Introducing The Ripple Effect

I am pleased to introduce The Ripple Effect, Cornell’s Community-Engaged Learning, Leadership and Research blog. Published by the Office of Engagement Initiatives (OEI), The Ripple Effect’s primary purpose is to share information in support of the Engaged Cornell ethos and to communicate the value and impact of community-engaged learning, leadership and research (CELLR), at Cornell and beyond. While the blog endeavors to cultivate and disseminate diverse stories of CELLR, its catalytic vison is to encourage and inspire readers to share their CELLR experience in multiple spaces, contexts, lenses and forms of media, and to contribute to a larger CELLR movement. After all, CELLR’s strength in building community, working across difference and engaging with people from all walks of life to address social and environmental issues offers powerful lessons for building a better world.

The Ripple Effect

First and foremost, as the name suggests, The Ripple Effect’s aspirational goal is to expand the impact of CELLR with each successive entry by creating a space for scholars and practitioners to share their experience, expertise and lessons learned from engaging with CELLR. The blog is a concerted effort to raise awareness about the larger world of CELLR. The blog is a medium through which readers can become better acquainted with the people, practices and organizations that are advancing public engagement at Cornell and beyond — inviting readers to become connected to a larger community-engaged network, through calls to action, scholarship and other activities that showcase examples of robust CELLR.

Another goal of the blog is to share OEI staff expertise, as well as highlight the grants, programs and resources we offer in support of high-quality CELLR. We seek to inform readers about the exciting CELLR opportunities at Cornell and in the field, and to inspire creative and yet-to-be imagined possibilities afforded by community-engaged scholarship and leadership. The Ripple Effect provides opportunities to recognize and CELLRbrate Cornell faculty, students, staff and community partners’ accomplishments in CELLR.

The blog will also expose readers to stories and insights from both Cornell and non-Cornell stakeholders. As the only land grant, Ivy League university, there are students, faculty and staff throughout the university who participate in inspiring CELLR activities with communities — locally, regionally and across the globe. Community-engaged learning courses and other types of co-curricular and international community engagement address challenging social and environmental issues. The Ripple Effect offers Cornell staff, community members, students, alumni and faculty an opportunity to share their knowledge and experience with CELLR from their unique vantage point. This will be a forum for CELLR participants ranging from novice to expert, to introduce and discuss topics of interest and offer an authentic assessment of the challenges presented by the inherent complexity of connecting classroom teaching and research with communities off-campus.

The content of the blog will be wide-ranging: from raising awareness of OEI and other Cornell programs and resources that support CELLR, to sharing opinions on an array of important and timely topics in CELLR. They could include the connection between CELLR and democracy-building, how to assess student learning outcomes through reflection and e-portfolios, approaches to CELLR course and program design, how CELLR supports diversity, equity and well-being, and evaluation tools for measuring community impact, to name a few. Importantly, the blog serves as a reflective space that will critically examine important questions and assumptions for facilitating quality CELLR practice. We will consider “what works best under what conditions? What are the strengths and limitations of particular approaches to CELLR? What key concepts and theories inform student learning, program design and quality community partnerships? What is critical reflection and why is it important? What are core principles of good practice in CELLR?

The blog will also offer a space for storytelling. Through stories of joy, transformation, humility, collective struggle, resistance, bearing witness and ethical dilemmas, we will create an online meaning-making forum to reflect on experience and unpack the uniquely visceral, emotional, affective and cognitive domains of learning brought about through participation in CELLR.

What Brought Me Here

My understanding of the transformative dimensions of learning that can be fostered through CELLR and what it means to be an engaged educator, is rooted in my experience with establishing and co-facilitating a community-engaged partnership focused on health care and prevention education in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua in 1994. Learning how to teach community-based courses and conducting participatory research in remote and resource-limited areas with vulnerable populations was challenging on multiple levels. There were few resources to help faculty and practitioners navigate the pedagogical, emotional, linguistic, cultural, physical and political challenges inherent in CELLR. I was grateful to organizations like Campus Compact and Community-Campus Partnerships for Health as well as peer-reviewed scholarly journals such as the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning and the Journal of Higher Education, Outreach and Engagement, where I learned about the emerging field of service-learning. Since then, I have served as a CELLR scholar-practitioner working with students, faculty, staff and community partners in the U.S. and abroad to build robust CELLR networks and communities of practice such as globalsl.org. What was once a counter-normative approach to teaching and research in higher education, is increasingly becoming a norm. After 25 years in the field of CELLR, I am still learning how to do this work better every day and The Ripple Effect, provides another useful avenue for learning how to navigate the inherent messiness of facilitating CELLR.

Upcoming Plans for the Blog

On that note, I am pleased to share the line-up of our first five blog posts written by OEI staff that will run approximately bi-weekly over the next few months.:

• Anna Bartel, associate director, community-engaged curricula and practice, will share OEI’s unique approach for supporting faculty who are using CELLR to change the world;
• Mike Bishop, director, student leadership, will describe the core elements of OEI’s peer-based student leadership program that distinguish from other leadership programs at Cornell and peer institutions;
• Dhyana Gonzalez, New York state partnership liaison, will articulate OEI’s approach to partnership-building along with opportunities to connect with partners across NYS; and
• Amanda Wittman, associate director, community-engaged curricula and strategy, will share lessons learned from stewarding Cornell’s university-wide effort to re-apply for Carnegie’s community engagement classification.

Given Cornell’s unique and rich history, public engagement has been at the core of its mission since its inception. The widespread and ongoing cultivation of high-quality CELLR across the university is broad and deep, and there are myriad untold CELLR stories to be unearthed and shared with a wider public. Having said that, CELLR is complicated work, with potential to do harm, even with the best of intentions to do good. There is still so much to learn about how to do this CELLR work well. The Ripple Effect has the potential to inspire, organize and foster critically reflective learning with readers, future contributors and collaborators who are part of a growing CELLR movement, near and far. As the inaugural executive editor, I look forward to your participation as the blog evolves and connects a wider CELLR network over time.