Community-Engaged Learning and Research Symposium

Monday, April 25, 2016

It is my pleasure to welcome you today to Lehigh’s inaugural Community-Engaged Learning and Research Symposium.

The purpose of this event is twofold: 1) to bring together a set of stakeholders – faculty, staff, students, and community partners – to celebrate our work together, and 2) to showcase exemplars of what meaningful, reciprocal community partnerships can be. We hope today serves as a catalyst to spark your own ideas of how to further engage through teaching, research, academic study, or individual citizenship.

Community engagement is woven into the fabric of who we are as an institution. From the earliest days of Lehigh, our purpose was to train young people to engage with the most pressing issues of the time. While much has changed about our world and our institution, one thing remains the same: our commitment to using the research and learning that takes place at Lehigh to effect positive change in the world.

From the Community Service Office to the Community Fellows Program to the Baker Institute and beyond, Lehigh has as its central mission a commitment to community engagement. The creation of the Center for Community Engagement in August 2015 was a strategic decision to advance our commitment to this area, our latest effort to strengthen our partnerships around pressing issues that face us as a community and as a society, and develop the capacity to do high-quality, meaningful work. The Center serves as a central connector for faculty, staff, students, and community partners who want to weave community engagement into their teaching, research, and/or academic service.

We have seen some outstanding student-led community engagement projects on campus this year. Our Global Citizenship Program brought people together to discuss issues of civics and inclusion – from the Without Walls Project to the Party Responsibly dialogues – and to address issues of sustainability and community development through the LV Shares and “Brown and Whiteboard” groups. Our Community Fellows Program graduated another outstanding cohort of students who serve as critical support for our local non-profits while pursuing graduate degrees in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Our Health, Medicine, and Society Program and Community Health Cluster sustain essential partnerships with hospitals and health centers to promote the health and wellness of both our South Side neighbors and communities around the globe. Zoellner Arts Center continues to engage students from local elementary and middle schools in artistic and theatrical programming that broadens their horizons, familiarizes them with our campus, and – of course – provides a lot of fun.

This summer, we will have our first pilot projects at Mountaintop as part of the CivLab program: an intentional research collaborative that connects interdisciplinary teams of undergraduate, graduate, and medical students around issues of civics, data, health, and art with the intention of producing sustainable collaborations that extend beyond the summer.

Through our work together, we can help make the world a more just, equitable, and sustainable place. The impact of Lehigh research collaboration is clear, and the road ahead is filled with possibilities. Today is about celebrating what we have accomplished, while also looking to the future and asking “What’s next?”

I want to thank our keynote speaker, Lin Erickson, for joining us today to highlight the long history of the Da Vinci Science Center as a partner in community-engaged learning and research. Our students, faculty, and staff have worked on dozens of projects with Da Vinci over the years – which Lin will delve into in more detail – and the hope is that hearing about them may spark some new ideas.

With that, thanks for inviting me to launch this symposium.