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Dr. Rosa Eberly Delivers “Sparks Seminar” to Students and Parents

Students Teaching Students

In coordination with an undergraduate-run organization called Students Teaching Students, CAS department faculty members mentor exemplary students who develop and teach 1-credit courses on a variety of subjects that advance expertise in communication and its role in public life. This semester, Associate Teaching Professor Lori Bedell is supporting undergraduates Kara Miller (who was in Lori’s RCL course a few years back) and Jess Strait as they teach a course titled “Period Talk: The Impact of Stigma on the Menstrual Equity Movement.”
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Dr. Rosa Eberly Delivers “Sparks Seminar” to Students and Parents

Ready to ‘spark’ your interest in the liberal arts? Join our Sparks Seminars on select dates this academic year! Our renowned faculty will give prospective and accepted students a taste of their most popular classes. Students will get first-hand experience of what it is like to be a Penn State student. Not only is this a neat way to discover some of what we offer our students, but it also is a great opportunity to connect with our faculty and other prospective and accepted students with common interests.

CAS Associate Professor Dr. Rosa Eberly delivered an invited College of the Liberal Arts “Sparks Seminar” to more than 300 accepted students and their parents on March 23 in Heritage Hall in the HUB-Robeson Center. The College of the Liberal Arts’ Accepted Students Program asked Eberly to tell students about CAS 222N / CIVCM 211N: Foundations of Civic and Community Engagement, a discussion-based interdisciplinary course she developed and started teaching in 2007.

After Eberly described the CIVCM Foundations Course, she addressed the question, “What are the foundations of civic and community engagement?” She then talked about the diversity of majors in the course and how students collaboratively discuss and address public problems. Public problems are problems that affect everyone, though they affect different people differently.

Introductory slide from Dr. Eberly’s lecture indicating her topic will be CAS222N/CIVCM 211N: Foundations of Civic and Community Engagement

“Students bring their emerging disciplinary knowledge from their majors to the collaborative learning space of our classroom to address shared or common or public problems,” Eberly said.

“Some examples of the public problems that this semester’s CIVCM Foundations students have chosen to do research about, to analyze, to speak about, and to write about include inflation, child abuse, climate change, single-use plastics, gun violence, funding for mental health programs, the COVID-19 pandemic, and news illiteracy,” Eberly said. “This semester there are students from Nuclear Engineering, Biobehavioral Health, Chemical Engineering, Education and Public Policy, Global and International Studie

s, Supply Chain and Information Systems, Hospitality Management, Mathematics, Environmental Engineering, Journalism, Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Kinesiology as well as Communication Arts and Sciences and other Liberal Arts disciplines.

Eberly said she was thrilled to highlight a few of the many student projects that came out of discussions in the CIVCM Foundations class and a few of the CIVCM capstone projects and theses that CIVCM students have completed.

CAS instructors offer six sections of the course each year. CAS 222N / CIVCM 211N is the only specifically prescribed course for the Intercollege Minor in Civic and Community Engagement, which has been housed in CAS since 2016 and which Eberly directs.A slide from Dr. Eberly’s lecture. What are the foundations of CIVCM? 1. Communicating together in multiple media as diverse discursive equals in an inclusive proto-public classroom.

Headshot photograph of Dr. Rosa Eberly, taken by Dr. Kirt Wilson