2024 PHENND Conference: The Future of Higher Education – Feb 23

Posted by PHENND on December 12, 2023

Register now for the 2024 Annual PHENND Conference!

Friday, February 23, 2024
8:30 AM-4:45 PM
Rutgers University-Camden

The PHENND Conference is an annual gathering for practitioners of campus-community partnership. This gathering will be attended by 100-125 students, campus staff, faculty, and community organization staff active in community service, service-learning, and campus-community partnership work. While primarily targeting individuals who are part of the 25+ colleges and universities involved in the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development (PHENND), this event is also open nationally to practitioners of campus-community partnership.

Register here on Eventbrite.

Theme

This year’s theme is The Future of Higher Education. As our partners at Bringing Theory to Practice write, “Higher education is at an inflection-point. It faces crises of precarity, of legitimacy, and of purpose. Change, big change, is coming. The stakes are high, and so is the urgency of the moment. Twenty years from now, college education will be very different for most students and most institutions. But the shape of that future is still up for grabs. There is no standing still; the options are to make change or be changed. The question that educators, students, and our public allies face is, what kind of change do we want? And what can we do about it?”

Join us this month to explore these questions!

Opening Keynote

The opening keynote will feature Dr. Timothy Eatman, Dean of the Honors Living-Learning Community at Rutgers University Newark. Dr. Eatman is the inaugural dean of the HLLC. Most recently, he held an appointment as Associate Professor of Higher Education in the School of Education at Syracuse University. From 2012 to 2017, Tim served as Faculty Co-Director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA). He is co-author of Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University, a seminal IA research report on faculty rewards and publicly engaged scholarship.

Lunchtime plenary

The Lunchtime Plenary will be led by a team from The Red House, which seeks to shape a new learning paradigm that expands high-impact practices at Georgetown University, confronts systemic injustice, improves wellbeing and healing, while controlling the rising costs of a transformative education. Their team will present the Three Horizons Framework as an interactive exercise designed to help participants imagine and articulate various futures for higher education and beyond.  The team presenting will be Dr. Randy Bass, Vice President for Strategic Education Initiatives; Susannah McGowan, Director of Curriculum Transformation Initiatives; Tad Howard, Associate Dean for Strategic Integration, College of Arts & Sciences; and Ijeoma Njaka, Senior Learning Designer for Transformational and Inclusive Initiatives.

Workshops

Workshops will be offered that speak to the Paradigm Project’s Framework and Five Connected Goals — Student Wellbeing & Success, Student Learning, Faculty & Staff Thriving, Institutional Community, and Higher Ed as a Public Good.

Selected workshops include:

o Transformative Education for all: College Together, a new “fusion college” model working to ensure visibility, inclusivity, challenge, and transformation for every student
o Community Scholars: Cultivating Change through Student-Led Community Engagement
o Contributing to the Public Good through Community-Based Learning: the Swarthmore College-Need in Deed Partnership
o Assessing DEI Practices: an Ethnography of Communication Approach to Create Inclusive Campus Spaces
o The Black Women Faculty Experience: Encouraging Change in Workplace Practices
o The Whole Package: Students Thriving through Free College in Philadelphia
o Developing novel training and technical assistance programming for community violence intervention organizations: An Equity-Centered Design Approach
o Developing Anti-Racism Community Dialogues: A Community-Driven Participatory Action Research Project
o Coaching Conversations: Fostering Culturally Sustaining Practices with Aspiring Educators
o Harnessing Digital Storytelling Tools for a Thriving Campus
o Community Building & Collaborative Learning in First-Year Seminars
o Evergreen DEI Obstacles: How to Ensure Campuses are More Welcoming for First-Gen Low-Income (FGLI) Students of Color (SOC)

Thank you to Rutgers University-Camden and Bringing Theory to Practice for their support of this event.