Faculty Toolbox Teaching: You are warmly invited to bring your disciplinary expertise to the Year of the City, and the Year of the City to your courses. The Year of the City is dedicated to the Jesuit educational ideal of academic excellence. As such, the Year of the City does not ask us to do more work or new work, but makes even more vital the work we already do in our teaching, research, and service. In some cases, the courses we teach have an immediate connection to the City or to questions or issues that shape the City. Even when that connection is not immediately apparent, we might consider the ways every discipline has implications for human life, human society, and the environment. Courses taught in this light allow us to teach our discipline and to make it even more meaningful to students’ lives, to honor connections between our work and our world. Following are ways we might bring the Year of the City to our courses and our courses to the Year of the City. Please submit additional related resources so that all of our faculty colleagues may benefit from them! Please send materials to June Ellis. - Consider making explicit the goals or values that are implicit in our courses. Such a feature might have specific content related to the Year of the City or a specific philosophy derived from Ignatian pedagogy.
- Consider adding a course goal, assignment, reading, or reflection that is related to the Year of the City or Ignatian pedagogy.
- Consider creating a course that considers the city from the perspective of your discipline.
- Consider making the hallmarks of Jesuit education—which animate the Year of the City—an integral feature of all of our courses. Examples of related techniques include active learning, dialogue and discussion, oral presentations, service-learning, and commitment to a diversity of perspectives. Ignatian teaching is of course not reducible to technique: it honors the proposition that education makes us more fully human, that the basic human drive to ask why, to seek and to share knowledge, makes us fully alive and leads us to deeper community and to the sacred.
Following are syllabi and other documents that attempt to put into practice one or more of the above suggestions. We are soliciting additional examples: please send related syllabi, assignments, and reflection materials to June Ellis Syllabi: Literature of the City
Creative Eye
Beyond Evergreen: Writing Our Way into the City
Intro to Theology: Theology of the City
Modern Latin American Cities and Migration
Assignments: Mystory Baltimore
Other: Reflection: Teaching Philosophy and the Year of the City
You might also find inspiration from the charter of the Evergreen Associates, an on-campus, student-run, non-profit public relations organization that does pro-bono work for Baltimore non-profits. Research: If your research relates to the City, you are warmly invited to apply for two grant opportunities. The Kolvenbach Fellows program provides a course release for faculty pursuing research related to Jesuit values, such as social justice. The Kolvenbach Awards program provides summer grant funding to faculty who wish to connect their research with “gritty reality.” Further information is available at the Office of Grant Services or call 410-617-2004 Service: All committees, clubs, and groups are warmly invited to propose and implement an event or initiative for the Year of the City. Please visit the Proposals page for further details. If you are interested in forming or strengthening a community service connection to the City, the Center for Community Service and Justice offers a wealth of resources that may be of interest. Center staff are experts at identifying service opportunities that match your personal and professional commitments. More information is available on the Center website or call 410-617-2380.
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