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Service-Learning Faculty Fellows

The Pearce Center Service-Learning Fellows Program is a year-long faculty development program that provides an opportunity for selected faculty members to learn best practices in service-learning and community engagement and to integrate service-learning into their teaching, research, and public service work. 

The program includes a $2,500 fellowship award. 

The Service-Learning Fellows Program is open to all Clemson Ph.D. students and faculty members with an interest in service-learning in any rank. Previous experience in service-learning pedagogy or familiarity with service-learning or civic engagement research is not required.

The Pearce Center Service-Learning Fellows program is committed to supporting participants in the following endeavors:

  • Developing and implementing a new service-learning course or project (see below);
  • Transforming an existing service-learning course or project;
  • Becoming part of a core group of faculty leaders engaged in service-learning pedagogy;
  • Increasing familiarity and exposure to service-learning theory and current research;
  • Applying best practices of service-learning research and pedagogy;
  • Considering ways to integrate service-learning throughout the curriculum or programs of study;
  • Connecting to public service and outreach initiatives and existing community-University
  • partnerships; and
  • Considering the development of interdisciplinary service-learning projects through conversation and collaboration with faculty from other disciplines.

 

WHAT IS SERVICE-LEARNING?

Service-Learning at Clemson University is experiential education in which community service experiences complement academic course material. It allows both instructors and students to apply their acquired knowledge and skills in a public setting by performing tasks with or for a community or a specific public organization. These tasks include but are not limited to identifying and analyzing real community needs and developing and implementing solutions to meet those needs. The process is accompanied by reflection activities over the course of the class or project.

 

PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS

Commitment to full participation in the program activities is essential and is required for consideration as a Pearce Center Service-Learning Fellow. 

Applicants must commit to the following activities in order to be considered for selection:

  • Participation in mandatory six Zoom Fellows meetings.
  • Fellows are required to develop a service-learning project throughout the Fall semester and implement this project or course in the Spring.
  • Fellows are asked to share their materials with the current and future Faculty Fellows.

 

PROJECT GUIDELINES

The Service-Learning Fellows program is a faculty development program, not a grant or project funding source. Each Fellow develops and/or implements a service-learning project during the year. Generally, projects are implemented during the Fellowship year but in some instances may extend past the Fellowship year. 

 

APPLICATION SUBMISSION

Applications for the 2023-2024 academic year are now closed. 

2023-2024 Service-Learning Faculty Fellows

Katalin Beck

Katalin Beck is a senior lecturer at the Department of English and a faculty member in the Pearce Center’s WAC Faculty program. Her pedagogy in technical and business writing instruction focuses on experiential learning, problem-solving approaches and knowledge-transfer skills applied to real-life challenges. She oversaw more than twenty client-based projects, involving various Clemson University units (e.g., Medical Physics Lab, Makerspace, Sustainability Commission), Upstate community organizations (e.g., Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, SC STEAM Collaborative) and an international client (Hannover Messe in Germany through a virtual collaboration with the University of Braunschweig). Her commitment to service-learning stems from her twelve-year-long employment with Clemson’s Public Service Activities department, her belief in the mission of our land-grant University and her dedication to enacting social change via higher education. 

Angela Naimou

Angela Naimou is associate professor of English at Clemson University and lead editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development. Her book, “Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood,” won the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present book prize and received honorable mention for the William Sanders Scarborough Award by the Modern Language Association. She is editor of the critical volume Diaspora and Literary Studies (Cambridge 2023) and is at work on two book projects: a second monograph about postcolonial literature and international border regimes and a short co-authored book project on human rights. She leads the Every Campus a Refuge at Clemson project to bolster local refugee resettlement support while deepening students’ place-based experiential learning. 

Arelis Moore

Arelis Moore (M.D., M.Ed., M.P.H., Dominican Republic; Ph.D., Clemson University) is a medical epidemiologist and social scientist with experience in health disparities and health equity research. She is an associate professor of community health at Clemson University. Her primary interest is understanding the role of the social determinants in the disparities and inequities experienced by underrepresented populations and communities of color and developing innovative and culturally relevant community development initiatives to promote health and well-being.

John Falter

John Falter is a doctoral student in the Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design program at Clemson University. Over the last 12 years, he has worked in a variety of educational settings, most notably University of North Carolina Asheville where he served as an adjunct instructor teaching first-year writing and humanities. His academic foci include democratic culture, rhetoric of place, persuasion psychology and multimodal composition. When he is not embroiled in grading papers or reading, Falter loves playing video games and traveling around the Upstate.

Robynn Butler

Robynn Butler works at Currey Ingram Academy, located in Brentwood, Tennessee, as the Director of Marketing and Communications. She was born in Denver, Colorado, and attended the University of Colorado for her undergraduate degree, attended the Savannah College of Art and Design and the University of Rhode Island for her masters degrees and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design at Clemson University. Her research is in artificial intelligence information gaps in education.

Will Cunningham smiles at the camera and poses in front of a beige background.Will Cunningham

Will Cunningham is a senior lecturer in the English department and is a huge fan of service-learning! He has worked on many public and applied humanities projects in his career, ranging from open-access digital humanities initiatives to nonprofit fundraising to in-prison resume and career development workshops. At Clemson, he has taught a number of client-based projects through the Pearce Center, including the creation of storyboards for the Clemson Area African American Museum and several corporate grant applications for a Greenville-based nonprofit called Jasmine Road.

Black and white photograph of David Williams smiling at the camera.David Williams

David Williams is a third-year Ph.D. student in Clemson University’s Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design program. He also works as a co-leader for the Visual Information Design program at Clemson’s Pearce Center for Professional Communication. His primary research focus is 21st-century Holocaust representation.

Emily Yates

Emily Yates is a lecturer of English at Clemson University. Her research looks at the intersections of performance, early modern drama and adaptation studies. She previously taught courses in English, theater, writing and general humanities at Michigan State University where she earned her doctorate in English.

Seth McKelvey

Seth McKelvey is a lecturer in English at Clemson University, where he teaches creative writing, composition and business writing, as well as literature. He previously taught at Auburn University, and he received his Ph.D. in English from Southern Methodist University.

Melissa Dugan

Melissa Dugan is a senior lecturer in the Department of English who is in her ninth year of employment at Clemson University. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of South Carolina and has been working as an educator for over twenty years.

Clare Mullaney

Clare Mullaney is an assistant professor of English at Clemson. Her teaching and research focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, book history and disability studies. As a Service-Learning Faculty Fellow, she hopes to incorporate community-centered projects into her new Literature and Disability course.

Magdaléna Matušková

Magdaléna Matušková is an assistant professor at the Department of Languages. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures from University of California, Los Angeles and a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the Charles University in Prague. She teaches Spanish in the Language and International Business program.

Looking for the Pearce Research Faculty Fellows? Click the link below for more information. 

Research Faculty Fellows