Civic Engagement Symposium at Rutgers-Camden

Posted by on October 24, 2010

You are invited to participate in a symposium on civic engagement to be held on Friday, October 29, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in the Multi-Purpose Room at Rutgers University – Camden. This event—organized under the auspices of an Academic Excellence Fund grant to define a civic engagement mission for the campus—is specifically targeted to faculty and will focus on the methods and modalities of engaged civic learning and the institutionalization of civic engagement in higher education.

The keynote speaker is Dr. Brian Murphy, a leading national voice on the connections between universities and communities. Murphy has been president of De Anza College in Cupertino, CA, since 2004. De Anza consistently ranks first or second in the state of California for the total number of students who annually transfer to University of California and California State University campuses and was recently ranked by Washington Monthly as one of the best community colleges in the United States. A key focus of Murphy’s presidency has been the preparation of students to be active, involved citizens committed to transforming their communities. This vision led to the creation of De Anza’s Institute for Community and Civic Engagement. Before becoming president, Murphy served for 12 years as executive director of the San Francisco Urban Institute at San Francisco State University. He has taught political theory and American government at UC–Santa Cruz, Santa Clara University, and San Francisco State University. Murphy served as the Chief Consultant to the California State Legislature’s Review of the Master Plan for Higher Education, and was the principal consultant for the Legislature’s community college reform process in the late 1980s.

Also speaking will be Dr. Patricia Crain, a professor of English at NYU who will describe her experiences in civic learning from the perspective of an engaged faculty member. Her teaching, research, and writing focus on nineteenth-century American literature and culture, on the history of print culture and literacy, on the history of childhood, and on critical pedagogy. She taught at Princeton and the University of Minnesota before joining the faculty at NYU. At Minnesota, Crain was co-founder of the Literacy Lab in the English Department, which supports faculty and student participation in community projects and civic engagement. Professor Crain’s book, The Story of A: the Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (2000), won the Modern Language Association prize for a first book. Her research has been supported by the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, a Newberry Library/Spencer Foundation fellowship, and an American Antiquarian Society/NEH fellowship, among others. She is currently working on a book about childhood and literacy in the nineteenth century.

The presentations will conclude with a report on Rutgers’ recent application to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for its classification for Community Engagement and will be followed by small-group discussions on campus-specific ideas for integrating civic engagement into our curriculum.

This event is open to colleagues from other campuses and the general public.

Any questions about the event may be directed to:

Andrew Seligsohn
Director of Civic Engagement
Rutgers-Camden
303 Cooper Street
Camden, NJ 08102-1519
856.225.6754