Two faculty members, one academic professional and two students were honored with this year’s Campus Award for Excellence in Public Engagement. Now in its eighth year, the awards program was developed to recognize people who have applied their knowledge and expertise to issues of public concern in order to improve the well-being of Illinois residents. Recipients were honored Feb. 4.
Paul Adams, the coordinator of research programs in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, “has proven himself to be, through his personal enthusiasm and his professional dedication, a true ambassador for the University of Illinois’ mission of research, teaching and public service or engagement,” wrote nominators Laura Lawson, the director of the East St. Louis Action Research Project, and Vicki Eddings, the administrative coordinator of the program.
Adams has a reputation among his colleagues at Illinois for his “community first” attitude.
Since 1999, Adams has been the director of Prairienet, a community network on the World Wide Web operated by GSLIS and providing computers and Internet access to low-income users and the local public.
Since 2000, Adams has been a crucial link between the College of Fine and Applied Arts’ nationally recognized community assistance and development project, the East St. Louis Action Research Project, and the outreach offerings of GSLIS. Since 2003, he has forged a partnership with ESLARP to provide technical services to the residents of East St. Louis. This effort has enlisted hundreds of Illinois students to assist with service learning and technical assistance projects in East St. Louis. He is in charge of the Digital ESL Collaborative, a program through which university students set up multiple computer labs, located at schools, service agencies, community centers, and housing projects. He also helped establish the Teen Tech program that trains East St. Louis young people in computer construction and repair.
Adams has utilized his experiences locally and in East St. Louis to initiate community-based work in Sao Tome and Principe, a small island nation off the coast of Africa. Using ESLARP as a model, the resulting project provides community-based learning and action research opportunities for students and faculty members at the university while delivering critical technical assistance to governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations in Sao Tome.
As an example, UI library students work with the national library and national archives in Sao Tome to provide expertise in digital cataloging, community informatics and computer training. Urban and regional planning students assist in preparation of a comprehensive plan and development of land-use policy. Architecture students have developed design scenarios for a new airport and offer assistance in the redesign and upgrading of many of the colonial-period buildings. Landscape architecture faculty members and students are in the beginning stages of a participatory design process to redesign the downtown plaza space, with attention to conveying the local history as well as encouraging tourism.
A truly innovative facet of his approach has included making connections between Sao Tome and East St. Louis. This past summer he brought a group of East St. Louis residents (three youth and two adults), along with a group of Illinois students, to Sao Tome. The youth were part of the East St. Louis Teen Tech Team, which works with GSLIS faculty members and students to teach youth how to repair and build computers. The goal was to have these youth work with their counterparts in Sao Tome to build computer labs in schools, libraries and community centers. The youth also brought camera equipment to film their experience and produce a documentary, which will be completed this fall. Much of the practical experience these students share has a real and lasting effect on the country of Sao Tome.
Minosca Alcantara, assistant director of the Women in Engineering program, who began working for the College of Engineering in 2004, had earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering and construction management, respectively, and had substantial experience in project management. “Since then, Minosa has developed into an indispensable member of our outreach and diversity program staff,” said nominator Charles L. Tucker III, associate dean for undergraduate programs in the college. “She has designed, implemented and expanded programs that engage K-12 students with science, technology, engineering and mathematics, particularly students from underrepresented groups.”
Alcantara’s focus is on middle school and elementary school students, and her achievements include the GAMES summer camp for middle school girls, the First Lego League regional competition, and the Envirotech program for elementary school students. The GAMES camp – Girls’ Adventures in Math, Engineering and Science – is Alcantara’s signature achievement, Tucker wrote. She has directed the camp since January 2005. GAMES is an annual, one-week residential camp that introduces young women to engineering. In 2004, prior to her leadership, GAMES had two themes (structures and computer science) and attracted about 80 girls each year. Starting in 2005, Alcantara increased the number of GAMES participants to more than 200 a year and greatly increased the percentage of minority participants.
On the curricular side, Alcantara has created two camps: Bio/Chemical Engineering debuted in 2007, and BioImaging began in 2008. She plans yet another camp, Aerospace, for 2009. Students from throughout Illinois are drawn to GAMES, and many students return to the camp for several years in a row.
Alcantara has also made significant contributions to the community in her work with the First Lego League regional competition. FLL is part of an international contest in which teams of elementary and middle school students build robots for an obstacle-course competition. FLL students also learn and report on a theme, such as energy resources or climate change. The competition is a wonderful connection between the university and the community – one that is again strengthened by the undergraduate engineers who act as coaches for the teams, Tucker wrote.
One of Alcantara‘s most innovative public engagement programs is Envirotech, a collaboration with an engineering faculty member, professor Timothy Strathman, and the Booker T. Washington School. The BTW School is situated in Champaign’s low-income northeast neighborhood. It enrolls 251 students in grades K-5, with a student population of 90 percent minority (43 percent African American, 42 percent Hispanics and 5 percent Asian/Pacific Islander). Alcantara worked with Strathman to create a program that would assist these students in developing the reading skills crucial to their future academic success. Further, the program capitalizes on the youngsters’ innate interests in science to promote reading development.
Scott W. Schwartz, professor of music and head of the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, “has taken a minor component of the University Archives and turned it into one of the best known, most widely respected, successful, and sustained public programs of the University of Illinois,” University Archivist William Maher wrote in a letter of support for Schwartz’s selection. John Philip Sousa, who died in 1932, willed nearly three-fourths of his personal papers, manuscripts, and even his baton and gloves to the university. The material languished for many decades until being assigned to the responsibility of the University Archives in 1994, when finally the material came under professional curatorship.
With the hiring of Schwartz in 2003, the hope was to expand the program beyond Sousa and to extend it beyond mere curation to active engagement. “To say that professor Schwartz has exceeded expectations would be to put it mildly,” Maher said.
In his first year, Schwartz not only created the concept of an annual American Music Month every November, but he also managed to have the governor of Illinois and the U.S. Senate declare November 2004 as American Music Month. In the first year’s program, he took instruments that had for decades been merely musical artifacts, such as over-the-shoulder horns, and convinced School of Music faculty members to learn to play them for a Smith Hall audience of more than 100. The resulting performances were a great hit; his monthlong programs that first year also reached out to the public schools, through master classes and performances.
Since then, Schwartz has continued to plan and implement annual American Music Month events, which have become some of the most popular events on campus. These have included bringing the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra to Illinois not only to perform, but also to work with area school students.
Because of his sustained collaborative efforts, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History agreed to the 2006 loan of its priceless Axelrod quartet of Stradivarius instruments to the Krannert Art Museum for a display (drawing more than 19,000 visitors) in conjunction with two performances by the quartet that uses those instruments, the Smithsonian Chamber Players. The museum’s Second Sunday concert by the quartet, which drew more than 1,125 people, was so in demand that people had to be turned away at the door.
Between November 2004 and August 2008, he provided more than 400 instructional sessions to more than 5,400 students from public schools and other universities as well as members of the public.
Schwartz also has embarked on lectures at several professional conferences as well as community and public forums on the importance of public engagement and how to do that successfully. Most important, he has pursued all of these activities through developing collaborations with the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution and U.S. Marine Band Library and Museum as well as new community-based partnerships with the Champaign Park District, Urbana Park District, Champaign Community Center for the Arts and the UI Alumni Association.
Kimberly Pimblott, a doctoral candidate in history, will never be satisfied simply to excel as a teacher and a scholar, wrote nominator Mark Leff, a professor of history. “She’s deeply committed to taking the insights and approaches she’s refined as a historian to foster and to further local initiatives and local pressures for change.”
Pimblott is an “outstanding historian across the board, distinguished by her penetrating curiosity, energizing presence, analytic sophistication, and facility at argumentation,” Leff wrote. “But what’s of greater relevance, I realize, is how she’s framed her educational trajectory around a service-learning model. This includes her research with the Champaign-Urbana Citizens for Peace and Justice on racial bias in our criminal justice system, showcased in radio appearances, her article in Public-I on ‘The Struggle for Racial Equity in the Champaign Country Criminal Justice System,’ and her involvement in a related forthcoming documentary film. It also includes her leadership in a grassroots activist effort to study toxic waste contamination in a Champaign African-American neighborhood.”
Her service-learning approach to integrating history education with research in the local community is leading to some rethinking of the course offerings of the UI history department.
“The historical profession needs more scholars like Pimblott, whose appreciation of the stakes of historical study in understanding and seeking historical change impels her to engage with the community around her, and to make history itself more accessible and relevant.”
Martha Webber, a doctoral candidate in English, moved to Champaign-Urbana from Los Angeles with degrees in fashion design and English and an interest in sewn handicrafts, including considering their connections to economic development and literacy education. She earned her master’s in English and involved herself in curriculum development for the department of rhetoric and collaboration between the Center for Writing Studies and the School of Art and Design, which culminated in the development of Writing With Video, an advanced composition course exploring video production and writing as rhetorical media, said one of her nominators, Kimberly Kwee, an adjunct faculty member in the School of Art and Design.
Two years ago, Webber shared her enthusiasm and background in design to teach a Communiversity course for children, “Puppet Making and Play Production” at the University YMCA. At the same time she contacted and began researching an organization in South Africa, Create Africa South, which facilitates the production of embroidered cloths that preserve the personal histories of primarily illiterate and marginalized South African women.
The following spring, she began to volunteer at 10,000 Villages, a volunteer-run retail store in Champaign that gives artisans in developing areas a market to sell handicrafts for a living wage. Through this volunteer work and her research, Webber became interested in artisan groups and nongovernmental organizations that foster handicraft production and sales with the larger goal of funding literacy education and other community development projects.
Throughout 2007 her research collaboration with Create Africa South flourished and, with assistance as a Jacob K. Javits Fellow, she traveled to Durban, South Africa, in January 2008 to volunteer and research the organization over the course of three months.