Civic Reflection News Update — April 2011 TRAINING
Register by April 29 for May Facilitation Training
Our next open-call facilitation training will begin at noon on Thursday, May 19 and conclude at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, May 20, 2011, at Columbia College Chicago. The registration deadline is this coming Friday, April 29.
NEW RESOURCES
Hearing the Call across Traditions Released in Paperback
A quality paperback edition of Hearing the Call across Traditions: Readings on Faith and Service, edited by Adam Davis with a foreword by Eboo Patel, is now available from Skylight Paths Publishing. The paperback is $18.99, a 37% savings over the cost of the hardcover edition.
Resources from New York Council for the Humanities Conversations Bureau
The Conversations Bureau, a new initiative of the New York Council for the Humanities, promotes thoughtful, engaged community dialogue based on short texts related to American identity. Ninety-minute discussions, facilitated by respected scholars, are available to high schools and nonprofit organizations statewide, on diverse topics ranging from poems by Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and Kay Ryan to "Food and American Identity," "The Black Migration," and "Perspectives on Rural Life: Poverty and Plenty."
Says Council executive director Sara Ogger, "The Conversations Bureau is a user-friendly way for even the most over-scheduled among us to take a little break in our lives and get personal with a text—to get together with other inquisitive souls, take a deep breath, and jump into a shared experience of great intensity and quality." Check out this list of conversations with attached resources. Civic reflection facilitators should find much of interest here.
New CR and Higher Ed page
Check out our new audience page on Civic Reflection and Higher Education.
New Discussion Plan
Thanks to PCR trainer Emily Archer for sharing this discussion plan for Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" and Pieter Brueghel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus". She used the plan to facilitate a discussion with hospice workers, through the New Hampshire Humanities Council's Literature and Medicine program.
New in the Resource Library
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy - What is compassion? Where does it come from, and what does it enable us to do?
- What is success? What is failure?
- How do we respond to death and dying?
"The House" by Gabriela Mistral - Does true giving require sacrifice?
- How does a person learn compassion?
- What is poverty? How should we respond to it?
"A Handful of Dates" by Tayeb Salih - What are my obligations to my neighbor? What, if anything, releases me from those obligations?
- What is our responsibility to the natural world?
- What is the relationship between our principles and our actions?
New in the Facilitators' Forum
Have you led a civic reflection discussion lately? If so, we'd love to hear from you. Tell us about it!
SPOTLIGHT
Serve Rhode Island and Justice Talks: 5 Years and Going Strong
Justice Talks is a gem of a program… the best thing we do for our AmeriCorps members.
–Serve Rhode Island program officer Marisa Petreccia
Justice Talking/Meaning of Service, the popular civic reflection program for AmeriCorps members, began in Illinois nearly a decade ago under the leadership of the Illinois Humanities Council, then spread to and was adapted by over a dozen other states. The program recently marked its five-year anniversary in Rhode Island, where it took root under the name Justice Talks. The Justice Talks Civic Reflection Series is the fruit of a partnership between Serve Rhode Island, the Feinstein Institute for Public Service at Providence College, and Rhode Island Campus Compact. One of the innovations of Justice Talks has been its use of bilingual English/Spanish readings with mixed groups of participants–some speaking English only, some Spanish only, and some fluent in both languages. Serve Rhode Island commissioned Spanish translations of the readings, which are hyperlinked at the end of this article. [ Read more…]
NEWS & NOTES
Chicago Cultural Alliance
The Project on Civic Reflection has been working with the Chicago Cultural Alliance and its Core Members on a discussion series that would bring together Chicago's diverse communities to talk about issues that matter. The Talking about… discussion series is part of a collective effort by CCA's members to build museums as centers of civic engagement. [Read more…]
Art and Empathy
PCR trainer Dylan Walsh, now a graduate student in the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale, recently published a column in the Yale Daily News on the film If a Tree Falls, featured in Yale's Environmental Film Festival. He advocates art, and conversation about art, as a way of fostering empathy: "Art allows us to inhabit another head and understand a perspective that is not and perhaps never will be our own. It provides fertile grounds from which empathy may grow." This sounds to us a lot like what civic reflection is and does. Read the full article here.
University of Iowa Sponsors Training for Faculty and Staff
In March the University of Iowa sponsored a two-day facilitation training for faculty and staff. Adam Davis co-facilitated the training with Georgina Dodge, the University of Iowa's Chief Diversity Officer and Associate Vice President, and Carrie Willson-Plymire, Technical Services Supervisor at Western Maryland Regional Library. In evaluations faculty expressed appreciation for the chance to learn a practice that can improve their teaching. Said one, "Refreshing—I echo another participant's comments about taking time for the teacher to learn. I learned a lot of new things these past two days and I have new resources and colleagues to rely on. Can't wait to try it with students."
Wisconsin Initiative to Promote Healthy Lifestyles
On April 7 leaders and staff of the Wisconsin Initiative to Promote Healthy Lifestyles (WIPHL) marked the end of a five-year initiative to fight unhealthy drinking and drug use among Wisconsinites by offering free screening, brief intervention and referral to treatment at clinics statewide. As part of a daylong retreat celebrating WHIPL's achievements, Elizabeth Lynn gave an overview of civic reflection with healthcare providers. [Read more…]
IMPACT Conference
Facilitator Amanda Nix, who attended our January 2011 training, led an introductory session on civic reflection at the 27th Annual IMPACT National Conference, held at Stetson University March 31-April 3. [Read more…]
Civic Reflection and Vocation: 2011 NetVUE Conference
The inaugural NetVUE (Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education) Conference, held March 10-12, included a session on "Civic Engagement and Vocational Reflection" led by Elizabeth Lynn and Adam Davis. The conference drew about 400 participants, including presidents, faculty leaders, chief academic officers and other senior administrative leaders on NetVUE campuses. The opening plenary was given by Christian Smith, author of Souls in Transition, and the closing plenary by Interfaith Youth Core founder Eboo Patel. NetVUE, administered by the Council of Independent Colleges with support from Lilly Endowment Inc., fosters the exploration of vocation in college and university communities.
Congregational Civic Reflection
Adam Davis led a civic reflection discussion for congregants of the Unitarian Church of Evanston in March. Volunteers, covenant group members, and members of social action teams were especially encouraged to attend. A UCE leader described the session as "a simple process and a meaningful discussion about what it means to relate to others, how we serve and why. It was about dignity, respect, and openness." UCE's congregation was introduced to civic reflection through a covenant group conversation series organized by member Cathy Deamant in 2008-2009. Click here for the program description and reading list.
Illinois State-Wide Service-Learning Conference
Kelli Covey gave the keynote address and led breakout sessions at the 2011 Illinois State-Wide K-16 Service-Learning Conference, held at the Tinley Park Convention Center on March 22. The conference was co-sponsored by The Illinois State Board of Education, Illinois Campus Compact and The Center: Resources for Teaching and Learning. Kelli's keynote address included audience discussion of a 1957 photograph taken in Nashville on the first day of school after racial desegregation. Read the keynote here.
McCormick First Amendment Seminar
This winter the McCormick Foundation Civics Program offered middle and high school teachers in the Chicago area a series of free seminars on the First Amendment. The three-part series explored how the First Amendment supports deliberation in the classroom within the broader context of engaging students with current and controversial issues. [Read more…]
Do you have civic reflection news to share? Contact us!
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