CPPSET Newsletter

As we near the completion of another semester, I find myself thinking about freedom. More specifically, I am thinking about how hollow claims regarding the right to freedom sound when used to evade the responsibilities of being in relation to those around us. Sadly, it is clear that those of us who are convinced that, yes, we are all in this together, have much work to so. Happily, I am delighted to be a part of a community that has deliberately encouraged and ultimately required that we prioritize others as we navigate the current pandemic. This seems the least that we owe to each other, right? Thanks to each of you for choosing to make the health and safety of our little "whole" a priority worth the modest limitations on our freedom required to do so. Here's to a post-pandemic period. May it arrive soon.

Below are some items of interest from fall semester 2021. As you will see, not only are we surviving this time of pandemic, the work of deep teaching and learning continues in creative and exciting ways. I am so delighted to be able to learn with my Guilford College friends and colleagues. Y'all impress me everyday and remind why education matters and why Guilford does too.

Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions, suggestions, or concerns. All things CPPSET may be found on our Google Site and I can be reached by phone at x2853 or at my individual email (justadmj@guilford.edu) or via the center's email address (cppset@guilford.edu).

Mark

• We Need Your Input
  
• New Addition at CPPSET
• Opportunities to Fund Student Conference Presentations
• 2021-2022 CPPSET Educational Development Grants
• Update on Projects and Events Supported by CPPSET and the PPS Endowment
  
• Fall 2021 People and Programs
• Past Events and Workshops
• Related
  

CPPSET will hold three workshops this spring. We are looking not only for workshop recommendations but your ideas on how we can support Guilford's transformative teaching mission. You can either email us directly at cppset@guilford.edu or you can take this quick survey to let us know what you need and hope for in the coming year around teaching excellence.

New Addition to the CPPSET team

I’m Joe Wiinikka-Lydon (pronounced WIN-uh-kah LIE-dun) and started at Guilford and CPPSET at the beginning of November. My role as Assistant Director is to help with CPPSET programs, particularly all things teaching excellence. I will be visiting departments and reaching out to staff over the next few months to talk to you about your needs as educators and how our teaching excellence work can support you and the Guilford College community.

I’m joining Guilford from a year and a half at Wake Forest University’s new engineering department. Although not an engineer, I joined the department to help them integrate ethics education into their core courses. Before that, I held a number of positions in various and interesting places. I was a researcher at a European Union-funded ethics center outside of Prague. Most recently, I was a visiting instructor of religion and ethics at Denison University and Sewanee, The University of the South, and was an assistant professor of religion at Birmingham-Southern College. I’m a teacher and a writer who in his spare time researchers issues of moral injury and the way in which violence can transform one’s sense of self and moral orientation. I even have a book on this subject, Moral Injury and the Promise of Virtue. When not spending too much time thinking about the consequences of war and the hope for peace, I write and publish poetry, love to sing, hike, and am learning to play the guitar.

I applied for this position at Guilford, which I was lucky to receive, because I’ve heard about Guilford for decades from friends who attended the college. It’s not an easy time to be an institution and community dedicated to the idea of the liberal arts, but it is an approach to education, and to life, that, like many of you, I think is worth the time and energy and struggle to introduce to new generations and to interpret for a new millennium. I’m eager to work with each one of you and to join this community of educators and learners.

If you know a student that needs funding to present at a conference, CPPSET has funds to help. The CPPSET Excellence in Teaching fund can support travel and registration up to $150. Students should email cppset@guilford.edu with the following:

• Their name, year, and major (if applicable)
• Name of a faculty sponsor
• Name and dates of the conference
• What they are presenting on (title, subject)

Requests will be reviewed on an ongoing basis and will be given on a first come, first serve basis. Please email jwiinikkalydon@guilford.edu with any questions.

Internal grants for educational development are available for all teaching faculty. A complete list of the funding sources and their respective application criteria can be found here. The online application can be found here.

Applications are accepted on a continuing basis but are evaluated and funded following four submission deadlines: Sept 30th, November 30th, March 30th, and May 30th. We will send out reminders closer to the deadlines but please keep these dates in mind as you plan your work for the year.

We are fortunate to have the continuing financial support from our PPS Endowment and our Mellon Grant for Edge related faculty development. These $1,000 grants are available to support projects in four areas as described in this document.

The PPS Endowment continues to offer educational development grants for faculty and staff for work that advances values-based teaching and learning. Support for individuals, departments, or programs are described on the Center's Grant Applications page.

Note: The range of grants and those eligible to receive them has expanded and the term "Educational Development Grants" is now being used in place of "Faculty Development Grants".

We have given out 11 grants during the September and November funding rounds, totaling approximately $10,600 in educational development support.

Every Campus a Refugee (ECAR)

ECAR is back! Or at least, its founder and director, Diya Abdo, is back with us as resident director of ECAR and Professor of English. Diya is currently working to expand ECAR on other campuses, work that has recently been acknowledged with a 2021 J.M.K. Innovation Prize from the J.M. Kapland Fund.

In awarding ECAR the prize, J.M. Kapland’s Executive Director, Amy L. Freitag said that “Every Campus A Refuge offers a potentially game-changing answer in a category of critical need.” ECAR was recognized after a competitive search:

From a nationwide search for transformative, early-stage projects, The J.M. Kaplan Fund awards the Prize biennially to ten innovators in the fields of social justice, the environment, and heritage conservation. Awardees receive a total of $175,000 over three years and participate in a learning collaborative designed to support their journey as change agents… This year’s awardees were selected from among 2,826 applications, by far the most participation in the Innovation Prize since its inception in 2015.

ECAR and CPPSET also welcomes Kathleen Herbst, a Guilford grad, as ECAR’s new program coordinator. Welcome Kathleen! We are all excited for the future of ECAR’s work.

See video below for more information.

Anechoia Memoriam

Mark Dixon, along with Jonathan Henderson, an ethnomusicologist doctoral candidate at Duke University, presented a new piece at the ReViewing Conference at UNC Asheville. It is a new composition set on an instrument Dixon made. The instrument uses a mechanical typewriter to control an acoustic piano. The score for Anechoia Memoriam is composed of a list of unarmed people of color killed by law enforcement in the United States. The names of the score will scroll by for eight hours each day in a public space at the conference and was inspired by the rallying cry, “Say their names,'' associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. As participation dictates, the piece will proceed in part, or even largely, in silence. The idea of silence in composition was inspired by composer John Cage, a participant in Black Mountain College that was located nearby in the Asheville area. More information on the conference and this piece can be found here.

CPPSET provided funds to pay for materials used in preparing this piece, conference travel, conference fees, and renting a piano.

See video below for more information.

The Resilient Community Food Systems Initiative at Guilford College

Through support from CPPSET, the Sustainable Food Systems program and Guilford College Farm are launching the Resilient Community Food Systems Initiative (RCFSI). This effort is committed to research, teaching, community partnerships, and land-based projects that focus on building capacity for community-based food sovereignty and climate-adapted regional crop varieties. The RCFSI will focus on three primary areas for the realization of these goals:

1. Seed Sovereignty

2. Polycultural Growing Systems

3. Eco-gastronomic Restoration

The current funding and programmatic support of CPPSET will be focused largely on the first of these areas. As reported by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, since 1900, around 75% of crop genetic diversity has been lost globally. This is a process that has resulted in the displacement of locally developed landrace varieties (highly adapted to local growing conditions) with more genetically uniform varieties controlled by increasingly consolidated multinational seed companies, often with restrictive patents that prohibit seed saving. As genetic diversity in crop varieties decreases, so too does resilience in the face of challenges to global and local food security. Indeed, the preservation of traditional seed diversity will likely prove critical to local food security efforts facing the challenges of climate change.

Erosion of agrobiodiversity has been accompanied by a loss of cultural and culinary knowledge associated with particular locally available varieties. In this way, traditional foods and diets have similarly been displaced by branded commodity foods. In some instances, this transition has resulted in the onset of diet-related disease and health issues, a trend that is especially acute in BIPOC and marginalized communities.

In its initial phase, the RCFSI seeks to address these intersecting challenges through the development of a robust seed preservation, rematriation, and education program at Guilford College. This program will leverage the Guilford Farm as a resource for the regular grow-out of seed crops, and assemble additional processing resources and infrastructure in order to document, catalog, store, and distribute seeds through a central repository. The intention of this effort is not just one of preservation, however, but of transformation as well, focusing especially on building local seed sovereignty through the stewardship and promotion of multicultural seed legacies adapted to the socio-ecological specificities of the piedmont and the greater southeast/mid-Atlantic regions.

This effort has already begun in earnest as of this writing, through our participation in the Heirloom Collards Project, a partnership between Seed Savers Exchange, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and regional growing partners including Guilford College. Our inclusion in this partnership will build seed stock and restore rare and endangered collard varieties to gardens and kitchens in North Carolina and the greater southeast. Our first selection, the Nobling collard, was developed and tended by the Nobling family of Garner, NC, just about an hour and a half east of the Guilford Farm.

Simultaneous and future phases will include the development of polycultural demonstration gardens, including traditional and experimental intercropping and agroforestry systems. In contrast to monocultural systems that diminish ecological symbioses and functional biodiversity, polycultural strategies employ agroecological techniques that generate resilient systems requiring fewer inputs. The third phase of the overall project vision will focus on the integration of locally adapted crop varieties and diversified growing systems with the restoration of place-based, heritage food products, techniques, and knowledge. Student involvement, through coursework, work study, and research opportunities, will be integral to all phases of the project’s development.

Faculty Peer Mentors Gather

On the first day of December, faculty participants in the mentor/mentee program gathered with CPPSET staff to share a meal and share their the experiences of the last year. This is still a COVID world, so half of the time we met in the cafeteria, half the time in the tent outside Founders Hall. This provided a moment to reconnect, meet new members of the community, share classroom challenges and successes, and talk about life in general. We all spoke about a hunger for more, COVID-safe opportunities to gather and practice community.

CPP Scholars – Mark, TBD

2021-2022 CPPSET Faculty Fellows

This year's CPPSET Faculty Fellows are Eric Mortensen in Religious Studies, Jill Peterfeso, also in Religious Studies, and Julie Winterich in Sociology and Anthropology. Please keep your eyes out for an announcement of an afternoon Tea and Talk with this year's fellows where they will share their projects with us. The CPPSET Faculty Fellowship program is supported by the PPS Endowment.

CPPSET Student Fellows for 2021-2022

We are delighted to welcome Diyaa Kaufman and Alina Santos to the Center for student fellowships with us. Student Fellows support the on-going work of the Center and use their creative energy to shape new efforts as well. This year's fellows will be supporting the development and launch of the CPPSET PPS/Ethical Leadership Innovation Lab. Alina, a graduate of the PPS Scholars Program and a former PPSSP Student Mentor, is a senior majoring in Sports & Exercise Sciences and Health Sciences. Diyaa, who is also a graduate of the PPS Scholars Program, is a junior majoring in International Studies (Asian Studies) and Economics.

PPS Scholars Program

The 2020-2021 PPS Scholars successfully completed summer internships on our campus, around the nation, and across the Atlantic. More details to follow but a list of the internships completed by PPS Scholars across the years can be found here.

We welcome 16 new Guilford students into the PPS Scholars Program this fall. A list of our new scholars can be found here. We are also happy to welcome PPSSP Peer Mentors Emma English and Milene Henriques.

The PPS Scholars Program is guided by CPPSET Director Mark Justad.

September 28: Educational Development Grants; Faculty Presentations on ED Grant Supported Efforts.

· You can access the agenda here.

· You can access a recording of the workshop on the CPPSET Google site.

November 16: How to Write a Faculty Support Letter for Tenure-Track and Tenured Colleagues

· You can access a recording of the workshop on the CPPSET Google site.

Ethical Leadership

Please join us in welcoming Amanda Szabo-Huff, a 2008 Guilford grad, as the new coordinator for Ethical Leadership. From 2008-2010, Amanda served Guilford's Bonner Center as an Americorps VISTA and fell in love with the city's parks and trees, diversity, and down-to earth people. She received her Masters in Communication from UNCG and a PhD in Organizational Communication from University of Colorado Boulder. Amanda has rich experience as an educator, communications consultant, and business leader. She and her husband were even selected as Small Business Person of the Year in 2020 by Greensboro Chamber of Commerce, and she was just chosen as Triad Business Journal's 40 Business Leaders under 40. We are grateful to have Amanda back on campus.

The work of CPPSET is only possible with the incredible support and active collaboration of our many colleagues, departments, programs, friends, and alums. No group is more important to our work than the Faculty Development and Excellence in Teaching Committee. The FDET Committee is chaired by Michele Malotky and this year includes Mark Justad and Sarah Thuesen. And, like many things at Guilford this year, the FDET Committee is navigating new terrain as it shares a roster and work with the Learning Technologies Advisory Committee.

The Guilford College CPPSET houses the Principled Problem Solving and the Excellence in Teaching programs. A unique academic center with a engaged teaching and learning focus, CPPSET develops and supports innovative programming for students as they seek to apply the practical liberal arts to real world problems. The Center also partners with Guilford faculty and staff in developing and supporting innovative educational development programs. To find out more, visit our website linked below or email us at cppset@guilford.edu.

Email: cppset@guilford.edu
Website: https://sites.google.com/guilford.edu/cppset/home?authuser=0
Location: 5800 West Friendly Avenue, Greensboro, NC, USA
Phone: (336) 316-2853
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cppsatguilfordcollege