2000-2001 Winners

Project Engage Mini-Grants

When students join faculty-community partnerships, a powerful learning circle is created which erodes the boundaries of classroom walls. Project Engage was developed to recognize the impact of partnerships where faculty, students and community members are engaged together in action research.

The Project Engage Mini-Grant Program represents NERCHE's commitment to support the combined resources and expertise of faculty, students, and members of the community in effecting change. The 2000-2001 grant recipients are:

Mending Our Ways with Words: The Demeter Project

Investigators:
Patricia E. O'Connor, English Dept., Georgetown University
Valencia Dillon, Demeter NW Substance Abuse Treatment Center
Jessica Billiam, English/Spanish major, Georgetown University

An expanded community based, service learning research project, this project will improve the existing educational tutoring program and the ability of the Demeter Treatment Center to treat and track its clients by collecting prior medical, social, and treatment data on women in recovery, thus further contextualizing the lives of those in treatment. The research team will use this information to produce expanded predictors for treatment outcomes for the center itself, to create improved training materials for recruitment and orientation of Georgetown tutors, and to pilot an outreach panel from the community to the campus. The outreach panel (composed of tutors, clients in recovery, and staff from the treatment center) will showcase stories of addiction and recover in an effort to enlighten the campus undergraduate community on its own indifference to binge drinking and substance abuse and their connections to sexually transmitted diseases, violence and addiction.

The Mission Project

Investigators:
Annette Gibson, School of Nursing, Miami-Dade Community College
Ronald Brummitt, Miami Rescue Mission, Inc.
Maria Esther Jaurrieta, Nursing major, Miami-Dade Community College

The Mission Project addresses several significant community and educational needs. First, the scope of the work of nurses and allied health professionals is expanding, with a greater emphasis on community health and disease prevention. This change demands new educational approaches to better prepare student for their careers. Second, faculty have been seeking new opportunities for their students to understand and sensitively address the health concerns of the underserved and to develop a sense of civic responsibility. Finally, the project will directly impact a critical need in Miami-Dade County: assistance to the homeless.

Project activities will include student-run semimonthly health education sessions and monthly health screenings of Miami Rescue Mission clients. In addition, the project will offer in-service opportunities for Medical Center Campus faculty and students to learn more about effective community outreach in the area of health, and for Miami Rescue Mission staff to improve their services to the homeless in the area of health. The project will be incorporated into the curricula of Medical Center Campus programs.

Promoting Understanding and Learning by Embracing Diversity

Investigators:
Bernadette A. Berken, Mathematics, St. Norbert College, WI
John Jacobs, Neville Public Museum of Brown County
Olga Villarroel, French major, St. Norbert College

The project seeks to build bridges between the diverse cultures that comprise the Green Bay, Wisconsin community. The project represents and effort to celebrate diversity while promoting respect and understanding through educational experiences. One goal is to help the growing minority communities (Hmong, Native American, and Hispanic) and to value the diversity they bring to share. A second goal is to increase the knowledge and learning in students of diverse ethnic backgrounds, especially in the areas of mathematics, art and social studies.

The approach is through the study of the role that mathematics play in the design and production of cultural artifacts. The incorporation of a multicultural approach to understanding mathematics through the arts, crafts, and artifacts produced by different cultural groups brings a positive new dimension to the classroom. The project will provide a model for collaboration that will demonstrate how informal education can merge with formal education to improve learning and promote understanding within a community.

Collaborative Research in the Educational Village: An Interprofessional Project

Investigators:
Mary-Lou Breitborde, Education, Salem State College, MA
Mary DeChillo, Social Work, Salem State College
Beverly White, Nursing, Salem State College
Claire Crane, Ford Elementary School
Susan MacNeil, Ford Elementary School
Dorothy Trainor, Ford Elementary School
Kimberlee Gonsalves, Education major, Salem State College
Melanie Sauder, Social Work major, Salem State College

This interprofessional action research project will examine the impact of the Educational Village Project in Lynn, Massachusetts, a three-year old collaborative which will expand its programs in the 2000-01 school year.

The Ford Elementary School, in partnership with Salem State College and the Lynn Family Support Coalition, offers school-based comprehensive educational and social services to urban schoolchildren and their families. Three sub-teams of professors, students, and practitioners from the the fields of Education, Nursing and Social Work will gather and analyze data related to academic progress, program quality, and family and community impact, using multiple mode and tools of inquiry. Central features of the project will be the sharing of information, perspectives and experiences across all three fields and the examination of the Project's interprofessional education components, which include joint seminars and exposure to concepts and practices outside the traditional boundaries of each field.

All aspects of the research process will be characterized by joint discussion and interprofessional exchange between the students, faculty, school based practitioners, and a parent member of the Lynn Family Support Coalition.

Digging Where We Stand: Research with Campus Workers to Understand and Change Their Place in the University

Investigators:
Fran Ansley, Law, University of Tennessee
Chris Pelton, Campus Workers for a Living Wage
Kristen Rudder, Law student, University of Tennessee

This project teams a law teacher, law students and a graduate student in adult education with members of Campus Workers for a Living Wage (CWLW), an emerging organization of low-wage hourly workers at the University of Tennessee. The team will design and carry out a participatory research project that will work from questions generated by the CWLW to map the legal and political terrain presently facing hourly workers at UT Knoxville.

The aims of the project are to strengthen the capacity of CWLW to democratically choose and carry out effective strategies to improve wages and conditions of work for low-wage university employees, to build the research and communication skills of selected members of CWLW, to
provide law students with hands-on experience working in a collaborative way with a grassroots organization committed to social change, and to help the law teacher and the education student pursue their own research questions about effective teaching methods -- all pursued within the "civic microcosm" of a university community that all the players share.