Engaged Courses
The EHN's Engaged Courses program provides funding and cohort-based pedagogical and logistical support to faculty across departments who are integrating community-engaged learning into new and existing courses. These courses provide students opportunities to apply their scholarly knowledge and skills to serve the public good through collaborations with community partners.
2024-2025 Engaged Courses Cohort
Spring 2025
HUM/NAT 300 & 400: Stories of Indigenous Dispossession across the Americas
Professor Miryam Nacimento | TTh 2 - 3:20pm
This course partners with the Skä•noñh Great Law of Peace Center (a Haudenosaunee Cultural Center) to introduce students to storytelling as an action-based research method and to develop storytelling projects that explore different cases of Indigenous dispossession in the Americas (North, Central and South America).
HUM/ENG 300: Poetry & Environmental Justice
Professor Lauren Cooper | TTh 12:30 - 1:50pm
In partnership with Write Out, this course explores how poetry and creative forms can advance environmental justice. Students will be introduced to key public humanities methods and will work with local youth on the production of a multimedia creative project/installation, learning how to build equitable partnerships that center community voices and ideas.
MAT 100: Social Justice Mathematics
Professor Nicole Fonger | MW 2:15-3:25pm
How can I apply math/stats to make a difference in the broader Syracuse community? This special topics course will engage students in collaborations on community-engaged Data Warriors projects with local high school students to understand, critique, and address social injustices they care about through math, statistics, and mapping.
ENG 420: Family Photos and Social Justice
Professor Roger Hallas | MW 2:15-3:25pm
This course contributes to the community project Black Family Photography in Syracuse, which aims to build an inclusive, sustainable, and transformative community-based archive for public memory, collective well-being, and social justice through local communities coming together to share their stories through family photographs.
WRT/HUM 422: Community Storytelling Studio
Professor Brice Nordquist | TTh 12:30 - 1:50pm
Community Storytelling Studio invites you to explore the transformative power of storytelling in shaping local communities. We'll collaborate with community partners addressing critical issues like food justice, transportation, housing, public health, environmental justice, and educational inequity. And students will craft meaningful stories through podcasting, still and moving images, and writing.
SPA 300: Our Community Voices
Professor Emma Tico Quesada | TTh 2 - 3:20pm
Our Community Voices helps Spanish heritage students to reconnect with their heritage language and culture, solidify their identity, and inspire them to contribute and be agents of change in their own linguistic and cultural community and in our local Syracuse community.
Fall 2024
NAT/REL 200: Indigenous Food Cosmologies
Professor Mariaelena Huambachano (Quechua, Peru)
Food has culture, history, and stories. This course will take you on a journey exploring Indigenous cosmologies (worldviews/cosmovision) and their philosophy of living well to understand the value of food for Indigenous peoples living in settler-colonial societies.
WRT 413: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Just Futures after Prison
Professor Patrick Berry
Working with Project Mend and the Center for Community Alternatives, the course explores the prison-industrial complex and its relationship to ethics, justice, and rhetoric for justice-impacted people. Students will partner with formerly incarcerated writers and learn how rhetoric and ethics are used to shape policy and perception about prison, crime, and punishment.
CSD/HNR 400/600: Culturally Responsive Healthcare
Professors Jamie Desjardins & Stephanie McMillen
This is a 3-credit hybrid course designed to promote optimal healthcare outcomes for refugees and other at risk and/or vulnerable populations. The course is geared towards students, in any major, who are interested in careers in health care or education. No clinical experience or pre-requisites required
2023-24 Engaged Courses Cohort
ENG 420: Everyday Media and Social Justice
Professor Roger Hallas
Although family photos and home movies have been significant to the social construction of white, middle-class heteronormativity, they have also been mobilized to transform the private into the public, preserve marginalized community histories excluded from official archives, and bear witness in social movements from Abolition to Black Lives Matter. We will engage with Family Pictures Syracuse, an inclusive, sustainable, and transformative community-based project for public memory, collective well-being, and social justice through communities coming together to share their stories through family photos.
LIN 300: Linguistics at Work
Professor Amanda Brown
In this course, students will partner with the Museum of Science and Technology (MoST) in Syracuse on a project entitled, “The Science of Language,” to develop exhibits that showcase in engaging and interactive audio-visual and kinesthetic ways the scientific phenomena behind language acquisition, processing, and use. Exhibits will be implemented at the MoST in spring 2024.
MAT 1XX: Social Justice Mathematics
Professor Nicole Fonger
This course leverages the historically responsive literacy framework and the model of Syracuse Truth Seekers (an EHN Engaged Communities project) to integrate a community-facing project that puts SU students into contact with Syracuse School District students and teachers through collaborative social justice mathematics and mapping.
CSD 650: Clinical Practicum
Professor: Kristen Kennedy
CSD 650 Clinical Practicum, is a component of the Doctor of Audiology (AuD) program, through which students complete semester long externships in various locations, including educational settings. One aspect of audiological services in educational settings is the fitting of Hearing Assistance Technology (HAT) for students with hearing impairment. Funds from the Engaged Courses Grant will be used to secure 6 new HAT devices for students in the Syracuse City School District, providing access to technology for hearing impaired children with diverse backgrounds while providing a clinical training opportunity for students.
WRT 114: Introduction to Creative Non-Fiction, Writing & Translating Cultures
Professor: Sevinç Türkkan
WRT 114 is an introduction to the art of creative nonfiction across languages and cultures. The course brings together SU students and members of the North Side Learning Center to explore questions about how cross-cultural exchange influences our sense of self. We explore the meaning and value of creative non-fiction, engage in collaborative translations, and write about ourselves in the context of broader cultures, places, and histories of displacement.