Community Engaged Faculty Fellows

The Community Engaged Faculty Fellows program is a year-long opportunity that supports faculty to deepen their community engaged scholarship, build the capacity of our local community in the Charlotte region, and provide input into faculty resources for community-engaged and experiential learning.

Community engaged scholarship can focus on a range of issues (e.g., food justice, poverty, educational equity, literacy, public health, housing) and take a range of forms (e.g., community-based research, action research, policy work, consulting and capacity building projects incorporated into courses).  Regardless of the issue or specific enactment, the faculty fellow(s) focus on a community-defined need understood through conversation and dialogue with the community.  The goal of the program is not to develop more campus-based programs, but to engage within existing structures and networks on and off campus. The Center for Civic Engagement team helps identify and make connections with community leaders and organizations that focus on a particular area of interest.

The faculty fellow(s) receive a $15,000 grant and are expected to: 

  • Incorporate community-based learning components into at least 1 course during the 23-24 academic year. 
  • Work on a community-engaged scholarship project of interest that is aligned with a community-defined need and CCE partnerships. 
  • Offer one workshop, talk, or discussion during the academic year related to the community-engaged project or community-engaged pedagogy.  The CCE team will help coordinate all event logistics.
  • Provide input into the development of community-engaged and experiential learning resources for faculty. 
  • Engage with other faculty in one on-campus professional development opportunity related to community engaged learning each semester.  The CCE team will coordinate all event logistics.   

     

2023-24 Community Engaged Faculty Fellows

Sally Lawrence Bullock, PhD, MPH

Assistant Professor, Department of Public Health

Dr. Bullock’s current community-engaged learning interests include working with community leaders and organizations focused on access to healthy food, nutrition assistance programs, and public health issues more broadly.  Through the fellowship role, she hopes to enable students to work with local health-related community organizations on collaborative research projects, program development opportunities, or policy evaluations. These external partnerships will allow students to collaborate with organizations and individuals with diverse backgrounds doing important work to address health disparities. She is excited about expanding her community-engaged research in the areas around Davidson College and contributing to experiential learning opportunities for our students.  She will incorporate community-engaged learning elements into her Food and Nutrition Policy seminar in the spring of 2024 (PBH 373).

Brittany Murray, Ph.D.

Malcolm O. Partin Assistant Professor of Educational Studies & Political Science

Dr. Murray seeks to transform how researchers, practitioners, and communities use data to gain new insights into the social context of schools and neighborhoods. Prior to joining the faculty at Davidson, Dr. Murray worked at the Urban Institute where her experiences in participatory research and survey administration culminated in a strategy to engage stakeholders in a data validation process known as “Data Walks.” These walks were designed to support researchers’ ability to interpret survey results while also encouraging collective action among residents, service providers, and policymakers to identify and pose solutions to their most pervasive place-based challenges. Through the fellowship role, Dr. Murray hopes to establish partnerships with parents, educators, and local community-based organizations to create more inclusive access to data and decision-making processes within schools and districts. Her current community-engaged interests focus on partnering with caregiver communities to build racial equity toolkits for schools and parent-teacher organizations. Additionally, she is partnering with the Center for Racial Equity in Education (CREED) to build a data dashboard that allows community members to interact with North Carolina’s school district indicators to better understand issues such as local school board representation and school funding inequality.  She will also incorporate community-engaged learning elements into her POL 432 Racial Justice in Education and EDU 280 Intro to Education policy courses.

Jessica Worl, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies and Core faculty in Gender and Sexuality Studies

Dr. Worl’s current focus is on developing linkages between academics, practitioners, and community members who are engaged in struggles of environmental injustice in North Carolina. North Carolina is often described as the birthplace of the modern environmental justice movement and given the large focus on environmental justice within the environmental studies department, the development of a community-centered and community-engaged set of coursework and research opportunities for students is necessary for the training of the next generation of interdisciplinary environmental leaders. Through this fellowship role, she hopes to develop productive and mutually beneficial collaborations between frontline communities, environmental justice organizations, students, and academics to work together to advocate for change, either through program or policy interventions, organizing and advocacy work, or public education campaigns. She is excited to bring her experiences developing community-engaged research in Kenya with informal gold miners who use mercury to process gold to bear on developing networks of change in North Carolina. She will incorporate community-engaged learning elements and opportunities into her Environmental Social Science (ENV 202, Fall 2023 and Spring 2024) and Political Ecology (ENV 242, Fall 2023) courses this academic year.