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;
suggesting creative ways to work with students and faculty in an educational, community development context.

The Healthy Eating Active Living (HEAL) Coalition:
The Healthy Eating Active Living Coalition is a dynamic interdisciplinary community-university partnership that is achieving local recognition for innovative work towards a healthier built environment and public policies to reduce the disproportionately high rate of obesity in low income and minority communities, particularly among children. This on-going effort has engaged PSU faculty and students in community-based participatory research that has empowered the Portsmouth Latino community through collaborative problem-solving and health promotion.

Green Empowerment:
Students at Portland State University have benefited from the partnership with the Portland NGO, Green Empowerment (GE). GE collaborates with organizations in Latin America and Southeast Asia to develop and implement renewable energy projects. PSU has two options for students to work with GE in Nicaragua: 1) a six-credit Capstone; 2) a nine-month Social Entrepreneurship project. PSU's engage-ment with GE is exceptional due to its innovative and integrated approach to address international issues across sectors.

Excellence in Departmental Civic Engagement

The following departments are recognized for making engagement with community a central aspect of their departmental aggregate approach to student learning and innovative 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 department/programmatic initiatives that engage the community in efforts to fulfill the University's mission.

NEW Leadership(tm) Oregon:
NEW Leadership(tm) Oregon identifies, educates, and supports the next generation of women leaders in our state through an annual, residential training program for college women. For six days, our students are mentored by some of the brightest women leaders in Oregon. After participants complete the program, they are given ongoing training and mentoring opportunities which increase student retention, diversify traditional leadership roles, and ultimately serve the community.

Excellence in Departmental Civic Engagement

Business Outreach Program:
PSU Business Outreach Program (BOP) focuses on community work by providing consulting services to small businesses, while providing students with community-based learning opportunities. Students utilize their academic study to consult with local small businesses. These experiences sustain and grow businesses, while allowing students to gain valuable "real-world" experience. Student involvement is essential to the success of the BOP through contributions of valuable research, recommendations, and support to the businesses the program serves.

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' increased understanding of content facilitating reflective learning understanding and facilitating civic learning outcomes for students

Priya Kapoor, Communication:
In a post 9/11 environment, pedagogy and curriculum at American Universities bear the mighty responsibility for preparing citizens to take on leadership roles that reinstate respect for difference in terms of race, religion, nationality, gender, sexuality, and disability, at the societal, family, and at the organizational levels. In subtle, interconnected, and important ways, the course on Problems in Intercultural Communication forges the personal with the political and the local with the global. Students explore what it means to be informed, critical thinkers while engaging in Communication theory with traditions in post-colonial, feminist, cultural, and critical scholarship. The course-based theories are evaluated within a powerful context of the students learning and serving in community based

Excellence in Community-based Teaching and Learning

Cynthia Gomez, Chicano/Latino Studies:
Community Green-works is a course that examines the divide between environ-mental movement and economically and ethnically marginalized communities. Cynthia Gomez works woth PSU students and Latino youth to explore social and environmental justice. In her senior capstone class, these student teams work closely with community organizations to accelerate current gains in creating and fostering green pathways out of poverty.

Harrell Fletcher, Fine & Performing Arts:
Art and Social Practice exposes undergraduate students to artists who operate outside of the "studio/gallery model" and instead function in direct and collaborative ways with the public. Professor Fletcher works with students on participatory projects with community groups. Currently they are developing public works for institutions in NYC, Kansas City, and Paris, as well for the Portland Art Museum.

Excellence in Community-based Teaching and Learning

Masami Nishishiba, Public Administration:
Community-based scholarship is central to Masami Nishishiba's academic work as a researcher and teacher. She has conducted numerous research projects with local governments; incorporated community-based learning in her international work with Japanese municipal government managers; and engaged students in her PA551/552 analytic methods course in community-based learning projects. She actively applies three principles to her community-based scholarship: (a) develop equal status partners, (b) co-produce, and (c) inform practice.

Scott Burns, Geology:
Scott Burns has been involved in civic engagement, using CBL strategies in his classes at Portland State for the past 19 years. He has participated in 83 projects involving over 300 students with 32 partners in non-profits, governmental agencies, counties, cities, and businesses and 24 homeowner partners. All of the projects center on addressing solving real-world problems involving geology. Some of the projects have informed public policy in Portland, Newell Canyon, and Oregon City.
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