Community Engaged Teaching

Connecting university students with local organizations to practice new skills, build community, and create useful products that support the organization's mission.

Community engagement is considered a high impact practice that leads to:

Reduction in stereotypes and broadened racial and cultural understanding (Bowman, Brandenberger, Mick, Smedly, 2010; De Leon, 2014; Seider and Hillman, 2011)
Improved disciplinary knowledge retention (Warren, 2012; Pelco, Ball, Lockeman, 2014)
Development in terms of student efficacy, personal identity, spiritual growth, and moral development (Astin, Vogelgesang, Ideda, Seifer, 2002; Yee, 2000)
Improved ability to work with others and leadership and communication skills (Simons and Cleary, 2006; Eyler and Giles, 1999)
Increased student commitment to service post-graduation (Astin, Sax, Avalos, 1999; Winston, 2015; Bernacki and Bernt, 2007)
Improved application of disciplinary learning to the “real world” (Terry, Smith, McQuillin, 2014)

“Once we start talking in the classroom about the body and about how we live in our bodies, we’re automatically challenging the way power has orchestrated itself in that particular institutionalized space. The person who is most powerful has the privilege of denying their body."

bell hooks

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Professional Writing

Professional writers include those who write in the workplace (engineers, accountants, managers, computer programmers, teachers) as well as those who write as their profession (grant writers, creative writers, technical writers).

Taught each Spring semester, Professional Writing partners with a local nonprofit to write one or more grants. Over five years, we've written $111,000 in grants and received $9,100. Spring 2013 students earned William Randolph School a Capital Planet Foundation Grant of $2,500 to maintain and expand permaculture educational programs. Spring 2015 students earned two, $800 Learning Links Grants with Community Foundation of Western North Carolina. Spring 2019 students created an interactive media site for Burton Street Community Peace Gardens. Spring 2021 students earned a $5,000 NC Humanities Council grant to support the Realities of Poverty programming with Asheville Poverty Initiative.

Professional Writing offers students a chance to research language conventions and types of writing particular to their discipline, make professional connections in their intended career, produce job materials or graduate school materials, as well as research and produce a grant for a local nonprofit. This course appeals to students in all disciplines.