COPC & HONORS COLLEGE ANNOUNCE TWO RESEARCH SERVICE LEARNING COURSE GRANTS

Under the COPC New Directions Grant an important outcome was to develop pilot Research Service Learning (RSL) courses in collaboration with the University Honors College. An RFP process for these pilot RSL course grants was undertaken during the spring term, and two $5,000 grants were awarded at the end of the term for course implementation in the fall term 2006. Awards were made to the following faculty and departments:

• Fiona Cheong, PhD; Department of English for an advanced undergraduate English Writing Course that will engage students in COPC communities conducting resident creative writing workshop and producing a Pittsburgh-based creative writing work.
• Laura Lund, PhD and Dan Budny, PhD; School of Engineering for an Honors Freshman Engineering Course that will place up to 15 teams of students working in COPC neighborhoods developing scopes of work for community-identified project that might later be implemented.

Both grants will be largely applied to course development activities of faculty in working with COPC community partners to identify and plan community-base workshops or projects in which students will engage community residents and leaders in the subsequent fall term. Congratulations to our COPC/Honors College Research Service Learning course-grant awardees. Details of these research service learning courses are available by clicking on the above links>

Research service learning represents an exciting opportunity for faculty and students at the University of Pittsburgh.

What is Research Service Learning?

Research service learning (RSL) brings students’ research skills and knowledge to community-identified issues and problems. Students engage in problem solving and analysis to create new knowledge for social applications. RSL brings students and faculty in service to a community or important social issues through applied research. RSL combines educational institutions’ missions of scholarship and advancing knowledge with civic engagement. Duke University provides a clear summary of RSL:

In the RSL process, students, faculty, and community partners study a question of shared interest. Research is conducted in the context of a service-learning experience, where the research components (problem analysis, synthesis, and conclusions) become an integral part of the service provided to the community. Students participate in a structured process of critical reflection on the ethical, intellectual, and civic aspects of their experiences while also producing a tangible research product for their community partner (Duke University 2004).

RSL is not “traditional service learning.” Students do more than serve. They produce a tangible product from their learn experience that has application to a community issue or need. RSL puts at its heart students’ scholarly pursuits in areas of civic engagement.

COURSE: EngWrt 1094: Readings in Contemporary Fiction

FACULTY: Fiona Cheong, PhD

DEPARTMENT: English

This advanced undergraduate course is required in the curriculum for the English Writing major. This section of EngWrt 1094, to be taught in Fall 2006, will engage students in exploring Pittsburgh as a location for the literary imagination. Besides reading fictional and dramatic texts set wholly or partially in Pittsburgh, students will participate in a research service learning component of the course, focusing on COPC neighborhoods and the Hill District. Working in teams of four or five, students will choose one COPC neighborhood in which to develop a creative writing workshop for residents that will be linked to the Hill House Center for Creative Writing, which is being developed this spring under the rubric of a graduate course in the University’s M.F.A. Creative Writing program and which has recently received a Provost Educational Innovations Award.

COPC creative writing workshops will draw on Pittsburgh’s artistic history and on residents’ lived experiences as inhabitants in a post-industrial, river-related city, and will introduce residents to elements of craft and artistic practice. Residents will be recruited for the workshops with the help of Hill House Association and COPC community partners. In workshops, residents will read and write poems, story scenes, and short memoir pieces, and will be invited and encouraged to continue their imaginative writing experiences, beyond the period of the course, in free workshops at the Hill House Center for Creative Writing.

Students will be asked to reflect on their observations and experiences of Pittsburgh as it emerges from their conversations with residents and from residents’ imaginative writing. The course will discuss Pittsburgh as both an urban habitat and a natural habitat. Using various modes of literary analysis and artistic practice, students will study literary constructions of Pittsburgh by residents alongside constructions of the city by published authors; course readings will include, for example, stories by John Edgar Wideman, plays by August Wilson, a novel by Michael Chabon, and a children’s book by Sharon Flake. For a final project, each student will work on his or her own literary construction of Pittsburgh in a story.

Students will acquire a higher level of analytical ability and gain skills in community outreach practice, and will develop their understanding of location in fiction as a site of both aesthetic and political choices. As writers, students will expand their imaginative vision of Pittsburgh, as well as the range of historical perspectives and life experiences informing their characters and narrative voices.

Residents will learn how to shape experience into a poem, a story, or a memoir, as well as how to spark the imagination through artistic meditation. They will acquire writing and reading tools that will enable them to develop confidence in their own voices, and a model for generating an enriching workshop and literary experience.

Besides delivering at least one creative writing workshop session per COPC neighborhood (ideally, two workshops), students will produce a final report and a “syllabus” designed for residents who wish to conduct creative writing workshops among themselves.

COURSE: ENGR 0715 Honors Freshman Engineering Research Service-Learning Course

FACULTY: Laura W. Lund, Ph.D. and Dan Budny, Ph.D.

DEPARTMENT: School of Engineering

Research service learning projects have been widely successful for many engineering institutions in the United States, and have become integral components of their engineering curriculums. A significant percentage of these institutions employ research service learning projects as a part of their Freshman Engineering curriculum. Such projects have been found to not only help in preparing engineering students for both their undergraduate engineering and post-graduate work experiences, but also in engaging the early engineering student in their community, and providing a sense of value in their skills and chosen field of study. At the University of Pittsburgh, service learning projects have been used by individual professors in various engineering disciplines, generally for capstone projects, but never as an organized course offered to or required of the entire engineering body, or even an entire engineering department.

The most difficult aspect of coordinating a larger scale service learning course is establishing relationships with community clients, and developing projects appropriate to freshman engineering students that are of benefit to both the client and the students. For the current pilot course, there are two projects being conducted with the Center for Creative Play in Edgewood, two projects with the Disability Resources and Services department at the University of Pittsburgh, and two more with the Carnegie Science Center National Engineers Weekend. Next fall, we plan to require all freshman engineers in the honors program to take this course, which translates to approximately 60 students or 15 projects.

In order to be prepared for the larger number of required projects, we would like to apply for funds that would be used to support the primary applicant, Laura Lund, to work over the summer term towards establishing relationships with those involved in the Hazelwood Initiative and to work with this organization to identify applicable projects for freshman engineers that would be of benefit to the Hazelwood community. The initial focus of this effort would be on project development in Hazelwood, but we would also like to establish similar relationships and project developments with the COPC neighborhoods in Oakland.

The possibilities for projects that could be conducted by freshman engineers in the realm of community rebuilding efforts in Hazelwood and the Oakland neighborhoods are wide ranging. Examples that would be relevant to community rebuilding include playground and ball field safety analysis, design, or improvement; green space analysis, design, or improvement,; public or private office space design; land surveying; site cleanup analysis and planning, or guideline compliance analyses for disability access. The possibilities are exciting and will further reveal themselves with the development of a solid and mutually beneficial relationship between our program and the Hazelwood and Oakland neighborhood redevelopment leaders.

The product of this effort would be a report, delivered to COPC and the partner contacts, containing a goal of fifteen (15) identified projects, and their preliminary scopes of work. Additionally, the preliminary framework of a course web page that uses the template of the University of Pittsburgh School of Engineering home page (www.engr.pitt.edu) will be created and posted. Projects scopes of work may result in further proposals for community application.