When students come to Kenyon from all over the world, they may read great literature in Lentz House, do research for a chemistry class in Chalmers Library or speak Arabic in Ascension Hall. However, learning does not just happen on the Hill. Over the past decade, there has been an effort from various members of the Kenyon community to expand students’ learning beyond Gambier.
Well before the Wright Center opened in 2017, and the receipt of the Mellon Grant that created the Office for Community Partnerships (OCP) in 2014, individual faculty were collaborating with local community members to enhance students’ learning. One of those faculty members was Professor of Sociology Jan Thomas who later became associate provost and after that, director of OCP.
When Thomas came to Kenyon in 1996, some of her colleagues were already working with the community in their courses. In developing classes with community involvement, Thomas recalls asking community members to be involved in the classroom. “I started with just, ‘Could you come talk to my class? I want them to be able to apply the readings to the real world.’ So I invited people from the community to come talk about their work and their perspective on issues we had been discussing in class.”
In one of those courses, “Sociology of Health and Illness” (SOCY 224), Thomas invited participation for Knox County community members who worked in health care settings. “We had conversations with the CEO of the hospital, the health commissioner, a surgeon and a family practice doctor about their work and their views on health care,” Thomas said. In her research methods courses, her classes always collaborated with the community on a project. “For example,” Thomas said, “we assisted the health department with surveys and data analysis, looked at sex education in the high school and partnered with an MVNU (Mount Vernon Nazarene University) methods class to look at hooking up at Kenyon and MVNU.”
In 2013, at the same time Sean Decatur became Kenyon’s 19th president, conversations started about creating a formalized program building upon the community-involved classes. Kenyon decided to apply for the Sense of Place: College and Community Through Experiential Learning and Service Mellon Grant to create the OCP. Upon the creation of the office, Jen Odenweller was hired as director, and Professor of Spanish Clara Román-Odio became the faculty director.
Odenweller and Román-Odio worked together to establish community-engaged learning (CEL) courses. Thomas, who oversaw the administration of the grant as associate provost, explained, “Clara’s role was to train faculty in the pedagogy of community-engaged learning, and Jen’s role was to develop community partners. So when faculty are trained and have their syllabus ready, what kind of community partner do they want to work with to accomplish the learning goals? Jen was also on the other side saying, in the community, where are the needs? Is there a project that would be great for community-engaged learning class?”
Thomas describes Román-Odio as someone who pushed for the implementation of CEL pedagogy among the faculty. “She was really that one person that said we need to do this as a college, and I think it was that sort of the right thing at the right time,” Thomas said of Román-Odio’s passion.
“The first step for me was to create CEL courses and measure outcomes,” Román-Odio said. She created a class called “Cultural Productions of the Borderlands,” where students went to Mount Vernon’s Columbia Elementary School to understand and see the theories and representations of borderlands in practice. “My students grapple with issues of intersectionality, borders, colonial power through deep critical reflection and by recycling the theories of the borderlands and creative writing by people of color,” Román-Odio said. “They read children’s stories, and they talk about what it means to be different or to be bilingual or be on those borderlands with the fifth graders.”
As faculty director, Román-Odio worked to train faculty on pedagogical best practices for CEL courses. One of the first things she did was to develop a faculty learning community (FLC) in collaboration with Kenyon’s Center for Innovative Pedagogy. “The specific objective of this FLC was to support the creation and delivery of courses that utilize CEL pedagogy to promote the development of personal and social responsibility and civic engagement,” Román-Odio said. In the FLC, which is a group of professors learning about a subject, Román-Odio worked with faculty to develop their syllabi, so they could teach courses after the training program. “Everything that you are going to do that semester has to be reflected in that syllabus,” she said. “It’s a contract.”
To help get faculty buy-in, Román-Odio also worked with faculty on how to incorporate CEL into their research as well as their evaluations for promotion and tenure. Joe Klesner, who was Kenyon’s provost at the time, described Román-Odio as playing a big role in making sure that CEL was in front of professors — for example, at faculty meetings. “Without a strong faculty champion, it probably would have taken us a lot longer to get to have CEL courses across the curriculum,” said Klesner. Additionally, Román-Odio partnered with the then-newly formed OCP to connect faculty members with community members to be able to develop CEL courses.
While Román-Odio was getting faculty buy-in and leading the FLC, Odenweller was helping to arrange additional relationship-building opportunities for both faculty and community members. “The early stages of supporting the coursework development were really around thinking about what faculty needed to think differently about in order to offer a course they maybe were accustomed to teaching many times,” said Odenweller. OCP offered workshops, brought in outside speakers who had done the work before at peer institutions and discussed the goals that they had for their class and their academic departments.
Odenweller aimed to meet faculty where they were when assisting professors in teaching CEL courses. She had conversations with faculty over coffee and hosted mixers with community members and faculty at the Wright Center to help facilitate the creation of CEL courses. “We really treated those as community conversations,” said Odenweller. “A lot of those engagements planted seeds for those faculty members and peers in their department to become more familiar with what opportunities look like.”
While working with faculty was new to Odenweller, she was used to working with the community in her previous role as executive director of the United Way of Knox County. Klesner remembers being impressed by the amount of people Odenweller knew in the community. “We were looking for someone who had good community connections,” Klesner said of the search criteria. In her role with the United Way, Odenweller was responsible for facilitating community-building strategies through program investments
made in Knox County organizations that addressed health, financial stability and educational needs of the community. Many of these organizations became close partners of Kenyon.
Odenweller hired Alyssa Gómez Lawrence, who grew up in Knox County and was a 2010 graduate of Kenyon, in early 2016 to help establish the office. Gómez Lawrence was able to provide Odenweller with perspectives about Kenyon culture.
“I will never forget her interview for the position, when she shared ways in which she wished she could have experienced more collaboration with those off of the Kenyon Hill,” Odenweller said. “The search committee knew we had found someone special who would be a key element in building the OCP with the larger community in mind.”
They initially started to look at what other schools had done with similar types of offices. Odenweller worked to develop rules of engagement, such as treating everyone as equals in the process. “It wasn’t an Office for Community Engagement, it was an Office for Community Partnerships,” she said. “We made a very literal choice in establishing an office designed to foster mutually beneficial community partnership building.”