Liberal Education

The Bonner Series on Student Civic Engagement

The Bonner Foundation engages students in an intensive, developmental, four-year, service-based scholarship and civic engagement program. Seventy-five colleges and universities are currently working to build and sustain an integrated cocurricular and curricular model for campus civic engagement. With support from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), many of these campuses have or are creating a parallel academic initiative in the form of a civic engagement certificate, minor, or concentration. Articles in this series featured Mars Hill College (Stanley Dotson), Washington and Lee University (Harlan Beckley), and the College of New Jersey (Elizabeth Paul).

For additional information and resources, including frameworks, campus profiles, practitioner how-to essays, and more, see www.bonner.org or the AAC&U publication Civic Engagement at the Center: Building Democracy through Integrated Cocurricular and Curricular Experiences (forthcoming 2008), which presents the model along with strategies for developing an in-depth academic initiative.

Bonner Series Articles:

Winter 2008
Downtown: A Community-Campus Collaborative Course to Prepare Students for Community-Based Research
By Elizabeth L. Paul
Through their participation in the Trenton Youth Community-Based Research Corps at the College of New Jersey, undergraduate students learn to be partners, citizens, and public scholars.

Fall 2007
A Focus on Poverty: The Shepherd Program
at Washington and Lee University
By Harlan Beckley
The Shepherd program offers a sustained and integrated curricular and cocurricular education that enriches students’ majors and shapes their understanding of their vocations. The program is intended to become a seamless component in an education that begins before student orientation and extends through the postgraduate years.

Summer 2007
Alignment for Life
By Stanley D. Dotson
Thematically connected to a sequence of core general education courses, the LifeWorks program at Mars Hill College culminates with a capstone presentation of learning and a portfolio. Bonner scholars and other honor scholars also participate in a cocurricular civic engagement program.

Spring 2007
Connecting Cocurricular Service with Academic Inquiry:
A Movement toward Civic Engagement
By Wayne Meisel
At the colleges and universities working with the Bonner Foundation to build and sustain civic engagement initiatives, students are committed to significant, ongoing involvement in community issues and to engaging other students to join with them in such endeavors.