example retreat (click here)

“Attending PHCV retreats has helped me make connections with colleagues and advance my own scholarship and practice. I appreciate the co-created space to meet my own needs while learning with and supporting others. I leave these retreats with significant progress on current projects and more clarity on my long-term scholarly agenda." [retreat participant]

example Workshops, keynotes, discussion sessions

[All of my work is co-created and customized; these abstracts are offered as illustrative examples of what we might do together. These examples are listed in no particular order; please scroll through.]

'With-ness' as a Way of Being: The Heart of Service-Learning and Community Engagement
Sigmon's seminal 1979 article establishing the core principles of service-learning made explicit that all serve and are served, all teach, and all learn. Thirty years later, the Democratic Engagement White Paper (Saltmarsh, Hartley, & Clayton, 2009) conceptualized a paradigm shift from technocratic to democratic community engagement, with a key element being the distinction between the hierarchical, deficit-based doing "for" and the reciprocal, asset-based thinking and acting "with." Democratic engagement positions all participants as "teachers, learners, and leaders" (Mondloch, 2009), indeed as "co-learners, co-educators, and co-generators of knowledge (Jameson, Jaeger, & Clayton, 2010). How, concretely, in our everyday practice, might we live out the "thick" reciprocity of democratic engagement in a largely technocratic world? Patti refers to the identities, perspectives, and practices underlying such a conceptualization of reciprocity as 'with-ness.' Much of her current work is focused on collaboratively exploring 'with-ness' as a way of being. What learning does it require and foster? What forces encourage it and what forces hinder it--at individual, interpersonal, organizational, and systemic levels? What, exactly, would we do (and not do) on the first day of class, during a gathering of faculty and community members, in designing a syllabus or a research project, in facilitating a workshop, in disseminating our work? In short, how can we enact and encourage the sharing and integration of power, voice, resources, and questions that comprises 'with-ness,' most especially in our community-engaged classrooms and partnerships?

“Engagement-Grounded” Teaching and Learning
Service-learning is often lauded as part of higher education’s paradigmatic shift away from teacher-centered classrooms and, correspondingly, defined as a learner-centered pedagogy. At the same time, from its inception service-learning has been conceptualized as positioning all participants as learners and teachers; recent work explicitly adds co-generators of knowledge to the rich conception of identities to be held by all partners in the process. Perhaps, then, service-learning is leading ongoing paradigm shift—into what might be called “engagement-grounded” rather than “student-centered.” In this interactive session we will explore together the possibilities of framing teaching and learning as “engagement-grounded.” We will discuss (a) the civic learning we might seek to achieve; (b) the meaning and implications of positioning all participants as co-educators, co-learners, and co-generators of knowledge; and (c) the concrete tasks associated with bringing democratic engagement to life in the design and implementation of service-learning (and other) pedagogies. The session will invite—and challenge—each of us to take on and to support one another in “co-” roles as we inquire together, share and critique our experiences, and contribute to emerging scholarship around democratic engagement.

Developing and Deepening Community Engagement Partnerships for Learning, Inquiry, and Change
Asset-based. Reciprocal. Impactful. Just. What specifically are we doing, or might we do, to develop and deepen partnerships with these characteristics? Partnerships in which we are all, in the words of community partner Amy Mondloch, “teachers, learners, and leaders”? In which we are all positioned as co-educators, co-learners, and co-generators of knowledge and practice? Throughout this highly interactive day we will examine example community engagement partnerships/projects and explore several frameworks and tools that can help provide guidance for moving in the direction of co-created partnerships (including the tension between technocratic and democratic engagement, SOFAR-CIP partnership model, the TRES instrument for assessing partnership quality, and the “nudging the world” activity). We will co-generate ideas about what supports and what hinders co-creation in and of partnerships, with specific implications for our practice. And at the end of the day we will have the opportunity to dig into questions and concerns about our own particular community engaged courses, research projects, etc. in casual conversation with Patti. We will leave with a packet of materials, a set of strategies co-created through the day, and concrete possibilities for new and deepened partnerships focused on learning, on inquiry, and on change.

Connecting for the Common Good: WITH-ness as a Way of Partnering
What specifically are we doing, or might we do, to develop and deepen partnerships in which we are all, in the words of community partner Amy Mondloch, “teachers, learners, and leaders”? Partnerships in which no one is seen as, or sees herself as, a recipient or a subject only but rather each of us is positioned as a co-educator, co-learner, and co-generator of knowledge and practice? Partnerships that are, therefore, more about being and doing WITH than about doing FOR? What supports these efforts, and what hinders them? What specific points of tension do we encounter in these efforts, and how can we leverage them creatively to generate new possibilities? What shifts in perspective and practice, in identity, and in culture are involved, and how can we best support one another in making them?
Veteran community-campus engagement practitioner-scholar Patti Clayton invites us to join and contribute to a national effort to gather examples of such efforts and answers to such questions -- exploring what it means to bring to life the commitments of democratic civic engagement in our day-to-day partnership practices. Beginning with a preconference workshop and then continuing as a thread of inquiry throughout the conference, we will examine how we understand, develop, deepen, and inquire into partnerships through the lens of democratic engagement – in short, through the lens of WITH-ness or co-creation. Our reflection on our own partnerships and those we learn about from one another through the conference will inform the development of new resources to support the growth of partnerships that enact WITH-ness and, for interested participants, may lead to the co-generation of related scholarship.
In the highly interactive preconference workshop we will explore several frameworks and tools that can help answer these questions and provide guidance for moving in the direction of such partnerships, including the distinction between technocratic and democratic paradigms of engagement, the SOFAR partnership model, the TRES II instrument for assessing partnership quality, and the “nudging the world” activity. Participants will leave the session with a packet of materials and a set of strategies created in the room for use and adaptation in their own contexts.
Participants in the preconference workshop will work with Patti to bring key ideas and questions from our discussion forward into the conference on Friday. In the opening plenary session we will all engage in guided reflection on partnerships through the lens of democratic engagement, co-generating questions to have in mind during the morning breakout sessions. Discussion during lunch will provide an opportunity to share and refine our reflection, critique, and questions further for the afternoon sessions. In the closing plenary we will compile our thinking and share specific ways we can continue the exploration of WITH-ness in our partnership practices.

Democratically Engaged Inquiry: Walking our Talk in SLCE Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
“Assessing the Practices of Public Scholarship” (APPS) Research Group, an initiative of Imagining America, is a collective of practitioner-scholar-artists that strives to change the conversation around assessment, evaluation, and research from one that privileges narrowly conceived technocratic models to one that embraces democratic values, equity, and participatory ways of knowing. We have developed a framework for reimagining assessment, called Democratically Engaged Assessment (DEA), that puts the values of democratic engagement ‘front and center’ by calling for co-inquiry among stakeholders. We work to co-create assessment / evaluation / research practices that help each of us to resist being shut down by top-down, bureaucratic demands for “data” and instead claim our power as agents of democracy and justice. We engage in inquiry into the impacts, processes, and relationships of community engagement in ways that walk the talk of -- and thereby help to cultivate -- such values as full participation, generativity, and co-creation. In this working session, participants will learn about the DEA framework; examine associated processes and tools; consider examples across a variety of programmatic and cultural contexts; and share implications and questions from application to their own work.

Articulating and Assessing Civic Learning
Educating for democracy. Graduating responsible citizens. Teaching the public purposes of our disciplines. Cultivating critical thinking, problem-solving, and cross-cultural skills. What do these and related "civic learning" goals of the academy really mean to us as educators, and how might we operationalize and measure them in our teaching? In this session we will examine a variety of conceptualizations of "civic learning" and use research-grounded tools for the design of course-embedded assessment to help achieve greater precision in both generating and assessing associated learning outcomes.

Cultivating Critical Thinking through Critical Reflection on Experience Within and Beyond the Classroom
As the part of experiential learning that generates, deepens, and documents learning, critical reflection is key to all forms of experiential learning. It is also a counter-normative way for many of us to teach and to learn, so it is both challenging to undertake and potentially transformative. In this highly interactive full-day workshop, participants will a) undertake an experiential learning opportunity (reading and reflection prompts will be sent in advance), b) consider the meaning and role of critical reflection in experiential learning, c) apply models for experiential learning and for integrated design to their own instructional contexts, d) critique example reflection activities, and e) practice developing critical reflection prompts and applying rubrics to student products. Participants will leave the session with examples of critical reflection activities and with resources that can be used with our students and in our own instructional design and assessment work.

Research on Service-Learning -- In this 2-day workshop we will focus on integrating service-learning practice with research and scholarship. Participants will:

Identify, analyze, and refine their own service-learning related questions and associated research and practice designs
Generate characteristics of high-quality scholarship related to service-learning and evaluate their own and others' work accordingly
Apply conceptual frameworks for service-learning, for scholarship, and for research to their own work
Compare and contrast examples of service-learning related scholarship with respect to such variable as types of method, fit between question and design, and rigor of data analysis
Analyze, refine, and apply to themselves the concept of “civic minded scholar”

A: Integrated Design of Service-Learning Projects and Courses (9 – 12)
Service-learning is the integration of academic content, community engagement, and critical reflection through co-created partnerships that engage students, faculty/staff, and members of the broader community to achieve academic, civic, and personal growth learning objectives and to advance public purposes. “Integration” is a key characteristic we are after in designing service-learning projects and courses / curricula and is the focus of this interactive workshop. Facilitator Patti Clayton will share a conceptual framework for service-learning as a form of co-created experiential learning and invite us to examine multiple examples and think about potential enhancements to our own practice through this lens. We will work together to refine learning goals and objectives and will consider associated choice points in the design of service-learning projects and courses. Throughout the session we will use a variety of tools that support alignment of the pedagogy with both (student) learning and (community) change goals. Provided with advance readings and a substantial packet of materials, participants will leave the session with concrete ideas, tools, and frameworks for developing and deepening our own well-integrated service-learning projects and courses.
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B: Integrated Design of Critical Reflection and Assessment of Learning (1 – 4)
As is the case with any form of experiential learning, critical reflection is the component of service-learning that -- when well-designed -- generates, deepens, and documents learning while also improving the quality of practice. In this interactive workshop we will explore what critical reflection is, why it is both important and challenging, and how it might be designed in a way that is tightly aligned with learning goals and assessment of learning. Facilitator Patti Clayton will introduce a conceptual framework for critical reflection and a particular approach – the DEAL Model – that can be used in any context. She will invite us to develop and refine our own critical reflection mechanisms and strategies in accordance with our own learning goals and other project and course design elements. We will examine sample critical reflection assignments, a specific tool for feedback, and two types of rubrics. Provided with advance readings and a substantial packet of materials, participants will leave the session with concrete, practical, and research-grounded ideas for integrating critical reflection and assessment of learning in our own service-learning (and other experiential) projects and courses.

Design for Experiential Learning: Integrating Critical Reflection and Assessment
Have you ever said, or heard, that "experience is the best teacher"? Most of us have. Problem is, when we stop to think about it, we know it's really not. Experience alone, as Dewey told us, is apt to be mis-educative. It is, rather, critical reflection on experience that may be our best teacher; without doubt, it is key to learning and inquiry and improved practice in experiential education. It is also challenging to design, facilitate, and undertake, in part because it is often highly counter-normative. In part because of that, learning to learn -- and to facilitate others' learning -- through critical reflection can be an empowering and perhaps even transformative process.
In this highly interactive, hands-on workshop we will use a conceptual framework for experiential learning that emphasizes tight alignment between learning goals, critical reflection, and assessment. And we will use research-grounded frameworks and tools – applicable across all forms of experiential learning – for designing critical reflection accordingly to generate, deepen, and document learning in ways that can improve practice and inquiry. We will share and critique our own ideas for and examples of reflection activities, working together to refine them and to build our collective capacity to design critical reflection, provide feedback to learners, assess the quality of learning demonstrated in critical reflection products, and conduct related scholarship.
Participants will be provided with an advance reading and will receive a substantial packet of example critical reflection assignments and rubrics, worksheets, and references -- materials that have been developed and refined through scholarship of teaching and learning activities over many years with many campuses and courses. For a preview, see the short overview of critical reflection as Patti and her colleagues understand it, design it, and study it in the context of service-learning. Bring your questions and concerns in response to the advance reading as well as your own efforts to integrate critical reflection and assessment in your experiential pedagogies, and let's see what we can learn and create together.

3 C's for Maximizing Community Engaged (and other innovative) Learning Opportunities: Co-creation, Critical Reflection, and Civic Learning
Patti H. Clayton will engage us in a conversation about co-creation, critical reflection, and civic learning as 3 key elements of well-designed and impactful community engaged (and other) learning opportunities. She will offer an overarching framework for conceptualizing and designing community engaged (and other experiential) learning and additional models for each of these 3 key features of it and will share and solicit examples. The conversation will focus on community engaged learning but will be relevant as well to other forms of experiential learning and to both curricular and co-curricular settings. We will leave the session with some ideas for enhancing our practice and some tools to support us and our students in maximizing innovative learning opportunities.

Introduction to Critical Reflection: Why, What, and How
As a form of experiential education, community engaged learning requires well-designed critical reflection if it is to fulfill its potential to generate learning, support inquiry, guide action, and lead to change. But what do strong prompts look like? How can we best facilitate it, provide feedback to deepen it, and grade it? In this workshop we will explore the why, what, and how of critical reflection. Facilitator Patti Clayton will introduce a conceptual framework for critical reflection and a particular approach – the DEAL Model – that can be used in any context. We will examine sample critical reflection assignments, a tool for giving feedback, and two types of rubrics, leaving the session with concrete, practical, and research-grounded ideas for critical reflection.

Transformation of and through Community-Campus Engagement
Let's chat about this arguably over-used word "transformation." What might it mean, why might it be important, and how might we go about it? Patti will share a few stories from her own 20 year journey with community-campus engagement, in which the idea of "transformation" -- variously framed, sometimes with skepticism -- has played a key role and invite us to consider the significance of those framings in our own work and in the future of the engagement movement.

Unpacking, Navigating, and Leveraging the Multiple Meanings of Core SLCE Concepts
"Community." "Partnership." “Co-creation.” "Social Justice." "Democratic." These core concepts of SLCE carry baggage, contain tensions, and evoke possibilities. We will collaboratively surface different takes on them, examine implications of multiple interpretations, and co-generate specific, actionable ways to navigate and leverage associated complexities in our own contexts.

Refining and Sharing Your Work in Experiential Learning: Practitioner-Scholarship
Part I (pre-conference)
What do you – or do you want to -- inquire into as a practitioner-scholar of experiential learning? What can others learn from your work? In this session we will share with one another areas of current and potential inquiry, explore related examples of scholarly work in experiential learning, and begin to use a simple set of questions designed to support framing and deepening our work as scholarship. We will also prepare ourselves to take full advantage of our conference participation as a stimulus to further developing our own scholarship.
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Part II (post-conference)
We will convene after the closing lunch to refine the questions we want to inquire into and the methods we use. We will critically examine example scholarship products (e.g., abstracts for conference sessions and articles, article introductions) and example feedback from peer reviews, generating key elements of high-quality scholarship and applying them individually and collaboratively to our own work.

example collaborative projects

Service-Learning & Community Engagement Future Directions Project (SLCE-FDP)
Co-facilitation (with Edward Zlotkowski, Sarah Stanlick, and Jeffrey Howard) of an international multi-venue learning community with the primary objectives of (a) supporting anyone involved in SLCE in thinking creatively and collaboratively about our work, now and into the future, particularly as related to the concept of community, the work of communities, and the dynamics of democratic civic engagement and (b) contributing meaningfully to enriching and shaping the SLCE movement, especially in accordance with co-created priorities around this community orientation. SLCE-FDP produces Special Sections of the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning and an interactive website and facilitates conversations on campuses, at conferences, and in communities. SLCE-FDP currently partners with NC Campus Compact to facilitate a Community of Practice, Inquiry, and Learning focused on exploring the meanings of the core concepts of “community,” “partnership,” and “co-creation” and the implications of how we conceptualize them, speak about them, and enact them. [www.slce-fdp.org]

NCCC~SLCE-FDP Community of Practice, Inquiry, & Learning (COPIL)
COPIL is intended for graduate students, community engagement administrators, faculty members, and others interested in collaborative scholarship and action focused on topics of relevance to the field of service-learning and community engagement (SLCE). North Carolina has a long history of innovative community engagement work in communities and on campuses across the state. Designed to bring together a diverse range of individuals who share an interest in deepening community engagement, COPIL enables us to leverage that experience, deepen our understanding of the complexities and possibilities at the heart of SLCE, enhance the processes and the impacts of our work, and further our leadership within the SLCE movement. COPIL is an initiative of North Carolina Campus Compact (NCCC), in partnership with the SLCE Future Directions Project (www.slce-fdp.org) and NC-based practitioner-scholar Patti H. Clayton (PHC Ventures).

COPIL members gather virtually and face-to-face through regularly scheduled meetings and engage in ongoing discussion and scholarship.
COPIL is intentionally structured to encourage shared responsibility and leadership among members; we co-create our processes and products, reflectively revisiting who we are and how we work together as needed. This also means that at the beginning of each year we revisit current projects and develop new goals and processes that reflect the interests and strengths of the current community.
Members are committed to being curious and open to learning from each other and our colleagues more generally as well as from literature and research.
We intend to develop our own capacities for collaborative work and dialogue across a variety of academic and community contexts and to create and share useful artifacts of our work together.

Curricular development and professional development with Global Vision International (GVI)
Co-creation of new academic service-learning course titled “Our Common Future: Advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals at Home, Abroad, and Globally”; facilitation of associated professional development among GVI staff; co-generation of associated scholarship