Today at CC Digest for Students

A Daily Digest for Colorado College

Today at CC Digest

A Daily Digest for Colorado College

Get Ready for Winter Commencement!

Winter Commencement, set for Sunday, Dec. 17 at 1 p.m., is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate those students who complete their undergraduate studies prior to the May Commencement ceremony. This year’s event will take place in-person in Shove Memorial Chapel, and the ceremony will include remarks from President L. Song Richardson with a Commencement address from Steve Hayward, Professor and Director of the Journalism Institute.

Students, faculty, and staff are invited to attend and celebrate our winter graduates. No RSVP is required. Faculty members who would like to march in the ceremony should sign up no later than 5 p.m., December 14.

Regalia can be picked up at the Bookstore December 14-15 between 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

For questions or to request disability-related accommodations, please contact Brenda Soto via email (bsoto@coloradocollege.edu) or by phone at (719) 389-6265.

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Stories of Community Engagement this Fall

Campus community,
Every block, Colorado College students, faculty, and staff engage in community work in Colorado Springs and beyond. This block, the CCE focuses our newsletter on storytelling, elevating some of the community engagement happening around us, in and alongside the classroom, through course collaborations, student organizations, internships and fellowships, and campus initiatives and projects. With 19 CCE student organizations, 37 Bonner Fellows, over 100 Community Engaged Scholars, and at least eight (and counting) community-engaged learning courses inspired by the CCE’s PEAK Project, we have no shortage of stories to tell.

Fall Highlights

Fall 2023 Bonner Fellowship Retreat at the CC Cabin

New Cohort of Bonner Fellows

In its seventh year at CC, the Bonner Fellowship welcomed 14 additional students, now totaling 37 Fellows! The Bonner Fellowship is a four-year, cohort-based, paid fellowship that seeks to provide developmental learning, community engagement, and community building to students who are committed to deep and sustained social change work. Our Bonners, after one year of exploration, commit to a community-based internship with one local community partner and work to build capacity within the organization through a culminating senior capstone project by the end of their time in the fellowship.  

This year, our Bonners will be working with 26 different community partners across various issue areas, from arts and media for social change to immigrant and refugee justice to environmental justice and many more! For example senior Bonner Misbah Lakhani ’24 has been working with their community partner, Inside Out Youth Services for the last three years assisting with the various projects and initiatives of the organization. In their senior year of the fellowship, Misbah is completing a Capstone Project that consists of developing lesson plans for the Inside Out programs team to educate LGBTQAI+ youth on various social justice topics, including feminist and trans justice. 

Community Engaged Learning 

In Block 2, students in Dr. Aaron Stoller’s Curriculum Theories class took what they learned and applied it to supporting the development of a real curriculum – “Diversity University II,” a multi-day workshop offered through local nonprofit Educating Children of Color (ECOC).  Diversity University II “aims to empower individuals to become catalysts for inclusive environments and equitable practices, fostering a more just society.”  Students used their knowledge from the class to offer suggestions for how to update and evolve this curriculum – suggestions that the founder of ECOC, Regina Walter, praised as “brilliant.”  
“Your project was absolutely amazing. This was scholar engagement at its finest. I am highly interested in working with you [again]…” 
Dr. Regina Lewis, Co-Facilitator, Diversity University II

This course culminated a partnership cultivated by the CCE’s PEAK Project (Publicly Engaged, Actionable Knowledge), which seeks to bridge campus knowledge to community impact by connecting CC educators to nonprofit and public partners for community-engaged learning classroom projects.  Here is what happened behind-the-scenes: ECOC submitted the idea for this classroom project late in the fall of 2022, which the CCE shared with faculty broadly through a Call for Interest, then in targeted ways to instructors of upcoming relevant courses.  Once we “matched” the project to a course, Dr. Aaron Stoller and Regina Walter co-created the classroom project together over the summer – with the support of a CCE CEL curriculum development grant!  
“It was a tremendous block and we learned so much from the experience…  I sincerely mean it when I say that this learning experience would not have been possible without your [ECOC’s] support and your partnership.”
Dr. Aaron Stoller, Instructor, Curriculum Theories

Faculty, learn more about community-engaged learning here. If you’re already teaching a CEL course, please let us know!  The CCE is working to revitalize a community-engaged learning course tag in Banner to have a better understanding of the scope of this pedagogy on campus (40 confirmed, 50+ expected). Read about the criteria for the tag here.  Students, check out upcoming CEL courses here

K-12 Engagement

Colorado College’s engagement with K-12 Education in the Pikes Peak Region spans work with youth-serving community partners, direct work in schools, and our college access programs. Following the recent local school board election, we are highlighting the ways in which our entire campus, CCE and beyond, engages with local school districts.

BreakOut Trips

BreakOut partnered with the following organizations this semester: The Marian House, Pueblo Nature & Wildlife Discovery Center, Partners in Housing, Concrete Couch, Flying Pig Farm, CC Farm, Sky High Ranch, Bemis School of Art and more!

Meet the CCE Intern Team

Ongoing Opportunities

Students

Explore These and More on the Student Hub

Faculty

Explore These and More on the Faculty Hub

Campus

Learn More About Our Work

Don’t miss out! 

We offer a number of ways for you to stay informed on issues and opportunities that align with your interests.

Sign up for the CCE Digest
Join an Issue Based Coalition Listserv
Join the Engaged Faculty Listserv
Subscribe to Campus Compact Newsletter

Join a Community Board or Commission

The City of Colorado Springs is frequently looking for engaged citizens to join boards and commissions. Consider contributing your time and talents to one of these boards or commissions. View openings here: https://coloradosprings.gov/boards

If you are interested in engaging in the local community and would like support getting started, please 
  • email us at cce@coloradocollege.edu
  • call us at (719) 389-7270
  • swing by the CCE House at 1008 N. Weber (East Campus)   

Best,  

Connect with us on social media!

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Support Our Local Youth

Dear campus educators, facilitators, and speakers,

The African American Youth Leadership Conference (AAYLC) seeks interested parties passionate about paying it forward and supporting our local youth and their village (those who make up their support system), to participate in the AAYLC annual conference, which will occur at CC on March 9, 2024. Those interested in presenting or facilitating a conference session would engage with attendees by creating an educationally rich and experientially interactive learning session. The sessions are conveniently scheduled to take place in the morning and afternoon. The theme for this year’s conference is You Only Fail When You Stop Trying. Attendees are eager to hear about and participate in discussions and workshops on various topics associated with this year’s theme. Please consider sharing your time, talent, and expertise with an organization that is making extraordinary strides throughout the state of Colorado.  
As the executive director of AAYLC, I can attest to the impact on our youths made  through opportunities like this. This event has created pathways to access education, community resources, and networking connections that will last a lifetime. For more information about how to get involved, please visit our website, or use this link to indicate your interest in being a presenter at our 2024 conference.
Hope to see you there, making a difference in the lives of our young people and the surrounding community. 
Kind regards, 

Dr. Ersaleen M. Hope

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Engaging Difference

Block 4 at Crown Center

Block 4 at Crown Center

Challenging Conversations & Bridge Building

The Crown Center for Teaching (CCT) is bringing together resources to help faculty, staff, and students engage difference in the classroom—and campus more broadly—in ways that respect individual identities, professional knowledge, and deeply held personal beliefs. The goal is not to take sides or change opinions, but rather to take seriously the things that matter to us most. Through that process we’ll build bridges that help us accomplish the common good to which we are all deeply committed.
 
Details on campus-wide programming will emerge between now and the start of the spring semester.  But for now, we would like to share with you a list of existing resources to help us continue to engage difficult conversations while respecting the mutable boundaries of our collective freedoms, including those of religion, speech, and academics. This is neither an exhaustive nor prescriptive list, but rather one we hope everyone will explore AND supplement.  Please share with us examples you’ve encountered.

Drop-in Hours
The only thing we love as much as teaching is talking about teaching. Is there something on your mind you’d like to talk about?  An assignment idea, a tricky classroom situation, a question about teaching, formed or unformed?

For the remainder of Block 4, from 1-3pm on Mondays and Wednesdays, you are invited to informal drop-in conversation hours in the CCT office. We’re on the second floor of Tutt Library across from the Colket Center and we’ll have coffee, tea, snacks, and fizzy water. Come talk about anything on your mind—big or small, general or specific—with Interim Director Ryan Bañagale and whomever else might happen to drop by as well.

Crown Conversations
The CCT invites and cultivates active conversation among all members of our community—faculty, staff, and students—as we continue to contemplate longstanding and emergent topics central to pedagogical experiences across our campus. Block 4 features two lunch-time sessions (food provided) on artificial intelligence that affect our collective work as educators. In addition to these sessions, you can visit the CCT page on Artificial Intelligence at CC for additional resources:
“An Intro to Generative AI”: Thursday, 12/7 – 12:15pm – South Hall Common

Professors Blake Jackson and Ben Nye (Computer Science) provide a primer on the history of AI, some common misconceptions, how Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT work, and what such tools can be good for.

“The Ethics of ChatGPT”: Thursday, 12/14 – 12:15pm – South Hall Commons

Professors Helen Daly (Philosophy), Cory Scott (Computer Science), Leland Tabares (Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Studies) and student Elliot Triplett (Computer Science/Feminist and Gender Studies) consider the inherent bias of tools such as ChatGPT and what our engagement with them means for our individual and collective values.

If you would like to lead a future discussion and/or suggest a topic for conversation, please email Interim Director, Ryan Bañagale.

Syllabi Statement Resources
As faculty and academic staff prepare their syllabi for spring semester, please remember to include all the statements appropriate for your particular course. A variety of examples can be found on the Dean of Faculty’s Course Policies and Syllabi Statements document and statements particular to artificial intelligence have been provided by the CC Honor Council. If you have questions or want to think about ways to hone particular statements for the needs of your classroom, please schedule an appointment with the Interim Director or drop by during the CCTs open office hours. 

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Today at CC Digest for Students

A Daily Digest for Colorado College

Today at CC Digest

A Daily Digest for Colorado College

Today at CC Digest for Students

A Daily Digest for Colorado College

Today at CC Digest

A Daily Digest for Colorado College

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