Workshop Series Addresses Sustainability and Service-Learning 

The Office of Global and Community-Engaged Learning is partnering with the Office of Sustainability Programs to offer a summer workshop series.  

The “Strategies for Engagement: Sustainability and Service-Learning in the Classroom” series kicks off Wednesday, May 8, from 4-5:30 p.m. CDT in Eppley 119. Registration is requested, as heavy appetizers will be served. The program will include an overview of the seminar sessions. 

“This series is designed for faculty interested in deepening their pedagogy and courses and applying principles of sustainability, which often marry well with principles of community engagement and service learning,” Curran says. “We want faculty to learn about the resources we have available for them.” 

The May 8 event will focus on information sharing about the six-seminar series, which will focus on different principles and deepening engagement with sustainability and community-engaged learning. While most of the series will be offered only in person on the Omaha campus, the May 29 session — “Deeper Dive: Designing and Integrating Critical Reflection”— will be entirely virtual, as the guest speaker is from Loyola University Chicago. 

“Critical reflection is a high-impact practice that should be integrated into any discipline,” Curran says. 

All sessions listed below include free catered lunch, except the May 29 virtual session: 

• May 22, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m.: Engaging with Creighton’s Learning Outcomes and Core Competencies for a Sustainability Course or Research/Scholarship 
• May 23, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m.: Taking Community-Engaged Learning & Practices to a New Level 
• May 29, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m: Deeper Dive: Designing and Integrating Critical Reflection (VIRTUAL EVENT) 
• May 30, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m: Deeper Dive: Partnering Well – Culturally Responsive Partnership and Closing the Data Loop 
• June 12, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m: Deeper Dive: Case Studies in Sustainability Panel 
• Date TBD: Environmental Justice Community Orientation 

“The sessions are divvied up into sustainability and community engagement foci,” says Andrew Baruth, PhD, director of the Office of Sustainability Programs, “but Lizzy and I quickly saw that much of what we wanted to cover and discuss was very complementary or even overlapping. So, we chose to work together on a common strategy.” 

This faculty development series invites curious faculty to explore how they can increase their engagement in the classroom by including community engagement and sustainability principles. The workshops will be invitational and start conversations on how faculty can better engage on these important topics within their pedagogical strategies and classrooms. 

“Within the Creighton 150 Strategic Plan: Lighting the Way,” Baruth says, “one sees the combination of sustainable living and civic engagement to provide students with a forum for learning, experimenting, exploring and committing to increasingly sustainable practices.” 

The series is intended to help faculty align their courses with two of the strategic plan’s goals: incorporating asset-based community engagement into curricular programming to support students’ understanding of local communities in context and, subsequently, to better understand course content; and increasing the number of departments and courses within departments that include a discussion of sustainability. 

“We hope to introduce more faculty to some new pedagogical strategies and help them ideate on how they might update their teaching to include some of these new strategies,” Baruth says. “It’s for the curious faculty who see this as an opportunity to better engage with their students on contemporary issues, but all are invited, and we’ll start at the ground floor.” 

“We’ll offer a $1,000 stipend at the end of the summer program for participants who update or create a new syllabus and who submit it for the Sustainability or AcSL designation process,” Curran says.  

Faculty may visit this Sharepoint site for more information about the series and resources on Sustainability and Service-Learning in the classroom.  

Faculty on campuses outside of Omaha interested in starting a discussion about obtaining the AcSL designation for a course should contact Curran directly at LizzyCurran@creighton.edu. They would also be eligible to receive a stipend.