In Creating Citizens: Liberal Arts, Civic Engagement, and the Land-Grant Tradition, professors and administrators at Auburn University’s College of Liberal Arts recount valuable, first-hand experiences teaching Community and Civic Engagement (CCE). They demonstrate that, contrary to many expectations, CCE instruction both complements the mission of liberal arts curricula and powerfully advances the fundamental mission of American land-grand institutions.
The nine essays in Creating Citizens offer structures for incorporating CCE initiatives into university programs, instructional methods and techniques, and numerous case studies and examples undertaken at Auburn University but applicable at any university. Many contributors describe their own rewarding experiences with CCE and emphasize the ways outreach efforts reinvigorate their teaching or research.
Creating Citizens recounts the foundation of land-grant institutions by the Morrill Act of 1862. Their mission is to instruct in agriculture, military science, and mechanics, but these goals augment rather than replace an education in the classics, or liberal arts. Land-grant institutions, therefore, have a special calling to provide a broad spectrum of society with an education that enriches the personal lives of their students and the communities they are a part of. Creating Citizens demonstrates the important opportunities CCE instruction represents to any university but which are especially close to the heart of the mission of land-grant colleges.
The role and mission of public institutions of higher learning that are supported by public subsidies are perennial subjects of interest and debate. Creating Citizens provides valuable insights of interest to educators, administrators, students, and policy makers involved in the field of higher education.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brigitta R. Brunner is a professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University. She has served as the associate director for the Public Relations Program, a research fellow with the Imagining America Engaged Undergraduate Research Group, a College of Liberal Arts Engaged Scholar, an Auburn University Provost’s Fellow, a fellow in the Southeastern Conference Academic Leadership Development Program, and a fellow in the Journalism and Mass Communication Leadership in Diversity program sponsored by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
CONTRIBUTORS
Kelly D. Alley / Barb Bondy / Elizabeth Brestan-Knight / Brigitta R. Brunner
Nan Fairley / Anne-Katrin Gramberg / William E. Kelly / Christopher McNulty
Julia Pittman James Emmett Ryan / Kyes Stevens / Timothy S. Thornberry Jr.
Chad Wickman
PRAISE FOR CREATING CITIZENS
“Creating Citizens has the potential to make a meaningful impact and serve as a model for other institutions.”
—Valerie Paton, chairperson of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities’s Council on Outreach and Engagement Executive Committee
ISBN: 978-0-817301907-6 Cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8960-4 Ebook
Price: $49.95
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