Patti H. Clayton, PhD
... take a look at some of my thinking ...
"It takes a community" (a personal reflection on my career as an SLCE practitioner-scholar, from IARSLCE Distinguished Career Recognition nomination, 2018)
"The Power of Little Words" (2010)
practitioner-Scholar-in-residence, North carolina campus engagement (NCCE)
SENIOR Scholar, Institute for Community and Economic ENGAGEMENT, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG)
A North Carolina native, I live in Cary, NC with my husband Kevin and our feline family. I read everything I can get my hands on by Parker Palmer (Let Your Life Speak is a constant companion) and Diana Gabaldon (historical fiction), enjoy spending time in the mountains (any mountains, but especially southwest Virginia), fell in love with Zion and Denali National Parks on our first visits, and am a lifelong fan of Star Trek and John Denver.
I have 25 years of experience as a practitioner-scholar and educational developer in service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) and in experiential education, including as an independent consultant with over 120 colleges, universities, and higher education organizations in the US, Canada, and Ireland (see a list of organizations I have consulted with). In that capacity I have guided inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional learning communities and other scholarly collaborations, facilitated curriculum development and professional development across all partners in SLCE, and supported institution-wide visioning and planning processes for community-campus engagement. I hold retreats around the US to support graduate students, professional staff, and faculty in formulating and advancing their pedagogical and partnership practices and their scholarly agendas and projects. I served for many years as an Associate Editor with the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning and for six years as a Board member of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE).
I co-developed with students, faculty, and staff a leading critical reflection and assessment model (the DEAL Model), models for student leadership in service-learning, and a variety of professional development and curriculum development processes related to community-campus engagement. With other practitioner-scholars and thought leaders around the country I co-developed the SOFAR partnership model, the TRES protocol for assessing partnership quality, the DPI Model for Institutional Transformation, and work on Democratically Engaged Assessment (DEA). My student and faculty colleagues and I co-produced an instructors’ guide and a student tutorial -- Learning through Critical Reflection -- as well as a faculty resource guide on instructional design for integrated service-learning. I co-edited (with Bringle and Hatcher) the 2-volume set Research on Service Learning: Conceptual Frameworks and Assessment (Stylus, 2013), have co-authored over 75 publications, and have co-facilitated over 250 conference sessions, many of them with undergraduate or graduate students. I am learning to write blog posts (see http://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/an-introduction-to-service-learning-and-community-engagement-as-co-inquiry/)!
For several years I co-facilitated the international Service-Learning and Community Engagement Future Directions Project (SLCE-FDP; www.slce-fdp.org) with Stanlick, Zlotkowski, Howard, and Kniffin; this multi-year, multi-venue, multi-voice project invites anyone interested in SLCE to share and critique ideas for the future of the movement. I co-facilitate the Community of Practice, Inquiry, & Learning (COPIL) sponsored by North Carolina Campus Engagement (NCCE). My current scholarship interests include operationalizing democratic engagement; designing critical reflection for civic learning; conceptualizing place-engaged SLCE; integrating SLCE and relationships within the more-than-human world; supporting engaged graduate education; and exploring the power of such “little words” as in, for, with, and of to shape identities and ways of being with one another in SLCE. Building on my collaboration with John Saltmarsh and Matt Hartley in the Democratic Engagement White Paper (2009), I am especially intrigued by possibilities for designing teaching and learning, partnerships, and scholarship in ways that position all participants as co-educators, co-learners, and co-generators of knowledge.
I formerly served as founding Director of the Center for Excellence in Curricular Engagement at NC State University and as a Faculty Fellow with National Campus Compact’s Project on Integrating Service with Academic Study. I have integrated service-learning into all of my own courses since 1999, ranging from “environmental ethics” to “leadership” to “contemporary science, technology, and human values.” In all aspects of my work I seek to support intellectual, personal, and civic development through co-creating mentoring communities grounded in reflective practice, leadership, and scholarship. Beyond community-engaged teaching, learning, and scholarship, my academic interests include environmental philosophy and environmental studies, leadership development, and the history and philosophy of science. I earned my Ph.D. (1995) and M.S. (1992) from the Curriculum in Ecology at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Find me on Linkedin
... and take a look at what some other folks think about our work together ...
Campuses (Lipscomb University, Birmingham-Southern College)
Alumni student leaders (Brake, Grissom, McClure, Respet, West, & Whitney; excerpted from award nomination)
Community-faculty partners (Snow & Hess; excerpted from award nomination)
Faculty member (McGuire; formerly at IUPUI)
National engagement scholar (Bringle; award nomination letter)
National engagement scholar (Saltmarsh; award nomination letter)
Just for fun, this is me -- personally and professionally -- as a word cloud !
