Wake Forest has been named to the 2013 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.  The University is one of 28 schools in North Carolina to be recognized for engaging its students, faculty and staff in meaningful service that achieves measurable results in the community.

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The Institute for Public Engagement promotes engaged teaching that fosters critical thinking, gives each student a voice, and encourages students to engage with issues affecting the Wake Forest community and the community beyond.  

Within the broader concept of engaged teaching is the recognized pedagogy of service-learning, usually involving direct service to meet community needs. Other forms of engaged teaching may not involve such service but nevertheless engage students in the process of identifying and understanding community issues.   

The purpose of this discussion series is to afford faculty the opportunity to share their ideas, challenges, and rewards relating to engaged teaching and to be of mutual inspiration in an enjoyable, informal setting.  

The Institute is proud to announce its Spring 2013 Lunch Discussion Series to be held in Reynolda Hall Room 301 from 11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. on

Monday February 4

Topic:  Engaged Teaching relating to Systemic Social Change.

Description:  “Systemic social change delves behind immediate problems, involves new ways of applying resources to underlying causes and results in tangible and enduring benefits.”  Skoll Foundation.  Faculty will share best practices to engage students to think critically and initiate action to bring about systemic change. 

Potential Speakers:  Stephen Boyd (Religion) , Peter Gilbert (Documentary Film), Mark Wilson (Public Health/Translational Science)

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Monday March 4

Topic:  Engaging Students to Think Critically

 Description:  Featured Faculty will share how they encourage students to think critically (analyze, assess, reconstruct) as part of teaching in their respective disciplines.  

 Potential Speakers:  Cindy Gendrich (Theatre), Paul Thacker (Anthropology), Gloria Muday (Biology),  Hana Brown (Sociology)

Monday April 1

Topic:   Engaging about Hunger – a Topic for Every Discipline

 Description:  Hunger can (and should) be addressed through the lens of every discipline – Forsyth County ranks as one of the highest for childhood hunger in the nation and the causes and consequences are complex. Speakers will share their ideas and best practices for engaging students to think critically about hunger and initiate action to bring about change.  

 Potential Speakers:  Grace Wetzel (English), Sara Quandt (Translational Science  food justice), Mark Jensen (Divinity),  Shelley Graves (Campus Life – Campus Kitchens)

Join us by registering for one or more sessions at http://pdc.wfu.edu/events/1242/ .

Lunch will be served!

Hana E. Brown, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Sociology has exciting news about students in her fall Sociology 360: Social Inequality class.  Instead of having her students jump right into service learning this term, Dr. Brown decided to have them do group projects which involved researching a particular aspect of social inequality in Winston Salem, reaching out to local organizations working on the issue, and using sociological research to propose a potential project that Wake Forest students could initiate to help out.

They  recently completed their final presentations for the course.  ”My students did a wonderful job on all sorts of topics (gay rights, immigration, sports, secondary education, adoption, etc).  But the most exciting result from the project is that the group studying health inequality actually formed a partnership with the Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity (MACHE) through their research.  MACHE is working on health access issues with local adults, and my students are joining forces with them to add a child health education component to the new MACHE program.  They are starting to research grant opportunities to ensure the project has adequate funding and gets off on the right foot, and they have masterfully used the sociological research on health inequalities to identify likely barriers to implementation and possible solutions.”

Congratulates Dr. Brown for availing your students of these engaged learning opportunities and to your students for achieving a sustainable outcome!

The Institute for Public Engagement is pleased to announce its call for proposal for the Center for Community Solutions. The Center for Community Solutions is a new enterprise that builds upon the successes of IPE’s Engaged Scholarship Initiative where faculty and community partners collaborate to promote positive social change throughout Winston-Salem.

The Center for Community Solutions aims to rethink traditional academic research in an effort to better serve Winston-Salem; develop greater support for community based projects; and, foster a more cooperative environment and open lines of communication between Wake Forest’s faculty and the Winston-Salem community. Efforts are underway to hold four, Community Partners-WFU Faculty workshops during the upcoming Spring semester. Community-identified topics include: homelessness, educational child readiness, infant health and teen pregnancy.

Click on CCS 2013 Application for the full call. Interested faculty are encouraged to take part in the inaugural cohort during the Spring 2013 semester. The deadline for submitting a proposal for the CC is December 21, 2012. For more information, contact Prof. Sherri Clark or Steve Virgil

Welcome to a wonderful cohort of  2012-13 ACE Fellows and the courses in which they plan to integrate service-learning:

 R. Jarrod Atchison, Director of Debate, Assistant Professor, Communication

 Argumentation Theory COM 302 which focuses on civic development, leadership, critical thinking, and ethical decision making.

 Margaret Bender, Associate Professor, Anthropology

Linguistic anthropology courses including Language in Education and Fields Methods.

 Carole Browne, Professor, Biology

 Cell Biology BIO 214.

 Philip Clarke, Assistant Professor, Counseling

 Undergraduate Helping Skills in Human Services Course CNS 337,  Health and Human Services in a Diverse Society CNS 335

 Patricia Dixon, Senior Lecturer, Music

 Music and Political Power (MALS Program), Music of Protest (FYS), Music and the American Dream (FYS), Performance Chamber Music (M120)

 Barbara Lentz, Associate Professor Legal Analysis, Writing & Research, Law

 Art and Cultural Property law course, Business Drafting, proposed Interdisciplinary Program in Non-profit Leadership

 Dee Oseroff-Varnell, Lecturer, Communication

 Communication and Identity (COM 370),  Public Speaking courses.

 Christina Toules Soriano, Associate Professor, Theatre

 Movement and the Molecular DCE 122B

 Neal Walls, Associate Professor, Divinity

 Service-learning  in short-term international travel courses

Ron Von Burg, Assistant Professor Communication and Interdisciplinary Humanities

Public Life and the Humanities HMN 282, Humanity and Nature HMN 380.   

Elisabeth Whitehead, Instructor, English

 English 111 Writing Seminar for first-year students possibly focusing on bully prevention,  mentoring high school students in creative writing, personal narrative, aging, politics and rhetoric of food.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Kulynych Auditorium in Byrum Visitor Center, 5:30 p.m. “Showdown 2012 One Month Away.”
Provost Kersh is a nationally recognized expert on U.S. politics. He is a well respected writer, and frequent contributor to print and broadcast media, on several of the issues that will shape the November election, including campaign finance and health care. Provost Kersh’s has recently commented on the companies who supported Obama’s campaign four years ago and are now contributing to Republican coffers. Provost Kersh is the author of “Dreams of a More Perfect Union,” a study of U.S. political history and “Medical Malpractice and the U.S. Health Care System.”

The Institute for Public Engagement supports initiatives across campus that promote public engagement and link Wake Forest’s academic mission to the wider community.

Campus Election Engagement Project (CEEP) is a non-partisan project that helps America’s colleges and universities get as many of their 20 million students as possible to register, volunteer in campaigns, educate themselves, and turn out at the polls. Focusing on administrators, faculty, and staff, and ways they can help engage their students, we worked with 500 schools in 2008 and hope to work with even more this round. Check out Wake the Vote 2012 Events!

Faces of Courage includes a wide variety of programming that recognizes and highlights Wake Forest’s ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion. Many events are free and open to the public; and students, alumni, faculty, staff and friends of Wake Forest are encouraged to attend.Check out Faces of Courage Events!

Junior J'Taime Lyons receives congratulations from President Nathan Hatch for grant from Harry S. Truman Foundation. Each merit-based scholarship provides $30,000 for graduate study for students who plan to pursue careers in government or other public service.

Lyons is one of 54 students from 48 U.S. colleges and universities named Truman Scholars. She is the 15th Truman Scholar at Wake Forest.

Lyons, who is majoring in sociology, plans to pursue a graduate degree in public policy with a focus on education.

“After graduation, I plan to become a Teach for America Corps member. In order to influence education and social policy, I must see what is happening first-hand,” says Lyons. “After graduate school, I hope to become an education policy advisor for a U.S. Senator, Representative or Governor. Eventually, I would like to be a state senator and eventually governor of North Carolina.”

Lyon’s reflects below on the value her experience in the Institute of Public Engagement’s Summer Nonprofit Immersion Program.

“I always knew that I wanted to make the world a better place for disadvantaged populations and that is  one of the reasons I did the internship.  The research I did in courses at Wake Forest showed me the power of education.  I realized that education would be the mechanism through which I would work for those who are disadvantaged. ”

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