Campus Highlight
Connecting Life and Learning: Engaging the Whole Person through the Integration of Academics and Student Affairs
For the past two years, the Engelhard Project has appeared on this student-published Thanksgiving list on Georgetown’s campus:
“100 Things at Georgetown to be Thankful For: The Engelhard Project.”
Georgetown University represents one of two Intensive Sites that the BTtoP Project funds with Engelhard Foundation support—a three-year grant of $250,000. Georgetown is seeking to have 100 percent of the class of 2010 involved in the Engelhard Project.
Georgetown has long been a standout campus in the BTtoP Project; it is the model campus for curricular infusion. Georgetown’s model of curricular infusion combines engaged learning with mental health awareness by introducing health topics directly into existing course content, opening the dialogue on an all-too-often stigmatized and ignored problem on college campuses. “A math class is an unusual place to learn about how diet affects metabolic rates,” reasoned an article in the Blue & Gray magazine at the time of the award in 2007. Professor James Sandefur responds that this strategy is not so unusual. “Students are inundated with information about eating disorders and nutrition, and even more so about alcohol and the dangers of alcohol…being presented with the information as a mathematical model, seeing how alcohol is used in and leaves the body in a mathematical equation…the students were finding that this material was a totally different way of seeing problems of alcohol and alcohol abuse.”
The true impact of the Engelhard Project at GU can be seen in the level of student engagement, both in and out of the classroom. A number of Engelhard courses incorporate a community-based learning component, partnering with departments across campus to allow students to explore what they are learning in the surrounding campus and DC-area communities. Theater Professor Karen Burman recently offered a course, Theater as Social Change, partnering with Ballou High School in Southeast DC, in which Georgetown students worked with high school students to put on a community-based theater production. Joan Riley, professor of Nursing and Health Studies, says that “what Engelhard changed most about my classroom was the level of active student engagement.”
BTtoP Project leaders, as well as the GU Engelhard Project administrators at the Center for New Designs in Leadership and Scholarship (CNDLS), recognize that the infusion method, and more broadly, the connection of well-being, civic development, and engaged learning, is a challenge and commonly involves extra work for many of the faculty members who implement these practices in their classrooms. GU’s response in effectively addressing that challenge is well summarized by Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson. “The success of the Engelhard Project at Georgetown is due largely to the partnership between faculty, CNDLS staff, and student affairs staff in the interest of more deeply engaging our students in the learning process and improving the health of our students at the same time.”
At a 2007 BTtoP Workshop, GU presented its project to an audience of eager fellow BTtoP grantees. Patrick Kilcarr, director for the Center for Personal Development, brought a student to the workshop who spoke about journal writing and sharing with peers in the classroom (commonly called “student reflection” by faculty) his fears and issues within the college atmosphere. The student explained how it opened his eyes to the prevalence of well-being issues surrounding him on campus, and how opening the conversation allowed him to view all students in a similar, nonjudgmental light whatever their personal concerns may be. Kilcarr wrote to the BTtoP Project after the conference, “I cannot articulate enough the importance of the BTtoP Program and what it’s doing for our students at Georgetown. This is something I have thought about happening on campus for literally 18 years. My deepest thanks.”
For more information on Georgetown’s Engelhard Project, please see the CNDLS Web site (cndls.georgetown.edu/view/about/engelhard.html); a video characterizing the activities and affects of the Project on the Georgetown campus will soon be available.
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