By MARTY LEVINE
This fall’s Faculty & Staff Development Program is offering two new sets of courses with big goals in mind: One aimed at expanding the number of community engagement professionals on campus and increasing their skills, and the other tied to the provost’s Year of Discourse and Dialogue’s efforts to help us through the Internet’s information minefield and even communicate better with one another.
The new Community Engagement Professional Foundations Certificate Program is designed to increase Pitt’s community engagement — partnering with community residents and organizations in many ways, from volunteer work to teaching and research.
Jamilah Ducar, head of Pitt’s Engaged Campus program in the Office of Engagement and Community Affairs, and colleagues have designed three courses and three groups of electives for the new certificate. Ducar also will be helping to present two of the main offerings.
She hopes faculty and staff will attend — whether just one course or the entire certificate program — “to start thinking about all the ways they might be able to support their unit or department and boost their engagement with outside communities.”
The “Community Partnerships” class, which Ducar will be co-presenting, “is really about ensuring you are setting up intentional relationships that you are looking to build or grow ... and that you’re setting up to impact” both your community partner and those the partnership helps in the community.
However, “we are not helpers,” she emphasizes, “we are folks that are facilitating something on behalf of the University.” That means not dropping by to implement our own ideas but having a clearly articulated goal devised with the community. That should create shared expectations in a partnership — which comes partly from understanding how your own background can best work in the partnership, she says. For instance: “We live in an August-to-December, January-to-April world. Our nonprofit partners don’t operate that way,” so we should work to create lengthier timelines with community partners.
The second class for which Ducar is co-presenter, “Equity and Inclusion Considerations for Engaged Scholars and Practitioners,” focuses on how prepared the University employee is to step into a partnership, and whether we have considered everything from accessibility to the “different learning styles and unique strengths of our partners.”
“The better we all are” at such preparation, she points out, “the more trust we can build, the better relationships we can broker.”
The third class. “Community Engagement Fundamentals,” offers a preview of what is uniquely available and happening at Pitt in community engagement and the foundations of its practice.
Electives are offered in three areas: diversity and inclusion; sustainability and workplace knowledge.
“We plan to learn from our learners,” Ducar emphasizes, with the input of attendees affecting course content in the future.
The new program has been five years in the making and reflects the core of the certificate program of Campus Compact, a national organization offering their own certification. The electives are designed to be accessible to Pitt employees who do community engagement at all levels, Ducar adds.
In fact, she says, there are already nearly 300 Pitt staffers and faculty members who are community engagement professionals throughout the campus. They range from the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation’s own community engagement staffer — as well as its co-directors — to the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences’ associate dean of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Community Engagement and a new faculty member in community engagement at the School of Education.
“We’re all over the institution,” Ducar says. “My hope is that the group will actually grow” as a result of the new certificate program — which will also help those in her department better understand how they can help support community engagement practice for all.
Discourse and Dialogue
The trio of courses for the Year of Discourse and Dialogue are “Be Civil, Be Civic: How to Agree and Disagree,” “Conflict as Catalyst” and “The Importance of Civil Discourse.” Calum Matheson, chair of the communications department in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, is presenting the first one.
Matheson is the former director of the debate program at Pitt, but the course isn’t about learning to best someone else — civilly — in an argument. It will focus, he says, on responding to the glut of information and alleged breaking news coming from the Internet and “learning a good sense of how to navigate the media environment we live in: how to build good habits” for judging what one views and hears as credible (or not).
Matheson has a “long interest in public conversation,” he says — “how we overcome differences to reach common goals” — and he has taught courses on argument as well as on propaganda and misinformation.
He says many people lack the training to assert their own opinions in ways that advance an audience’s understanding of their point of view — or good tools for how to listen to others.
Happily, he notes, attendees for this course will not be political opponents but rather University faculty and staff who share common goals.
“It is difficult, maybe impossible, to research everything we are exposed to,” Matheson says. “We need to have some ability to determine what aspects or what information is worth our time” — and what is just noise.
In “Conflict as Catalyst,” the second offering, participants will learn how to engage in “conflict productively and build skills to support conflict transformation in their areas,” says the course description, while the third class, “The Importance of Civil Discourse” will help attendees learn “the fundamentals of debate.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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