Fall 2019 Periclean Faculty Leadership Awards

Project Pericles is pleased to announce that we have selected the third cohort of faculty members for the Periclean Faculty Leadership (PFL) Program™. 

​Periclean Faculty Leaders create new courses across the curriculum that incorporate civic engagement; collaborate with the local community to address their needs; engage in peer mentoring promoting conversation and feedback with faculty on their campus and PFLs on other campuses; encourage community-based work among their colleagues; promote civic engagement through lectures, town hall meetings, and public events; and advance public scholarship nationally and internationally through publications and conference presentations. PFLs champion civil discourse and social responsibility in the classroom, on the campus, and in the community.
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Through courses that utilize high impact learning strategies and address current economic, environmental, health, and income inequality, among other social issues, frequently working with the community, students gain an understanding of how they can use their knowledge and skills to improve their communities. Professors and community members model civil discourse, as stakeholders, to address pressing issues. Students gain experience working as part of a team with community members. This third round builds upon the work carried out in previous years. Periclean Faculty Leaders from earlier cohorts will serve as peer mentors to the new PFLs.
 
Praise for the PFL Program:
This program has changed the way that I think about citizenship, civic engagement, and community through first-hand experiences and thought-provoking course material. I have no doubt that this program has better prepared me for my future in law and the rigorous academic challenges that face me moving forward (Student, 2017-2018 PFL course, "Inventing the Citizen: The History of Political Action and its Limits," (Student, "Inventing the Citizen: The History of Political Action and its Limits" taught by Ulrike Krotscheck, Member of the Faculty in Archaeology and Classical Studies and Bradley Proctor, Member of the Faculty in History, The Evergreen State College).
 
We are pleased to have a diverse and dynamic group of professors from recent PhDs to full professors and department chairs in a wide range of disciplines including American Studies, Anthropology, Cinema and Media Studies, Economics, Education, Kinesiology, Native American Studies and Environmental Justice, Religion, Sociology, Theatre Arts, and Visual Arts.
 
PFLs and their courses for 2019:

• Berea College, Andrea Woodward, Associate Professor of Social Sciences, “Civic Sociology”
• Carleton College, Laska Jimsen, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, “Nonfiction Media Production”
• Elon University, Jennifer Carroll, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, “Citizenship in Crisis”
• Goucher College, Ann Duncan, Associate Professor of Religion, “Religions of Baltimore”
• Hampshire College, Ashley E. Smith, Assistant Professor of Native American Studies and Environmental Justice, “Memory, Nation, Power, and the Politics of Place”
• Hendrix College, Ann Muse, Professor of Theatre Arts, “Engaging Community Through Theatre: The Service of Others”
• New England College, Christine Oskar-Poisson, Assistant Professor of Education, “Teaching Literature for Social Justice”
• Occidental College, Marcella Raney, Associate Professor of Kinesiology and Bevin Ashenmiller, Associate Professor of Economics, “Planting Seeds: The Collaborative Approach to Implementing Green Schoolyards in the Urban Environment”
• Pace University, Melanie LaRosa, Assistant Professor of Media, Communications, and Visual Arts, “Multimedia Storytelling: Service Learning Through Media Production”
• Rhodes College, Laura Beth Kelly, Assistant Professor of Educational Studies, “Issues at the Intersection of Education and Immigration”
• Widener University, Bretton T. Alvaré, Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology, “Perspectives on Sustainability”

The PFL Program will support a host of innovative community-based projects and research. Anthropology students at Elon University will study the opioid crisis engaging with government officials, local first responders, and social service providers. New England College Education students will work with local k-12 schools to develop, teach, and assess language curriculum with embedded social justice themes At Occidental, students will use social science and life science research tools to evaluate the impact of green schoolyards in underserved areas and will collaborate with community partners to develop a schoolyard project.
 
Insights and best practices from the initial PFL Program  are discussed in our white paper, The Periclean Diamond: Linking College, Campuses, Communities, and Colleagues via Social and Civic High Engagement Learning by Ben Berger, Associate Professor of Political Science and Periclean Faculty Leader at Swarthmore College, and Jan R. Liss, Executive Director of Project Pericles.
 
PFL awards from Project Pericles are matched by each college or university. The awards support civil dialogue and civic engagement activities at member institutions. The applications were reviewed by a panel of outside evaluators. We were impressed with the excellent quality of the proposals and the enthusiastic response of the participating colleges and universities. By helping to integrate civic engagement into the academic life of the college, the PFL Program embodies our shared mission of graduating students with the knowledge, habits, and skills necessary to make contributions in their chose vocations and in their communities.
 
We thank the Eugene M. Lang Foundation for supporting the Periclean Faculty Leadership (PFL) Program. Prior support was provided by The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and The Teagle Foundation.