Dr. Naggy is an assistant professor of occupational therapy and a 2022-2023 Office for Community-Engaged Learning (OCEL) Faculty Associate at SRU. She connects students to real clients to develop a more collaborative and creative classroom approach while creating mutually beneficial and valuable experience. Between the years of 2021 to 2022, a group of five OCEL faculty associates came together to create professional competencies for each of the six attributes of
community-engaged learning at SRU. These professional competencies guided the design of the fall 2022 HIPS Faculty Learning Community (FLC). The FLC’s are small, cross- disciplinary groups compromised of both faculty and staff, working collaboratively to develop modern approaches to teaching and learning in higher education. Here is more about the development of the FLC competencies from the perspective of Dr. Naggy:
Dr. Naggy was a part of the OCEL faculty associates that collaborated to develop CEL professional competencies and utilize them to design the fall 22 HIPS FLC. The other faculty associates she worked with were Dr. Doug Strahler (Communications and Media), Dr. Jennifer Willford (Psychology). Dr. Tami Micsky (Social Work) and Dr. Jana Asher (Mathematics and Statistics). The competencies are essentially the groundwork, or blueprint, to the community-engaged learning courses meant for faculty to use as a framework for their classes, projects, or programs. The competencies are important because they put the work in context and allow all projects or CEL programs to stem from it in a scaffolded structure. They allow professors to use best practices when creating their CEL courses and provide context and measurement in the process.
The development process was challenging at first because Dr. Naggy had never worked with the other faculty before that all had different backgrounds. Additionally, having to make the competencies in a way that could apply to any field or program was a difficult task. They had to be very concise and in a basic format. After everyone began feeling more comfortable sharing ideas from their different perspectives, the process became much smoother and greatly collaborative. The faculty members would split off into pairs and focus on one competency to deep dive into. In the future, the competencies will be able to be refined, edited, and updated to better apply to higher level programs and projects.
Dr. Naggy expressed her appreciation to Jeffrey Rathlef, saying he has done an amazing job leading and supporting the group through the journey and their learning. The process of working backwards, like the associates did for creating the competencies, is something valuable that she learned during her experience. She uses this process in developing her own courses which helps tie every step into each other and connects back to the main goal or idea. Dr. Naggy said that at the end of the whole experience, the best part was the intellectual stimulation of working with the other associates paired with the pride of the final product.
View the document below to read the Competencies!