Sarah K. Donovan

Sarah K. Donovan is Interim Dean of Integrated Learning and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wagner College in Staten Island, NY. Her approaches to teaching and learning help students become community smart as well as book smart.

 

1. Which of your courses get students out of the classroom? What project(s) do your students do?

I have two different types of courses that get students out of the classroom and engaged in the local community of Port Richmond, Staten Island (15 minutes from Wagner College campus). The first is an ethics course that is part of a Learning Community (LC). The second is an independent study I invite philosophy majors and minors to participate in.

The LCs that include the ethics course have a cohort of 20-30 students who, during their first semester of college, take three courses together and engage in about 30 hours of experiential learning independent of classroom time commitments. At my institution, we define experiential learning broadly to include service-learning, field trips, participatory learning, and community research.

Each LC is co-constructed by two professors from different disciplines. Each professor teaches one discipline-specific course, and the pair typically co-teach a third course, Reflective Tutorial, which replaces a college writing course. Reflective Tutorial also serves as a space in which to reflect on interdisciplinary themes and to relate theory to experiential learning.

I have taught in two different LCs that can be characterized as follows:

LC1: Diversity at Home and Abroad.

• I teach an introductory ethics course.
• My colleague, Margarita Sánchez, teaches an intermediate Spanish language and culture course.
• We co-teach a Reflective Tutorial in which we teach writing and reflection using literature, ethics, and readings about immigration. We also discuss the experiential learning in this course.
• For their experiential learning, students spend 30 hours tutoring and mentoring children in grades K-6 at a local immigrant center. The tutoring program runs every weekday with about five to ten kids attending a day; our average student will tutor one to two afternoons a week at the center. The project began in 2007 partnership with the local center to help Spanish or Mixtec speaking parents, with little to no English language skills, provide their children an opportunity to receive free tutoring.

LC2: Connecting Families through Documentary Filmmaking and Philosophy

• I teach an introductory ethics course.
• My colleague, Sarah Friedland, teaches a documentary filmmaking course.
• We co-teach a Reflective Tutorial in which we teach writing and reflection using storytelling, ethics, and readings on immigration. We also discuss the experiential learning in this course.
• For their experiential learning, students work with a local organization, Ñani Migrante, on a digital postcard project. Ñani is dedicated to obtaining travel visas to reunify long-separated family members, and is supported by the local Port Richmond non-profit La Colmena. The individuals in the Ñani group near us are all from the same sending community in San Jerónimo, Mexico. Our students shadow cohorts of local Ñani members to construct a 10-15 minute digital snapshot of life, work, family, and community in the U.S. I am part of a small Wagner faculty group who will travel in March 2017 with members of the Mexican non-profit Asamblea Popular de Familias Migrantes (APOFAM) and La Colmena to bring the digital postcards to San Jerónimo and display them in the town square. We will film the reactions of the community in San Jerónimo for the Ñani Port Richmond group. Given the overall hardship of family separation, the postcards are a small gesture, but everything is welcome that facilitates connection.

Outside of the LC course design, I also bring one to two philosophy majors per semester to help with a debate club at our local high school, Port Richmond High School. Some of my students participate for Independent Study credit, and some simply volunteer. We are currently preparing our Port Richmond students to compete for the first time in the regional NYC ethics bowl.

2. What do you think students gain from doing this civic engagement?

I hope that I present my students with the opportunity to learn at least four important lessons. One, we can learn a lot about how a theory works by testing it out on real-life experiences. For example, students regularly think about the question of how we are obligated to people we do not know, and utilize Kant, Rawls, Singer, and natural rights theory (among others) to puzzle it through. Two, becoming an educated person is more than being book smart. A civic engagement project can help students learn and practice a set of critical thinking, organizational, and social skills that are crucial for life and career. Three, every community has tremendous strength and knowledge, but we have to put in the time and energy before we will begin to know what it is. Four, if we do not take chances and make efforts to interact with people who are different from us, our lives become insular and our perspectives will narrow.

3. Why do you choose to ask students to do civic engagement projects?

We enter the classroom as strangers; civic engagement projects build a common context of experience that we can draw on in discussion. This helps us to build trust that is essential to developing a strong intellectual community, and sets the tone for us to be creative as we connect theory to practice.

4. What does the civic engagement project offer to wider communities?

I hope that all the projects of which I have been a part offer our wider local community sustained partnership in utilizing community strength to address challenges faced by community members. For example, the parents and the local non-profit were crucial to developing the strong tutoring program in the first LC I described, and they helped us create opportunities for our students. And even though Wagner first-year students are only enrolled in the LC tutoring program for the fall semester, the Spanish department and Wagner Center for Leadership and Community Engagement make sure that the program remains staffed during the entire academic year. When we partner with a community organization and parents, we recognize that we cannot ask them to give our students opportunities to be mentors and educators, and then walk away from them when the grades are turned in for our students. We are committed for the long haul, and are open to dialogue and mutual decision making.

5. Why do you choose to be involved?

I am uncomfortable with what feels like artificial barriers between the academy and other, non-academic work environments. With my LCs, I want students to know that philosophy has practical application. With the community, I want them to help us to blur the boundaries between town and gown. With the debate club, I want to invite high school students into my discipline instead of waiting for them to get into college and find me—especially when the skills we work on may help them get to college.

6. If someone wanted to do these projects at their own institution, what steps or resources would you recommend?

If you are interested in civic engagement, try to avoid recreating the wheel. If you have a center for civic engagement (or something equivalent), start by talking to the director and staff. Before working out all the details of an elaborate project, locate the community member(s) with whom you anticipate working. You can start with a solid idea of what you want to do and still be open to dialogue and revisions.

7. What has been your biggest obstacle in doing civic engagement work?

I work at a school with a Center for Leadership and Community Engagement and an administration that supports civic engagement. We have a long-standing partnership with several local non-profits and businesses (called the Port Richmond Partnership). Given the robust infrastructure for civic engagement at my institution, I was my own biggest obstacle. I was originally scared to move away from traditional teaching and scholarship. I worried about tenure. I worried about scholarship. I worried that I wasn’t organized enough. I worried that I didn’t have the social skills to be successful in a highly collaborative project. But once I took the plunge, and demonstrated to myself what I can do, I found a new sense of professional and personal satisfaction. In particular, I found myself gathering an invaluable experiential base and network that helped me to align my teaching and community engagement interests with my research interests. I have always found it deeply rewarding to educate and mentor students, and now I also am lucky enough to research and write about it.

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