Universities promote the scholarship of engagement

Fingers snapping, hands clapping, the young participants in a Take Ten class at their neighborhood community center recite the maxim ”TALK IT OUT, WALK IT OUT, WAIT IT OUT,” as they learn to avoid violent confrontations. Both the center and the class are initiatives of the University of Notre Dame, engaging students and faculty volunteers to interact with neighborhood residents.

University of Notre Dame students interact with neighborhood residents in the Take Ten Program, initiated by the university.

A high-school student with dreams of being the first member of her family to attend college takes notes in the Early College High School program at Studebaker, a collaborative effort involving Indiana University South Bend and South Bend Community School Corp. leadership to provide extra support for first-generation college students.

Wide-eyed, a group of third-graders participating in a BioEYES class, sponsored by the Notre Dame College of Engineering, peer through the transparent skin of the zebra fish, observing as its blood pumps through the heart. In this way, they learn a little bit more about how their own bodies work.

A student in IU South Bend’s dental hygiene internship program gains real-world experience as he provides dental care to students in South Bend public schools. Students on both sides of the equation are learning valuable lessons about how successful relationships are fostered between health-care providers and their clients.

Without a doubt, the presence of a university offers significant potential benefits to its surrounding community, particularly in the form of an enhanced intellectual infrastructure.

When a city hosts not one but two major universities, the potential increases exponentially.

Students in IU South Bend’s dental hygiene internship program provide dental care to students in South Bend public schools.

But until recently, the relationships among South Bend’s public schools and its institutions of higher learning haven’t always been particularly collaborative – nor even, for that matter, especially mindful of one another. While each individual entity developed and thrived on its own, there was little interaction among the disparate academic communities.

That has begun to change, with both the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University South Bend in recent years articulating clear visions for community engagement that emphasize well-defined and distinct roles that each university will play in the city’s future. In addition, the universities also have collaborated with each other to create powerful, innovative programs using the unique strengths of each institution.

Warming trends

Beginning in the late 1980s with the administration of Father Edward A. “Monk” Malloy, CSC, the University of Notre Dame began a slow dismantling of the invisible barriers that had long separated the university from the community.

Jay Caponigro, director of community engagement, University of Notre Dame

According to Jay Caponigro, director of community engagement for Notre Dame, early indicators of Notre Dame’s more open stance included the establishment of the Center for the Homeless and the Robinson Community Learning Center.

The university’s increasing visibility in, and engagement with, the community has steadily increased with the administration of Notre Dame’s current president, Father John I. Jenkins, CSC.

Indeed, Caponigro’s own newly created position demonstrates how far Notre Dame has come in its efforts to engage with the community, particularly with educational initiatives.

“I think we have a commitment under our current administration to be responsible neighbors and partners,” says Caponigro, explaining that the university’s goal is to increase involvement by professors and students to promote a culture of service and measurement of impact. “We’re taking it up a notch.”

The goal is to build collaboration among outreach faculty and staff, and, ultimately, to broaden long-term impact on schoolchildren.

“We want to extend these outreach and professional development opportunities in a way that we can see a measurable difference,” he says. “Different programs will have different way of evaluating their impact, but a goal is to build measurement into all initiatives to see how well they’re performing against our joint goals.”

In addition to the examples cited above, other Notre Dame programs include:

• No Parent Left Behind, designed to help parents understand their role in the education of their children. In its first three years, the program has connected with more than 400 parents in 10 area schools.

• A fluid dynamics competition, sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce of St. Joseph County and the SBCSC in cooperation with the College of Engineering. The goal is to introduce middle-school children to basic techniques and processes in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math). A team of first-year engineering students will be sent to intermediate centers to work with students in constructing a device that performs certain tasks. The task is the test.

• I2U2 for students in two South Bend intermediate centers (grades 5-8). Also offered through Notre Dame’s College of Engineering, the initiative is designed to help kids understand the difference between engineering and science. Notre Dame students will meet with South Bend students to design a robot, which they will return to campus to build. The South Bend students will vote for the best product. “One of the things we’re really striving for is mutual benefit from both sides,” Caponigro says. “The Notre Dame engineering students learn how to listen to a ‘customer,’ [the public school students]. The kids will design a product, and the engineering student will build it to perform functions as close to kids’ designs as possible. So there’s a direct academic impact for Notre Dame students as well.”

Developing the next generation of community leaders

Meanwhile, Indiana University South Bend has been engaged in a process of redefining itself and its role within the community as it looks to the future.

Once perceived as a commuter campus that served a mostly nontraditional-age student population who tend to work full- or part-time, IU South Bend’s creation of a campus housing community has signaled a dramatic change in the campus’s profile.

Increasingly catering to the needs of traditional-age students, IU South Bend demonstrates a strong sense of mission in preparing the next generation of leaders for the South Bend community.

Michael Horvath, Ed.D., professor and dean of the School of Education, IU South Bend

“The definition of an educated person is changing, and the K-12 and higher education institutions are changing,” says Michael Horvath, Ed.D., professor and dean of the School of Education. “As the local economy changes, our community must meet the demand for a workforce educated to support new opportunities, such as nanotechnology and life-sciences initiatives.”

Providing leadership to the local school corporation is not new to IU South Bend faculty. Indeed, faculty members regularly share their expertise with local teachers and students in a variety of formal and informal contexts. For example, they provide leadership to high-school magnet programs, provide oversight for the development of courses taught in local schools, and conduct workshops and seminars for teachers and staff within their areas of expertise. In many cases, their expertise has led directly to the development and adoption of curriculum in the public schools.

“We at IU South Bend are in a position to lend expertise to the academic endeavors in the SBCSC and other corporations,” Horvath says.

Toward that end, IU South Bend is involved in numerous and profound ways with the SBCSC, including:

• Providing leadership on policy formation and oversight.

• Developing programs to address the needs of at-risk student populations.

• Providing job experience through internships in nursing and dental hygiene, as well as offering employment to local high-school students.

• Offering on-site admissions programs at each of the area’s high schools.

• Judging science fair projects for elementary, middle, and high schools.

• Promoting the SBCSC/IU South Bend/Notre Dame grant-writing team for the WRITE project, which aims to improve reading and writing achievement in selected SBCSC intermediate centers.

• IU South Bend students have assisted in after-school tutoring programs, and have provided math instruction to small groups of students in their Leadership Education for Adult Professionals (LEAP) program.

Community pride

Education students from IU South Bend help teach students at Madison Primary Center.

Not surprisingly, IU South Bend’s School of Education has been particularly active in the SBCSC, in part because “we were charged with being more visible in the community and being seen as a resource to schools in our area of service,” Horvath says.

But he sees a more important reason for becoming actively engaged.

“Education is the responsibility of the whole community,” he says.

Thankfully, according to Notre Dame’s Caponigro, the community is blessed with an exceptionally talented community that is ready to step up with new ideas, innovations, and “with an entrepreneurial spirit that’s really bubbling.”

“We’re ready to move our children into the new information economy, and we’re building a sense of community pride,” Caponigro says. “I’m very excited about the direction we’re heading.”