What would it look like for UMass Boston to integrate community and industry leaders seamlessly into the classroom as educators, and develop community-university learning partnerships that deliver multiple benefits for students, faculty, practitioners, and the community?
The Office of Community Partnerships (OCP) is producing a synergy between theory and practice through its Practitioner Scholars Program (PSP) pilot. The pilot recently kicked off a second year with a new cohort of four faculty-practitioner co-teaching pairs, thanks to a grant from The Boston Foundation and a private donation.
The program is a unique model matching up UMass Boston faculty with community practitioners to co-teach a course in the spring, providing students with real life applications of their educational experiences. Students produce projects that contribute positively to the community through experiential learning, engagement, and social action.
Through a nine-month collaborative co-planning and co-teaching process that is rooted in equity and social justice, PSP transforms “learning as usual” by disrupting how knowledge is shared and obtained.
“When I think about what will happen for UMass Boston students, my hope is that they will have a high-quality experiential learning process that takes a lot of theory and gives them the space to apply it and practice it and/or be able to see how that theory does or doesn’t play out in different settings,” said co-teacher Carolyn Navikonis, director of programs and community engagement at 826 Boston.
The new cohort launched with a two-day PSP Institute held on September 21 and October 5. The institute prepares co-teaching teams with the tools and resources to successfully plan a spring 2020 course that both infuses practitioner knowledge and allows students to develop projects with community benefit.
“Building the course, learning from your peers, understanding the culture of the school and their larger goals, makes the transition from community to classroom easier and makes it more beneficial to the students in the end,” said co-teacher Monica Cohen, owner and founder of The Boom House Productions. “It is a huge task, co-teaching, but we aren’t just being launched into this task, we are being nurtured in the process of doing so.”
Associate Professor of Anthropology Rosalyn Negrón, who is co-teaching a course with Cohen, added, “I think that I discovered that we work really well together, we support each other’s ideas, and that makes it easier to grow. …This really helps us discover the strengths that each of us brings. I want to learn from her and make sure we give space for that and vice versa.”
This year’s co-teaching pairs are:
ANTH 477: The Latino Leadership Opportunity Program
Associate Professor of Anthropology Rosalyn Negrón, and Monica Cohen, owner and founder of The Boom House Productions
WGS 270: Indigenous Women: Leadership and Self-Determination in North America
Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Amy E. Den Ouden, and Melissa (Harding) Ferretti, chairwomen/president of Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe
ENGL448: Perspectives on Literacy
Associate Professor of English Matthew Davis, and Carolyn Navikonis, director of programs and community engagement at 826 Boston
AF 495: Financial Policy
Senior Lecturer of Finance Kristen Callahan, and Charles Smith, senior vice president and SBA program manager at Eastern Bank
The PSP Institute also created a safe space for the new co-teaching pairs to explore and address unconscious bias in teaching and learning partnerships. Co-teachers said it was an opportunity to reset a power dynamic built on reciprocity and equity between faculty and community-practitioners.
“The PSP Institute gave us some frameworks in which to think about not only the design of the project, the course materials, and the logistics but also the ethics behind the partnership, the interpersonal, intercultural, and inter-institutional ways we want to work together,” said Matthew Davis, an associate professor of English. “Like, reflective reciprocity, so that we are thinking in every way…what we are getting out of the work we are putting in, what our students are getting out of it, what our community partners are getting out of it, but also what we are putting in.”
The co-teachers will use the rest of the fall 2019 semester for planning and will reconvene as a cohort in November as part of an ongoing network of practice for the co-teaching pairs.
For more information about this series and related collaborations, please contact UMass Boston’s Office of Community Partnerships at 617.287.4223 or ocp@umb.edu.