Each year, with support from the Division of Faculty Affairs, the UVM Community-Engaged Learning Office (CELO) presents the Community-Engaged Learning Awards. Community-engaged learning is central to UVM’s fulfillment of the land-grant mission, and these awards recognize excellence in community-engaged learning, honoring community collaborators, faculty instructors, and student leaders.
On April 13th, 2023, CELO held its annual awards ceremony to honor some of the people exemplifying this high-impact practice. Congratulations goes to Community Development and Applied Economics (CDAE) Lecturer Ben Dangl, who received the 2023 Outstanding New Community-Engaged Learning Faculty Award. This award is presented to outstanding faculty who have taught designated service learning and/or civic learning courses for three to five years. The pedagogy is a hallmark of CDAE; by the time they graduate, over 55 percent of UVM College of Agriculture and Life Sciences seniors have taken a community-engaged learning course (compared to roughly 45 percent of UVM seniors as a whole).
Dangl teaches both CDAE 120: Strategic Writing for Public Communications and CDAE 224: Public Communications Capstone. He has used this community-engaged pedagogy in no fewer than 12 semesters since his arrival to UVM in 2020. Dangl has also been part of the Faculty Fellow for Community-Engaged Learning Program since 2021.
Students in Dangl’s courses work with community partners around Burlington, VT (and beyond), in particular providing professional outreach and communications capacity to small, mission-driven organizations that often lack communications resources. While building their own professional communications portfolios, the students are helping their organizations do their critical community-based work more effectively.
Given his commitment to building reciprocal and long-standing relationships with his community partners, its fitting that it was a partner who nominated Dangl this year. The collaboration between CDAE 120 and the UVM Office of Student & Community relations (OSCR) is one of the longest-standing service learning partnerships at UVM, having been nearly continuous since 2013.
Public communications students interview OSCR stakeholders and utilize these interviews to create profiles, videos, audio productions and other media that OSCR can use in a variety of outreach contexts. Nominators John Mejia and Ash Hoyt noted all of Dangl’s behind the scenes work, scaffolding important concepts around confidentiality, ethics in interviewing, editing, note taking, and about audience and voice. Mejia and Hoyt report that students surprise themselves with their capability, and interviewees come away energized, appreciative of the opportunity to reflect on their work.
CELO is pleased to be able to recognize Dangl for his outstanding commitment to both his students and to the communities connected to UVM. Thanks and congratulations to Dangl, and to the CDAE department, for all their wonderful work.
These dedicated individuals contribute to transformative learning experiences for UVM students that simultaneously address community priorities and goals, as students prepare for their lives after graduation by deploying their academic skills within community partnerships.
Roughly 50 faculty members and up to 200 community partners create approximately 100 community-engaged courses annually. In 2022, 45 percent of graduating seniors had completed a designated service learning (SL) and/or civic learning (CL) course.