Jose Calderon

Jose Zapata Calderon is a Professor in Sociology and Chicano Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. He has had a long history of connecting his academic work with community organizing, student-based service learning, participatory action research, critical pedagogy, and multi-ethnic coalition building.

His class, Rural and Urban Social Movements, takes students annually to live and work with the United Farm worker’s Union in La Paz. The class was named as the ‘Curriculum Based Alternative Break Program of the Year’ by Breakaway. For his efforts in behalf of farm workers, Professor Calderon was presented with the United Farm Worker’s Union’s ‘Si Se Puede’ community award for life-long contributions to the farm worker movement. Another class, Restructuring Communities, has developed a partnership between Pitzer College and the city of Pomona to create a day labor center

Presently he serves on various advisory boards: the Center for Liberal Education and Civic Engagement, the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Diversity Works Board, the Working Forum for Civic Engagement, the American Sociological Association’s Minority Opportunity School Transformation Program (MOST), the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center, the Southern California Leadership Development in Interethnic Relations, and the California Center for Community and Social Issues (CCCSI). As a participant ethnographer, he has published numerous articles based on his community experiences and observations. An article, ‘Lessons From an Activist Intellectual: Participatory Research, Teaching, and Learning For Social Change,’ was published in the January, 2004 Latin American Perspectives journal. Another article, ‘Organizing Immigrant Workers: Action Research and Strategies in the Pomona Day Labor Center’ with former Pitzer students Suzanne Foster and Silvia Rodriguez) will appear in a forthcoming book Communities and Political Activism, edited Enrique C. Ochoa and Gilda Laura Ochoa.

Lorrayne Carroll

Lorrayne Carroll is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. Through service learning scholarship and teaching, she has developed an interest in broadening academic practices for civic engagement. She is currently a faculty consultant for the Maine Campus Compact and a faculty designer of the Institute for Engaging Democracy, a three-day program for faculty who wish to expand their roles in public life by strengthening connections between campus and community. Professor Carroll teaches courses in Early American literature and culture, Women’s Studies, Literacy Studies, and composition, and she writes on topics in Early American culture, service learning, and discourses of globalization.

Mary Coleman

Mary Coleman is professor of political science at Jackson State University (JSU). She serves as director of the Center for University Scholars and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. A published author of Political Change in Mississippi and the South, her writing has been reviewed and appeared in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, Romania Studia, and in several editions of books that focus on electoral participation and black politics, Southern politics, deliberative democracy, and the impacts of court ordered legislative redistricting on policy change. The University of Wisconsin-Madison and JSU alumna is a two-time winner of National Science Foundation research awards, and has earned post-doctoral fellowships as a Liberal Arts Fellow in Law and Political Science at Harvard Law School and a Fellow in Public Policy at the University of Maryland-College Park. She is the recent recipient of the Harrison Distinguished Service Award and the Mississippi Humanities Outstanding Teacher award.

Coleman serves on the United States Speakers Bureau and has lectured on and directed or co-directed civic education programs throughout the world, including her native state of Mississippi; Bucharest, Romania; Luanda, Angola, Windhoek ,Namibia; Fort Hare, South Africa; and Baku, Azerbaijan. Stateside, she serves as an advisory board member to the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland-College Park and is a core faculty member of the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy. She has served as a site team member for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and was instrumental in JSU’s recent and successful educational program review, strategic plan, and Vision 2020 (reorganization). Her current research interests examine the practice of citizenship and the nexus among rates, routes and exits of intergenerational poverty and inequality in the Deep South. She dedicates her professional leadership to the improvement of scholar teachers and the efficacious implementation of thoughtful experiential learning strategies in the teaching, research, and service mission of Jackson State University.

Gary Daynes

Gary Daynes is the Associate Director of Freshman Academy, Brigham Young University’s learning communities initiative. He holds a PhD in American History from the University of Delaware. Before joining the Freshman Academy, Gary worked as Director of Service-Learning for Washington Campus Compact, Executive Director of Utah Campus Compact, and Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

Gary’s civic engagement work falls at the intersection of history, service, and the public life of local communities. He is the editor of Fulfilling the Founding: A Reader in American Heritage (Boston, 2000) and the author of Making Villains, Making Heroes: Joseph R. McCarthy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Politics of American Memory (NY, 1997), and recent articles on service-learning as a pathway to civic engagement and the use of history in the movement for the civic engagement of higher education. He recently completed a documentary on the influence of orchard farming on community life called The Best Crop and is beginning two new service-learning projects, one on the influence of the Provo River on community life and the other using storytelling to build connections across ethnic and economic barriers in Provo.

Melissa Kesler Gilbert

Melissa Kesler Gilbert is the Director of the newly founded Center for Community Engagement at Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio. She has provided extensive national faculty development training to campuses across the country in the areas of partnership development and sustainability, service-learning pedagogy, reflection strategies, and outcomes assessment. Melissa has published numerous articles in the fields of feminist pedagogy, women at work, and community-based learning, including her most recent publication, ‘The Civic Leadership Program: Lessons from the Field,’ published by Pennsylvania Campus Compact.

While in Oregon, Melissa served on the women’s studies faculty of Portland State University where she played an integral part in the development of their nationally recognized service-learning program. In 1997, she founded the CityGirls Project, a community outreach program for teen girls living the Portland metropolitan area. She has taught innovative service-learning courses on the history of the women’s movement, women’s bookstores, and women’s health. Her teaching and community activism in Oregon brought her several awards for civic engagement and community heroism.

This project is funded through the Corporation for National and Community Service, Learn and Serve America — Higher Education.