VCC:
First-Year: The First
College Year as Pivot
Deepening Students' Academic and Civic Engagement:
The First College Year as Pivot
Facilitated by Edward Zlotkowski, national consultant,
professor of English at Bentley College and senior associate
at the New England Resource Center for Higher Education.
Workshop held October 23, 2009 from 10 a.m. - 3 p.m
at Southern Vermont College, Bennington, VT
 For
almost three decades, campuses have focused on first-year
experience programs as a way to improve the retention and
success of new college students. While excellent courses
and programs exist, including first year seminars, learning
communities and extensive orientations, many agree that
these programs could be strengthened by working in more
institutionally cohesive ways to assure the success of all
students.
Deeping Students' Academic and Civic Engagement: The
First College Year as Pivot will help faculty, administrators
and staff think through the needs and interests of first-year
students while exploring how academic and civic engagement
strategies contribute to student success.
Facilitated by Edward Zlotkowski, senior associate at the
New England Resource Center for Higher Education and author
of Service-Learning and the First-Year Experience, this
one-day workshop will engage campus teams in exploring such
questions as:
- Which academic strategies work best in the classroom
to engage first-year students?
- How can civic engagement contribute to a first-year
student's success?
- Who should be at the table to discuss comprehensive
first-year engagement reform?
- What are the key institutional priorities in promoting
greater academic and civic engagement in the first year?
- What role can students themselves play in advancing
first-year reform?
Workshop attendees will leave with an action plan and ideas
from other campuses on reforming the first year of college.
Attendance by campus teams comprised of faculty, students,
academic affairs and student affairs professionals and other
campus representatives involved in first year and student
success programs is strongly encouraged.
Edward Zlotkowski is a professor of English at Bentley
College and in 1990 founded the Bentley Service-Learning
Center. He received his B.A. in English and his Ph.D. in
Comparative Literature from Yale University. He writes and
speaks extensively on a wide range of service-learning and
engagement-related topics, and served as general editor
of the American Association for Higher Education's 21-volume
series on service-learning in the academic disciplines.
He also served as editor of Successful Service-Learning
Programs, published by Anker in 1998, Service-Learning and
the First-Year Experience, published by the University of
South Carolina in 2002, and as co-editor of Students as
Colleagues: Expanding the Circle of Service-Learning Leadership,
published by Campus Compact in 2006. A collection of his
essays will be published in 2010 by Temple University Press.
Dr. Zlotkowski is a senior associate at the New England
Resource Center for Higher Education.
Dr. Zlotkowski has led service-learning workshops for
international, national, and regional organizations as well
as several hundred individual campuses. His non-service
learning scholarly interests have included contemporary
American poetry, and German and English romanticism. He
regularly uses service-learning in his own teaching.
Please contact Cheryl Whitney Lower at (802) 443-2507
or clower@middlebury.edu
with any questions.
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