CWI's Summer EAST Institute
FEATURED WORKSHOPS, SESSIONS, & SPECIAL EVENTS

PLEASE NOTE: Workshops may be updated.
Information on Institute faculty and workshop leaders can be found on Summer EAST Faculty page


Instructional Best Practice for Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: Instructional Best Practices for Service-Learning—designed to create common language and understanding around the use of service-learning as a teaching strategy. The Best Practices form a core part of our work, helping educators (and students) plan, extend, and reflect upon service-learning activities and projects. The Best Practices will also be useful as a way to talk about service-learning within your own institution.

Site-Level Best Practice for Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: The Site Level Best Practices have helped educators, administrators, community partners, and students support long term service-learning efforts for more than a decade. Faculty will offer their own insights and explore practical needs and considerations encountered on the road to supporting and institutionalizing service-learning.

Traveling the Path with Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: This conversational style session will take us inside one teacher’s journey through the world of service-learning, place-based education, and sustainability. We will focus on what it was like getting started, forging community relationships, and working to create student and teacher engagement.

Counter-Cartography and Civic-Engagement In The American Autumn
DESCRIPTION: Maps are powerful. Counter-maps are changing the political landscape and art world. Counter-cartographic methods can be used to not only change public policy but to challenge and empower students through class projects and service-learning. This session will focus on one educator’s journey into a variety of counter-cartographic projects from the classroom to the Occupy Movement to a local community. Our goal will be to rethink the ways in which we approach the idea of community.

Encountering Sustainability, Discovering Shelburne Farms
DESCRIPTION: This hands-on field trip will serve as the backdrop for beginning your own investigation into the relationship between service-learning and Sustainability. In the simplest terms, Sustainability is "meeting the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to do so." With the goals of Sustainability as a motivating force, service-learning provides an ideal strategy for students to become invested in caring for their own communities. During the field trip we will delve into Sustainability's "3 E's" (Environmental Integrity, Economic Vitality, and Social Equity) in a variety of ways. This field trip will help participants begin the Institute with an understanding of the connection between service-learning, Sustainability, and education. with SSP Staff

Higher Ed/K-12 Partnerships
DESCRIPTION: When you think about partnerships between higher education and K-12 schools, chances are things like mentoring and student teaching come to mind. This session will help you to think beyond traditional paradigms to explore new ways in which K-12, community based, and institutions of higher education might collaborate through service-learning.  We will share select examples of innovative partnerships, followed by the opportunity for participants to explore, discuss, and brainstorm ideas they might consider implementing in their own settings.  We will also explore possible challenges, offering ideas to each other as to how to overcome them.

Effective Student Voice and Participation and the Implications for Learning
DESCRIPTION: How do we create and nurture meaningful student voice within the constraints of a typical classroom, school, or program? Participants will work with a contiuum of possibile entry points for creating a pedagogical foundation that supports real student voice within the curriculum. Schools are the foundation of our democracy. Service-learning experiences that encourage genuine student voice also create opportunities for leadership. In doing so we increase student engagement, ownership, and ultimately learning outcomes. In this workshop, we will also explore candidly some of the dilemmas that this work raises.

Thinking Forward: Meeting the Challenges that Lie Ahead
DESCRIPTION: We will use the collective thinking and experience of the full group to think long term—identifying and problem solving potential roadblocks, unexpected changes, and unforeseen “landscape alterations” that can affect the well being of even the most successful projects and programs.

Service-Learning and Assessment
DESCRIPTION: Assessment is about observing how our students are doing and providing feedback and support so that they can do better. Involving students in the assessment process helps them understand how and why they learn. In this workshop, we’ll look at some techniques for aligning assessment with learning goals in service-learning practice, including deepening the connection between journal writing and service and aligning curricular goals with service and assessment using Connecting Service-Learning to the Curriculum. This workshop begins with a quick resource review. We then look at some powerful assessment models collected by a national study group on service-learning and assessment. The workshop concludes with a lively discussion of how assessing what students learn through service fits into the larger goals of education for Sustainability, and how the reason for learning becomes a powerful motivator for student achievement. We encourage you to bring your questions and dilemmas about assessment for group discussion.

Connecting Students to their Future Through Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: Sustainability provides an integrative concept for service-learning that helps build participants' skills, knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs with the goal of creating a better future. Embedded in education for sustainability is a process that is integrative and participatory and that uses long-term thinking to meet curriculum and service goals similar to the best practices of service-learning. In this workshop we will explore this integrative process and how it can deeply enrich service-learning experiences for both teachers and students. with Emily Hoyler

Connecting School Based Gardens and Greenhouses
to Service-Learning Projects, Curriculum, and Community.
DESCRIPTION: School based agricultural education is on the rise. In this presentation Steve will discuss the many service projects that can be done using both school based gardens as well as greenhouses. These outdoor classrooms provide a perfect environment for providing the hands-on learner a real connection to science, math, health, and english curriculums. Steve will share how he uses Instructional Best Practices in service projects, along with his involvement in a grant using the Learning Kitchen, a six week program teaching students about nutrition and cooking. He will make connections to nutrition and the local food movement. Steve will also discuss his successes and challenges with these projects as well as managing gardens and greenhouse throughout the school year. with Steven Colangeli

Reflection: An Essential Ingredient for Learning
DESCRIPTION: Take a look at how reflection can become the guiding force behind service-learning and how it deepens understanding. Learn and practice a variety of strategies and techniques with veteran service-learning practitioners. Discuss spiral reflection. Engage in the popcorn method, a refection collage, image journaling, and scrapbook documentation. Take a look at how reflection can be based on the multiple intelligences. with Pat Haggerty


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Summer EAST Institute Faculty • Workshops may be updated. Check back often.