This is an exciting time in the Office of Community Engagement. The Graduate Engagement Corps has exceeded recruitment capacity for the second year. At the same time, Community Engaged Course (CEC) offerings and enrollments have nearly doubled since the designation began last year, bringing even more faculty and students into community-engaged experiences. Our new cohort of GEC members highlights the value and potential of community-engaged research to address local and global challenges and to prepare our students to be leaders and change-makers. 

The OCE team has recently grown with the addition of Jan Warren as Community Engagement Manager, whose skills and experience will immediately impact increasing campus and community partnership opportunities. As we generate more enthusiasm and tools on campus, I remain particularly interested in cultivating and strengthening relationships with outside partners. 

Thank you to the students, faculty, and community partners who have worked diligently throughout the past year to impact Iowa communities and University experiences through community engagement. 

In partnership,

Travis Kraus

Faculty Fellow for Engaged

Teaching and Scholarship

Please join us in welcoming Jan Warren to the OCE team! As the Community Engagement Manager, Jan will be advancing strategic initiatives that bolster community engagement at Iowa. She has had a long career in education, the arts, and student services. She has worked in gifted education and university admissions and was a music teacher in both public and private music schools in Iowa. 

Preserving and Sharing Community Memory in Rural Libraries across Iowa

Community-Engaged Student Experience Leads to $150,000 Grant

Our Voices of Community Engagement story for December features Micah Bateman, Ph.D., from the School of Library and Information Science.

Across Iowa, rural community libraries tend to be storehouses for documents, records, photographs, and published material that collectively tells the story of events and people that shape the surrounding area's history, often without the resources to organize and share them with future generations.

Through personal experience, community-engaged coursework, and a personal mission to address this problem, Micah Bateman has been championing this issue while working to provide solutions, first as a student and then as a professor at the University of Iowa.

Micah Bateman, Ph.D., assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at the University of Iowa, worked with the Iowa Initiative for Sustainable Communities (IISC) and Office of Community Engagement when he was a graduate student with SLIS. 

In one of the community engagement projects undertaken with IISC as a student, Bateman worked with the Washington Public Library (WPL) in Washington, Iowa, advising them on how to use recently acquired iPads - new technology at the time.

While assisting with recommendations for circulating the tablets and developing programming about integrating the technology into existing services, Bateman noticed that the library had an extensive archive of community and genealogical documents in storage. 

"Because there was such a small staff, no one was able to organize and promote these documents," Bateman said. 

Bateman had previously been a reporter for his hometown newspaper in rural Jacksonville, Texas, when he first noticed how local libraries preserved community memory.

"Even the newspaper I worked for didn't archive its newspapers, Bateman said. "We relied on the public library to archive our old back issues."

Creating Student Experiences

Now on the faculty for SLIS, Bateman's early experience working with under-resourced rural libraries has become a focus for his students as they work on community-engaged projects in class that serve local libraries and cultural heritage centers.

Bateman said that SLIS has a deep commitment to community engagement, offering community-engaged courses (CEC) where students get active learning experiences and gain skills to put on a resume while offering community partners the expertise of organized and guided graduate students.

"At the heart of these projects and community engagement is a sense of community inclusion and wellbeing," Bateman said.

In one of his first class projects, Bateman partnered with Iowa City Poetry, which was looking to start a lending library to share poetry with the community. 

"The director of Iowa City Poetry was not a librarian and needed consultation on what library systems they would need to make the poetry lending library run," Bateman said.

In 2020, Bateman's Computing Foundations Course (CFC) students helped the organization critically evaluate new and emerging technology to identify platforms to purchase for implementing an Integrated Library System (ILS) for cataloging materials and keeping a database of users essential to running a library of any size.

"One of the groups recommended the platform Iowa City Poetry now uses to run the lending library," Bateman said. "The organization also takes in a number of our students for practicum projects based on the success of that experience."

The following year, students in the CFC course worked with the Jackson County Historical Society, an IISC partner led by a former librarian, with a lot of community documentation about the City of Maquoketa that needed to be cataloged and digitized for sharing with the broader community. 

"We got to help an actual librarian heading up this historical society think about what digital platform would be best for all of the community documents that told the story of the history of Jackson County and Maquoketa," Bateman said. "We used the same process that helped Iowa City Poetry to determine what platforms would be best for a volunteer force at a historical society that would bring all of these community documents and memories into the digital realm."

That same year, students also worked with the Marion Public Library, which was looking to preserve the stories of those affected by the 2020 derecho, which brought straight-line winds up to 140 miles per hour, with devastating damage, to Midwest communities across the United States - the worst of which was in Eastern Iowa.

"They had a lot of community information they wanted to collect, so our class partnered with them to offer tips on how to use the platform for sharing those stories, along with advising on how they could fill out the descriptions of and organize the documents," Bateman said. 

Other classes included projects where students encoded and edited for the online Walt Whitman Archive, a partnership started in 2020 and continues to this day, along with coding a website for indexing disability studies articles.

During these partnerships, Bateman said it became clear that rural public libraries and historical societies become dumping grounds for community historical documents, stories, and memory because they are the only institutions that will take them.

Have a story about how community-engaged teaching, learning, research, or the arts at the University of Iowa is impacting Iowa communities?

Reach out to james-dykeman@uiowa.edu to share your experience!

The 2023 Graduate Engagement Corps cohort has formed with 30 Master's and Ph.D. students joining the program from nearly 20 departments across the University of Iowa

The GEC program provides graduate and professional students with training in critical areas of community engagement, including community-engaged teaching, community-engaged research, and building community partnerships. 

A three day Orientation will kick off the GEC on January 9th - 11th. After completing the Orientation, graduate students will participate in additional workshops and training to gain a more profound knowledge of specific topics in community engagement through the Spring 2023 semester. Grant funding will be available for GEC participants to apply for in the late Spring of 2023 to encourage the implementation of the skills they have learned through the Orientation and subsequent workshops.

Register for a Spring '23 Community Engaged Course

Over 50 sections of courses designated as CECs are now live in MyUI from across disciplines, from engineering to language, arts, and event management; there are many diverse opportunities for community-engaged learning with partners across Iowa. Get practical experience while making a difference!

Arts Share High School Workshop & Performance Day Registration Open

After three years and limited to 90 students, registration is now open to High School Theater students from across Iowa to attend the performance of Braided Sorrow in the David Thayer Black-Box theatre with stunning visuals and an incredibly talented and diverse cast. 

Braided Sorrow will give you and your students the opportunity to immerse yourselves in a reality that currently exists outside our borders. The performance and workshops will focus on the importance of uplifting community members not often seen. The presenting artists hope that this will influence the audience to maintain a more global outlook that deepens our ability for compassion, empathy, and humanity.

The workshops and performance are FREE, but reservations must be made in advance.

Please reserve your student group by Friday, January 20.

Contact artshare@uiowa.edu

The fellow will promote diversity and interdisciplinarity in teaching, research, and creative work.

Applications Open for 2023 Grant Wood Interdisciplinary Performance Fellow in Digital Media and Live Performance

The Grant Wood Fellowship program is currently seeking a candidate appointed through the department of Theatre Arts with a specialty in interdisciplinary digital media in live performance. GWAC is seeking applications from emerging to mid-career artists who are engaged in creating theatrical experiences/performances through the use of incorporating video, projections, and new/emerging technologies in bold and exciting ways to engage audiences for the twenty first century.

Seeding Excellence: OVPR Community Engaged Scholars FY23 Request for Proposals

The Research Development Office (RDO) within the University of Iowa Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) seeks collaborative, 18-month OVPR Community Engaged Scholars proposals with awards up to $50k (smaller projects are encouraged) to assist in creating and solidifying community research and scholarship partnerships within Iowa. The goal is to enable and sustain community engaged research and scholarship partnerships that reciprocally benefit the University and Iowa communities.

OVPR Community Engaged Scholars aims to support community partnerships within Iowa that create new opportunities for pilot projects to gather data that enable long-term research partnerships sustained through external funding proposals.

The Office of Community Engagement will be offering workshops in January and February to support applicants. The January Workshop will explore the basics of Community Engaged Research and an overview of the Community Engaged Scholars Grant. The February Workshop will offer guidance and feedback for pitching your proposal. Exact dates coming soon.

LOI Deadline Due February 03, 2023

Call for Papers: Abstracts Due 9 December 2022

Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement 



Gateways has announced a new themed volume, 'Asset-based community development and community-based research: Compatible agents in equitable and sustainable change?'. Contributors are encouraged to critically and creatively explore the interactions between asset-based and relationship-centred community development approaches and research collaborations.

A special invitation has been extended to practitioners, leaders, activists and others to submit their own contributions. 

The Office of Community Engagement is here to help with letters of support and one-on-one meetings with our office to discuss upcoming courses, research projects, and community partnerships.

IISC currently accepting Letters of Interest for the 2023-24 academic year from Iowa communities

IISC will select two "full partners" and commit to completing 15 projects with each, calling on the expertise of faculty-led graduate and upper-level undergraduates from across campus.

Applicants may consist of a municipality, a county government, councils of governments, or a collection of communities with similar characteristics, such as economic or cultural districts, or a transportation corridor.

Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement

Submission Deadline

December 09, 2022

Campus Cogenerate: Updates & Next Steps

December 15, 2022 2 - 3:30 PM

Online

IISC Request for Letters of Interest

Submission Deadline

December 15, 2022