It's Been A Long Time

I started teaching summer session classes on the first of June, and I haven't written a posting for this blog in over three months.  It was an unintentional but perhaps inevitable hiatus. 

So now I am back, and I have been thinking about the blog for awhile: how best to use it, what I want to include here.  I have two themes that I'd like to explore in the months to come.

One is exploring the day-to-day civic engagement that my colleagues, students, and I experience.  Too often, civic engagement is described in high-falutin and formal ways: voting, participating in a political meeting, running for office, writing one's congressman or -woman.  All of these are important expressions of one's civic engagement, but I think this view unnecessarily limits our understanding.  So I am going to try and do something about that.  If you find yourself interested, I'll be tagging those posts with "day-to-day civic engagement."

Another theme I want to explore has to do with a new post that I have at Minneapolis Community and Technical College.  I am the Social Responsibility Assessment Coordinator for the 2010-11 academic year.  The college is in the 2nd year of a three-year assessment effort of one of its core competencies: Social Responsibility (the others are Communication, Critical Thinking, and Personal Responsibility/Life Skills).  There is some really amazing work happening on the campus with inspired faculty members designing and implementing Social Responsibility components in their courses and assessing the results.  I am going to share some of them with you in the coming months.  If you find yourself interested in these posting, I'll be tagging those posts with "MCTC Social Responsibility."

And away we go!