LMU Professors Selected for Statewide Political Engagement Effort
Two LMU professors have been selected as Faculty Fellows in the Service Learning for Political Engagement Program by California Campus Compact and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Alicia Partnoy, associate professor and chair of the modern languages and literatures department, and Nina Maria Reich, assistant professor of communication studies, are among 25 professors from public and private colleges and universities across California who will lead efforts to increase college students’ political engagement. Each fellow will be responsible for creating, implementing and evaluating courses that use service learning to increase students’ understanding, skills and motivation for political participation.
“The opportunity for students to take what they learn in the classroom and put it to use in the community makes the experience come alive for them,” explains Pam Rector, director of LMU’s Center for Service and Action, and the person who nominated Partnoy and Reich for the fellowship.
Over the next two years, Partnoy and Reich will work in conjunction with other fellows and with CSA to develop and refine their course models, examine student outcomes and share their work with colleagues on campus and across the state and nation.
“This group of 25 fellows is the first of its kind, it is worthy, from an academic standpoint, given today’s political climate to re-examine these models for effective political engagement,” says Reich. She joined LMU in 2003 and is an expert in political rhetoric, public sphere and social movement studies, critical rhetoric and feminist theories.
“As an institution committed to the promotion of justice, it is our obligation to help students become responsible citizens, capable of understanding different ways of resisting human rights violations perpetrated both in the U.S.A and in Latin America,” adds Partnoy, who joined LMU’s faculty in 1998. Partnoy is a survivor of the Argentinean detention camps where about 30,000 ‘disappeared.’
Through the fellowship, Partnoy will refine two of her Spanish courses, “Testimonial Texts” and “Hispanic Cultural Studies.” These include analyzing cultural responses to the genocides perpetrated by dictatorships in many Latin American countries, the femicide (both in Guatemala and Mexico), and other human rights violations in Latin America and the United States.
Partnoy’s students will learn diverse cultural forms of expression to resist destructive practices. They will then examine the degree in which those expressions of cultural resistance are useful to promote political participation and empower the Spanish-speaking elders in the sites of their service learning projects.
Reich has proposed a communications course titled, “Engaging Service-Learning and Politics from the Ground Up.” In this class students will select a timely political issue from various ideological perspectives and partner with community organizations whose foci are in-line with their projects. Readings will be assigned to help the students obtain the best outcome for the hands-on portion of the course and generate change from a grassroots level.
Examples of the activities Reich’s students will be involved with include organizing community forums to educate publics about issues, petition-elected officials to change a policy in the status quo, hold consciousness-raising groups, organize rallies or protests, facilitate boycotts or sit-ins, initiate “get out the vote drives,” or develop public service announcements.
All fellows will come together for the first time this summer for a three-day institute at the Carnegie Foundation, where they will begin planning their courses. Both Partnoy and Reich have prior experience in successfully including service-learning components in many of their courses at LMU. They plan to offer their refined classes in Spring 2008.