Center for Community Engagement

The Liberal Arts in the World: Immersion Education for Sewanee Students

For many years, among the most moving opportunities experienced by Sewanee students has been community service made possible by the All Saints’ Chapel Outreach Program. In fact, students, themselves, created the conditions for this program to begin. Their grass roots efforts led the University, nearly twenty years ago, to create the Outreach Program.

Today, this movement is entering a new stage, where this powerful engine for service is harnessed for curricular innovation. With a grant from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, Sewanee has launched the Center for Community Engagement. The Center supports faculty members who are transforming their courses by engaging their students in the broader world as a way of teaching course content more effectively. Examples?

• A Spanish professor and anthropology professor combined efforts to study a local Latino community (anthropology) and design Spanish-language services (Spanish) to meet community needs.
• Students in two courses (political science and education) worked with local high school students to create the first ever business directory for a neighboring community. They saw firsthand the impact of poverty and how social policy both creates poverty and tries to alleviate it.
• Students in Biology 232 learned how population growth, food security, emerging diseases, and environmental devastation are connected with human health. Local field trips connected students with impoverished communities, and a week-long Spring Break trip to Haiti provided an extreme example of environmental impacts on human health.

In essence, CE courses represent the best of experiential learning. They are not so much about doing good as they are about learning well and completely.