Actually, no; we're not holding a conference! We're convening a learning community! Join community engagement administrators and staff from across NC for 10 days in May (virtually and in person) to examine the past, present, and future of our work with Leslie Garvin, Sarah Stanlick, and Patti Clayton.

Context

35 years ago NC's own Bob Sigmon called all participants to understand themselves as teachers and learners, servers and served. 20 years ago Ed Zlotkowski called for the growth of service-learning as a academic work. A decade ago the Carnegie Foundation called colleges and universities to examine and claim the role of community engagement in their institutional identities and missions. Students have called their peers to provide leadership in the growth of curricular and co-curricular engagement; faculty have called their campuses to acknowledge integrated, engaged approaches to scholarship. How is our work as professional staff today influenced by these trajectories? What do we call for today as we envision the future of this work in our institutions and communities?

Process

The 2015 CEAC Learning Community will both explore and walk the talk of reciprocal, reflective, democratic engagement -- co-creating new understandings of and enhancements to our day-to-day work while also contributing our unique voices to a national project on the future of service-learning and community engagement. First, we'll do a bit of common reading; gather perspectives from our community, student, and faculty colleagues; and post key ideas we want to share and inquire into together (using a new technology platform NCCC is rolling out with this event). Then, on May 28, we'll spend a highly interactive day reflecting critically on our practice in the context of some of the central questions that have, do, and will shape community engagement. And finally, we will organize our thinking as a learning community of practitioner-scholars, co-generating and disseminating products that will add knowledge, inform practice, and pose questions to call the field forward.

Whether you are new to your role or an established leader on your campus ... working on your own or as part of an institution-wide conversation ... focused primarily on work with students, with faculty, or with community members ... we hope you will help us build a forum to collaboratively examine possibilities for deepening, expanding, and integrating community engagement in each of our own contexts, across NC, and nationally.