I have been accepted into the Engaged Pedagogy Initiative for Winter 2018. I look forward to this opportunity to work with this diverse interdisciplinary cohort. Throughout this program we will focus on engaged pedagogy, community-based learning, and public scholarship.
What is the Engaged Pedagogy Initiative?
The Engaged Pedagogy Initiative (EPI) The EPI is a semester-long community-based learning (CBL) graduate training program that promotes excellence in undergraduate teaching and graduate student professional development.
The EPI was established in 2014 through a collaboration between LSA's Community-Engaged Academic Learning (CEAL), the Residential College, and the Rackham School of Graduate Studies. Through the EPI, graduate students from across campus explore the theoretical foundations and ethical implications of CBL. In addition to creating a CBL course, participants present their key learning in a public form: the EPI Symposium.
Click here to learn more about the Engaged Pedagogy Initiative at the University of Michigan.
Click here to learn about the other EPI Fellows.
Laura-Ann Jacobs is a doctoral student in the School of Education specializing in Literacy, Language, and Culture. Prior to her doctoral program, Laura-Ann taught public high school English in South Carolina for six years. Laura-Ann’s research centers on youth identity and youth literacies and is driven by her belief that youth voices matter. Broadly, her research focuses on youth-created counter-stories. Her current work considers performance as a space of empowerment for youth of marginalized identities. In this work she explores storytelling in general and stand-up comedy in particular as productive sites of identity exploration and expression. As an EPI fellow, Laura-Ann hopes to create a curriculum that supports students in the creation of their own counterstories in the form of stand-up comedy sets.