News

Xavier One of Twenty Campuses Selected for Community-Engaged Faculty Charette

Teams Convene in May to Design Models of Faculty Development

05/14/08

Faculty for the Engaged Campus announced that Xavier University was one of twenty colleges and universities selected from over 100 applicants to build a cadre of community-engaged faculty members. Teams from the 20 will join project staff and advisors in Chapel Hill, NC from May 28-30 for a charrette. Mainly used in architecture, urban planning and community design projects, a charrette is an intensely-focused multi-day session that uses a collaborative approach to create realistic and achievable designs. This charrette will design competency-based campus-wide models of faculty development that support community-engaged careers. At least four participating institutions will be awarded grants to implement and evaluate their designs.

 

A four-member team was gathered at Xavier, including the chair of one department from each college. David Knutson, Modern Languages chair in the College of Arts & Sciences, Carol Scheerer, chair of Occupational Therapy in the College of Social Sciences, Health and Education, and David Burns, chair of Marketing in the Williams College of Business, joined Byron White, Associate Vice President of Community Engagement, to create an Engaged Scholarship Faculty Academy at Xavier for 2008-09. The charette will connect these four members with a nationwide network of faculty and administrators who are committed to engaged scholarship.

 

"The Xavier team is honored to have been selected for this unique opportunity,” said Byron White. “I am convinced that a strength of our application was the caliber of faculty who have agreed to take part. The fact that three department chairs from all three colleges agreed to participate speaks to the level of commitment to engaged scholarship among faculty leadership here at Xavier. I am certain that we will learn a great deal interacting with peers from such a diverse group of universities."

 

Each application was assessed by three reviewers, with geographic and institutional diversity considered in the final selections, resulting in participants from Alabama, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, North Carolina, Illinois, Texas, Mississippi, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia.  

 

Faculty for the Engaged Campus, a national initiative of Community-Campus Partnerships for Health, in partnership with the University of Minnesota and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, aims to strengthen community-engaged career paths by developing innovative competency-based models of faculty development, facilitating peer review and dissemination of products of community-engaged scholarship, and supporting community-engaged faculty through the promotion and tenure process. The initiative is supported in part by a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education in the U.S. Department of Education.