Thrilled to Co-Present Partnership Work Yesterday. Love Working with @elizabethboquet

Yesterday, I was thrilled to take part in conversation celebrating community in partnership work, supported by the leadership of Melissa Quann and Dr. Jocelyn Boryczka. Three mini-grants were awarded to scholars to collaborate with community groups to explore, implement, and carry forth projects that are socially engaging, thought-provoking, and beneficial to students at the University, research, and putting scholarship into action.

Last spring, Dr. Beth Boquet had a vision of working with the expertise of UCONN faculty, Tom Dean and Jason Courtmanche, to think about a beginning conversation of supporting writing centers in secondary schools. We reached out to Tim Huminski at Joel Barlow High School (with a 25 year writing center tradition) and Ann Traspasso and Shaun Mitchell at Central High School to host conversations about building a network for writing centers in the southern Connecticut area. Last Friday, we held a Partnerships for Social Change, Writing Center Pop-Up, where youth accompanied their teachers to work with writing center tutors at Fairfield University. The dialogue was exciting, motivating, and purposeful.

We were asked great questions about our work with a lot of prompts for what we might reconsider in the future, including visual mapping of our work, creating a plan for what we'd like to see 10 years from now, and thinking of ways that our work might assist others who have similar questions.

We also learned about robotics work between the School of Engineering and Harding High School, as well as pharmaceutical work between the School of Nursing, St. Vincent's and Spanish & Portuguese faculty.

Moving. Powerful. Important. Men and women for others in innovative ways.

I'm ending a semester with bags under my eyes (and this is before final projects come in), but I'm already excited to continue the work with our partners (and the magic they bring to our conversation). I absolutely love working with Drs. Beth Boquet and Betsy Bowen, as they think creatively of how we can bring a richer conversation to the work of Tim Huminski, Shaun Mitchell and Ann Traspasso.

There's power when Universities unite with the communities they serve.