CESP Blog

In the Mapping Our Comfort Zones session we discussed how we want to expand our understanding of PLACE (specific, personal, geographic locations) to see SPACE (the abstract, the general). We thought about places in context of forces such as history, time of day, relative location, the 5 senses, etc in order to start to get at this larger idea of "space." We also looked as absolute, relative, and relational space.

With our discussions in mind, please respond to the following prompt with a paragraph of writing:

Show how the PLACE where you do your community work is actually SPACE. (think about any connections to your "comfort zone").

We would also like you to include a visual with your post (a picture, or drawing, etc). Please include the visual in an email to cesp (at) umn.edu since posting the picture in a comment can be difficult without knowledge of HTML code.

Posted by reut0076 at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Cedar Riverside tour took us from the U of M campus, around Cedar Ave, to the Riverside Plaza and ending at the River Bluffs. It is amazing to me, how in such a small geographical location you can have some of the states largest institutions (U of M and Fairview), a National Park, and one of the densest housing complexes west of Chicago home to thousands of new immigrants and refugees. Given the diversity of the neighborhood and the often competing interests, is it possible to create one unified identity of Cedar Riverside? Is that important for a neighborhood? What identity have you associated with Cedar Riverside in the past and did the tour and service work change your perspective? How can the diverse communities of Cedar Riverside work together to enhance the quality of life for all residents while simultaneously protecting a unique natural resource like the Mississippi?

To get credit for this RAP Session please make sure you leave us your response in a comment on this entry or shoot Laura an email at damm0032 (at) umn.edu.

If commenting, please put your full name and umn.edu email address so we know who to give credit to!

Posted by reut0076 at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In our Reflective Writing Workshop, we tried out a variety of methods for getting started on a piece of reflective writing. These included: free writes, making lists, time lines, outlines, diagrams, maps, etc. We also explored two different approaches to the content of a reflection: 1) Starting with an experience you'd like to "unpack" and using the "what, so what, now what?" model, and 2) Starting with a meaningful "big question" and brainstorming what you know about that question, what you don't know, and how your community work might fit in to finding out more about the answer to that question. To wrap up this RAP session, do some kind of pre-writing that you might use to write a reflection in the future. This pre-write can take any of the forms that we tried out in the RAP session, or any other that has come to mind since then.

To get credit for this RAP Session please make sure you leave us your response in a comment on this entry or shoot Laura an email at damm0032 (at) umn.edu.

If commenting, please put your full name and umn.edu email address so we know who to give credit to!

Posted by reut0076 at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October is GLBT history month as the video above explains. For this month's reflection idea we want you to think about the contributions GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) people have made to the community work you have done. Are GLBT issues discussed at your community organization? Is harassment based on sexual orientation and gender identity/expression challenged? If you are working with young people, is GLBT history discussed? If so, how are GLBT people portrayed? If not, what can be done to incorporate and make visible the contributions of GLBT people?

For more information, visit the GLBT History Month website for more videos and biographies on GLBT historical icons.

If you would like to turn in a reflection on this topic, you can submit it via email to cesp (at) umn.edu or drop it off in our 345 Fraser office.

Posted by reut0076 at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

RAP sessions are a space where students in the Scholars Program can get together and discuss challenges, inspirations, and goals in your community work.

Attending a RAP session and writing a short summary on the Scholars blog will count as one of your six required reflections for the Scholars Program.

Fall 2009 Schedule and Descriptions after the jump.

Continue reading "Reflection, Action, Partnership (RAP) Sessions - Fall 2009" »

Posted by reut0076 at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes it feels like there is more than a road dividing the University of Minnesota from the Cedar Riverside neighborhood. My sense was confirmed as we went around the group of students to ask what brought them to this RAP session. Most of the students expressed an interest/curiosity in the neighborhood but just haven’t taken the time to explore. How is it possible that most students can identify the restaurants, stores and other assets of Dinkytown or Stadium Village but have very little sense of the community just across the street from the West Bank Arts Quarter, Carlson School of Management, and the Humphrey Institute? How have U of M students, staff and faculty been acculturated to understanding our bordering communities? Is there a difference in the imagery, language, and marketing that you see for Dinkytown, Stadium Village, and Prospect Park, versus Cedar Riverside?

Reflection Questions
One of the most important aspects of CHANCE is that it is tied to a place. It is intentional that our partnerships and work are tied to the neighborhood where Humphrey is located. Thinking of your own community experience: What draws you to the place where you do your community work? Does it matter that the organization you work with is based in a particular neighborhood? Is it a conscious choice for you to work in that neighborhood? Is it a conscious choice that the organization works in that neighborhood? Do you participate in the neighborhood beyond that community work with an organization? If your relationship with the neighborhood goes beyond your community work, how does that impact your experience?

To get credit for this RAP Session please make sure you leave us a summary with how it went, what you learned, etc in a comment on this entry or shoot Laura an email at damm0032@umn.edu.

If commenting, please put your full name and umn.edu email address so we know who to give credit to!

Hope you all enjoyed the RAP session and come to some more next fall!

Posted by reut0076 at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Imagine working full-time for minimum wage with no benefits and not being able to afford to pay your rent. Imagine paying a damage deposit and first and last months rent on a home and two months later being evicted because the owner of the home had been foreclosed upon. In this RAP session we participated in a dialogue about some of the many complicated issues facing individuals and families in the Twin Cities homeless population.

To get credit for this RAP Session please make sure you leave us a summary with how it went, what you learned, etc in a comment on this entry or shoot Laura an email at damm0032@umn.edu.

If commenting, please put your full name and umn.edu email address so we know who to give credit to!

Hope you all enjoyed the RAP session and come to some more, the next is A CHANCE Tour of the Cedar-Riverside Neighborhood on Friday, April 24th from 10am-12pm at Cedar-Riverside Neighborhood. Sign up at www.servicelearning.umn.edu/trainings!

Posted by reut0076 at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Helping people help themselves is the philosophy in which guides Project for Pride in Living (PPL). This nonprofit agency works with lower-income families and individuals in numerous ways such as housing assistance, employment training, education resources, and family support services. With these services PPL encourages people to become self-sufficient and achieve stability with their housing, finances, and family. PPL also coordinates the College House Program, a tutor and mentoring program which serves the needs of children directly from the community. All the individuals who live in these houses tutor two children and serve as healthy adult role models. For this RAP session we visited PPL’s various programs in the Seward Neighborhood, meet with students living in the College House, and discussed how the work of PPL addresses community issues present in all of our community work.

To get credit for this RAP Session please make sure you leave us a summary with how it went, what you learned, or respond to the following question in a comment on this entry or shoot Laura an email at damm0032@umn.edu.

What are some things that you learned about "helping people help themselves" that are useful for you in your community work at other Twin Cities organizations?

If commenting, please put your full name and umn.edu email address so we know who to give credit to!

Hope you all enjoyed the RAP session and come to some more, the next is Housing and Homelessness in the Twin Cities on Thursday, April 16th from 2-4pm at CSOM 1-122. Sign up at www.servicelearning.umn.edu/trainings!

Posted by reut0076 at 2:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The word, "grant" tends to represent a big and scary document that any undergraduate student would feel nervous about approaching, but there are a variety of grants and key elements that can increase the success of a grant. This session was a hands-on approach to researching for grants, as well as writing them, so bring your past community work experiences to the table because you could find them very useful during the grant finding/writing process. There was also some discussion about other fund-raising methods which can be found if we "think outside the box."

To get credit for this RAP Session please make sure you leave us a summary with how it went, what you learned, or respond to the following questions in a comment on this entry or shoot Laura an email at damm0032@umn.edu.

Questions to comment on from Samone!
If you plan on writing a grant in the future, what factors will affect your
grant writing/searching process the most?

After the session, what kind of grants (federal, state, mini-grants,
community) interested you the most and why?

helpful websites:
http://www.technologygrantnews.com
http://www.uncg.edu/soe/trc/docs/Grantwebsites.pdf

If commenting, please put your full name and umn.edu email address so we know who to give credit to!

Posted by reut0076 at 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Integrative Community Engagement Project (ICEP) is the capstone experience for the Community Engagement Scholars Program, and a great chance to use your past community work and academic experiences to meet a need or build capacity within a community organization. In this workshop, we heard from alumni of the Scholars Program about how they developed and implemented their ICEPs. We also participated in activities meant to begin the brainstorming/planning process for your ICEP

From Laura:
Thanks for a great workshop last week. Here is a question for reflection:

What do you think it means to "meet a need" or "build capacity" at your community organization? How will you know that your ICEP plan does this?

To get credit for this RAP Session please make sure you respond to this question in a comment on this entry or shoot Laura an email at damm0032@umn.edu.

If commenting, please put your full name and umn.edu email address so we know who to give credit to!

Posted by reut0076 at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

From Mitch:

Thanks again for a great conversation and discussion. We put together some insightful and provocative ideas about how reflection works and how we accomplish reflective writing. I came away with several new ideas and a lot to think about. Monica's facebook status after the session was right on: "Monica is reflecting on reflection. It's all about the meta."

We did spend most of the time together talking about reflection for reflection's sake -- or as its own outcome, purpose, or assignment. We didn't have much chance to discuss how reflection and reflective writing can support and extend other kinds of thinking and writing -- how it can move other projects forward. So please respond to the following questions:

What are some specific larger projects or goals that you have before you (e.g. writing a capstone paper, writing a proposal, teaching or training on a certain topic, applying for a career-track job, etc.)?

How can you imagine reflective writing being a productive part of your process towards those larger projects?

How might you structure your reflective writing in these projects -- which might not require reflective writing at all, leaving your use of reflective writing entirely up to you? How will you design your reflective writing assignments for yourself?

To get credit for this RAP Session please make sure you leave us a summary with how it went, what you learned, etc in a comment on this entry or shoot Laura an email at damm0032@umn.edu.

If commenting, please put your full name and umn.edu email address so we know who to give credit to!

Hope you all enjoyed the RAP session and come to some more, the next is Grants and Other Fundraising Tools on Thursday, April 2nd from 3-5pm at Akerman Hall 225. Sign up at www.servicelearning.umn.edu/trainings!

Posted by reut0076 at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In our session we talked about space beyond physical geography and place as it relates to comfort zones. We used maps of the U of M campus and the Twin Cities as concrete examples of how we feel comfortable in some spaces and not others. Some of the things discussed were memory, familiarity, routine, people, etc.

For your comment, we ask you to consider the idea of "universal" space introduced by the excerpt from Freedom Dreams by Robin D. G. Kelley (Hannah says it's a great book, especially if you're interested in surrealism). We would like you to contemplate the proposals/ideas of Kelley and how they can be applied to your community work, or community work in general.

Would you consider the place you do community work a "universal" space? Explain. Consider the ideas of absolute, relative, relational, four dimensional, historical, imaginative space that we discussed. Also think about potential spatial acts - what would you do to make this space more comfortable for everyone?

Click "continue reading" to see pictures of the whiteboard to help you remember the terms discussed, the maps created, and everything else that ended up on the board!

To get credit for this RAP Session please make sure you leave us a comment on this entry or shoot Laura an email at damm0032@umn.edu.

If commenting, please put your full name and umn.edu email address so we know who to give credit to!

Hope you all enjoyed the RAP session and come to some more, the next is a Reflective Writing Workshop on Tuesday, March 10th from 2-4pm at Physics (Tate) 236A. Sign up at www.servicelearning.umn.edu/trainings!

Continue reading "Mapping Our Comfort Zones RAP Session Reflection" »

Posted by reut0076 at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This month we thought we'd try something completely different!

We got word that Lisa Arrastia, an instructor in the Social Justice Minor, was working on a collection of works to be published along with Bill Ayers (you probably know his name from the recent presidential elections and his slight ties to President Obama). It is titled White Before We Got Here? Youth and the Hidden Curriculum of Whiteness and right now they are looking for submissions from young people no older than 25.

Submissions can be essays, poetry, lyrics, and visual/performance/installation art.

Some questions to think about for submissions:
In what ways does whiteness keep you silent or make you holla back at the world!?!?
Who and what taught you whiteness and why do you think they/it did? Who continues to try and teach you whiteness’ practices?
Who and what benefit from whiteness and what do those benefits look like and feel like?
What do they mean in the larger picture of life?
What is the cost of whiteness? What are its limitations?
Why do you love about whiteness and what is difficult about it for you?
In what ways do you comply with the social norms and cultural values of whiteness and why?
What does whiteness sound like, feel like, look like, or smell like?
If you could change whiteness, how would you?
If whiteness could talk, what would it say?
In 100 years, what will whiteness be if anything?

Click on "download file" to get the PDF document that gives the full details along with submission forms!
Download file

If you decide to submit, please send us an email with the submission attached so we can give you credit for doing a reflection!

We hope you all take this amazing opportunity!

Posted by reut0076 at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In our RAP session, we talked about a lot of different issues related to higher education, including how we define it, what its role is in society, obstacles to accessing it, and how different perspectives on education and learning can inform the way we think about higher ed. How do any of the issues we talked about connect to your community work? This can be community work that you're engaged in now, that you've done in the past, or that you would like to be involved in in the future. (You're also welcome to share any other reflections or thoughts you have on the session!)

Resources:
Perspectives on higher education that we talked about in our session:
Paolo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
John Dewey: Experience and Education
Te Wananga-o-Raukawa, a Maori university in New Zealand: www.twor.ac.nz
Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve and three articles on higher education and intelligence: http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.25452/pub_detail.asp
The Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network and the Dream Act: http://immigrantfreedomnetwork.wordpress.com/

For those looking for other views on the meaning of higher education, access, and alternatives, a couple of other places to check out are the Experimental College of the Twin Cities (www.excotc.org), self-described as a place that "shares visions of a better world, offers free and open classes and is building a community around education for social change;" and La Universidad de La Tierra (The University of the Land) in Chiapas, a school for indigenous youth that is also associated with the Zapatista social movement. Read an interview with the coordinator of the school here: http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/global/rsb_int_eng.html. He has lots of cool things to say about the school, education in general, and its connection to social movements. Thank you to everyone who attended for sharing your thoughts and ideas--we really appreciated our time with you!

To get credit for this RAP Session please make sure you leave us a summary with how it went, what you learned, etc in a comment on this entry or shoot Laura an email at damm0032@umn.edu.

If commenting, please put your full name and umn.edu email address so we know who to give credit to!

Hope you all enjoyed the RAP session and come to some more, the next is an ICEP (Integrative Community Engagement Project) Workshop on Thursday, February 26th from 5:30-7:30pm at Lind Hall 229. Sign up at www.servicelearning.umn.edu/trainings!

Posted by reut0076 at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

What does it feel like to be a foreigner? To not know the language of the community you’re “serving?� How does this affect the way the community views you? This session focused on the experiences of students who have or are planning to do community work in the “Global South,� or developing countries.

Some questions for you to think about from the facilitators:

Did the other experiences and stories shared during the rap session give you a different insignt into your own experiences? If so how?

Reflecting on the conversation during the RAP session, think about a situation in which you were in the dominant community, and someone else wasan outsider. How did you/others react to that person/people? Would you react differently now?

How do issues of identity and privelege play a role in your community work?

To get credit for this RAP Session please make sure you leave us a summary with how it went, respond to the facilitator questions, or what you learned, etc in a comment on this entry or shoot Laura an email at damm0032@umn.edu.

If commenting, please put your full name and umn.edu email address so we know who to give credit to!

Hope you all enjoyed the RAP session and come to some more, the next is Rethinking Higher Education: Access, Alternatives, and Advocacy on Monday, February 16th from 5-7pm at Nicholson Hall 315. Sign up at www.servicelearning.umn.edu/trainings!

Posted by reut0076 at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)