Illustrations by Ryan Olbyrsh
Community-engaged scholarship happens where learning goals and community goals converge. Collaborating on projects and programs benefits both the Muhlenberg students and the local partners involved.
This spring, two young alumni and a current student experienced the thrill of seeing their research published for the first time. The paper “Effects of a School-Based Mindfulness Program for Young Children” appeared in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, with Tovia Marinstein ’20, Brooke Bailey ’20, Sarah Cehelyk ’22 and Professor of Psychology Mark Sciutto listed as co-authors. The fifth co-author, Denise Veres, founded the Allentown nonprofit Shanthi Project, which administers school-based mindfulness programs in the Lehigh Valley and New Jersey.
In 2013, Sciutto heard through a colleague that Veres needed help evaluating the effectiveness of Shanthi Project’s programs, a step that’s required to secure funding. At the time, Sciutto was teaching Psychological Assessment, a class in which students learn how to measure and quantify psychological variables such as intelligence, love and resilience. A group of his students worked with Veres to come up with measures Shanthi could use to evaluate its programs. When Sciutto taught the class again in 2015, another group did the same.
“Prior to founding Shanthi Project in 2010, I had a 20-plus year career in medical research, and though I appreciated how data can drive program development, behavioral research was new to me,” says Veres, who served as Shanthi’s director of research when the recently published study was underway. “Sciutto’s interest in Shanthi’s early work and his willingness to lend expertise and collaborate long-term helped Shanthi achieve the goal of presenting ever-improving and relevant programs based on robust research.”
In Spring 2019, Sciutto taught a seminar in which Shanthi Project identified three dimensions of its school-based mindfulness program it wanted to evaluate and students, including Marinstein and Bailey, worked with Veres and a colleague to develop assessment methods. The two students then joined Sciutto’s research group and worked with Shanthi to collect data on the outcomes of their programs at a local elementary school in Fall 2019. Cehelyk joined the research team as it began the process of analyzing the data and writing up the results. In addition to the published paper, this cyclical relationship has produced valuable insights for a community partner as well as opportunities for students to apply what they’re learning.
“This project arose out of multiple years of collaborative work with Shanthi Project. At every step of the process, students have played an integral role in shaping the questions, methodology, analysis and dissemination of this research,” Sciutto says. “Community-engaged research, when mutually beneficial like this, can be truly transformative for all parties involved.”
Reciprocity is a central value of all community engagement at the College, including the work that happens within the context of courses or independent research. When faculty, staff and students form relationships with local partners, they can collaboratively identify where their interests and knowledge might overlap. The potential to do something that benefits not just the students and the community partners but the Lehigh Valley as a whole then emerges.
Many College departments and programs offer community-engaged learning opportunities. In any given semester, approximately 10 courses are connected to communities, and community-engaged scholarship outside the classroom takes place throughout the academic year and over the summer. While the scholarship itself can look very different from one discipline to the next, there is an overarching thread that ties this work, including the sampling of opportunities that follow, together: “They’re all addressing particular issues that will make our collective communities stronger, better places to live,” says Director of Community Engagement Beth Halpern. “It’s not necessarily about the particular organization or relationship but about what makes our community spaces stronger, more equitable and healthier.”
About a decade ago, Senior Lecturer of Biology Kimberly Heiman found herself on the board of four local nonprofit organizations, including Friends of the Allentown Parks. She joined to contribute her expertise in sustainability and conservation, and at meetings, issues would arise that dovetailed with what she was teaching.
“As I was listening, I thought, ‘I could throw some students at that question and we could get the answer,’” she says. “If you’re a nonprofit or an agency working in a cash-strapped environment, you don’t have the people power to answer all your questions.”
Starting in 2013, she began utilizing students in her Local Sustainability course to work on projects identified in collaboration with Karen El-Chaar, who was then the executive director of Friends of the Allentown Parks. The partnership continued after El-Chaar became Allentown’s director of parks and recreation in 2018.
“The goal of community-engaged learning is that the professor has particular learning goals for a project or a course. A community partner has different needs. Together, you find this happy middle ground,” Heiman says. “What good community-engaged learning requires is the flexibility to adjust assignment details to meet the immediate concerns or needs or efforts of whatever the community partner is working on while retaining the core learning goals of the project.”
One year, the parks department sought to control certain invasive plants, so Heiman’s students supported a multi-site removal effort involving hundreds of volunteers by creating handouts to help individuals identify the species in question and participating in the removal. Another year, Heiman’s students planned a restoration planting at the city’s Union Terrace Park, and the following year, with help from funds from a Mellon grant, a new class of students made it happen.
“Working with [Heiman] and her Local Sustainability students has proven to be an extremely valuable partnership. Students have the opportunity to take a real parks-related situation, [conduct] research and apply the classroom knowledge to develop potential recommendations and solutions,” El-Chaar says. “Given the success of so many projects, I look forward to continuing our collaborative ventures well into the future.”
Heiman will be working with El-Chaar to plan what the course will look like in Spring 2022, when students will again use what they’re learning to support Allentown’s parks.
“A lot of times, we as professors are teaching about stuff that could be applied, but if we don’t take a moment to apply it, it’s hard for students to see the real-world implications of what they’re learning,” Heiman says. “Being able to ground the classroom knowledge in the real world helps make it stick more and helps the students visualize how it can be useful beyond a test or a classroom setting.”
The first semester Professor of Psychology Kate Richmond ’00 taught her Inside-Out course at Lehigh County Corrections Center, in Spring 2018, thirty Muhlenberg students applied for 15 spots. As she prepared to teach it a third time, she received 110 applications.
“It’s a transformative experience,” Richmond says of the course. “You are definitely not the same person after taking that class. You experience knowledge in a different way.”
The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, which was jointly started by a formerly incarcerated man and a Temple University professor in 1995, is a pedagogical model meant to bring unlikely people together for sustained conversations working toward the goal of education, Richmond says. The “unlikely people” here are college students and students who are incarcerated, who spend a semester attending class together within a prison. Any instructor who completes the Inside-Out training can create their own course; Richmond’s, which she developed in conjunction with the corrections center’s administrators, deals with mass incarceration in the United States.
“I remember meeting with [Richmond] for the first time, listening to her speak about her ideas for this class and thinking to myself, ‘We need to make this happen,’” says Warden Laura Kuykendall. “By [residents] sharing their life experiences with the [Muhlenberg] students, both the students and residents see how mass incarceration impacts every community.”
Outreach & Assessment Librarian Jess Denke co-facilitates the course with Richmond, partially because the prison restricts how information can be accessed and shared. At the start of the semester, all students receive a binder of printed, prison-approved readings, a legal pad and a pen; this is what all of them, including the Muhlenberg students, will use to complete assignments. Without instant connection to technology, students spend more time developing complicated questions that Denke later researches for them when her access to library materials and the internet resumes.
When the semester begins, tension runs high. Many Muhlenberg students are setting foot in a prison for the first time. The incarcerated students often feel suspicious—most programming at the prison is heavily monitored and goal-focused (covering, for example, how to get a job), while this course is relational and dialogic.
“The way the activities are structured, we’re immediately building community with the goal of learning together,” Richmond says. “By the end, I have moments where I forget who’s a Muhlenberg student and who’s a student who’s incarcerated.”
Those who’ve taken the class have sustained their connections through a think tank they formed in the fall of 2018. Alumni of the course started meeting every six weeks to catch up over a meal and to collaborate on effecting change within the prison system. Pre-pandemic, each gathering would draw 40 to 50 people; while the group has continued to meet virtually, formerly incarcerated individuals tend to have less access to technology, Richmond says, and that has been a challenge. The think tank’s most recent focus was on bail reform and how to support other local groups’ activism on the issue.
“This opportunity brings together the textbook knowledge with the lived experience,” Richmond says. “The stakes are so high in that space that we feel an obligation, once all of us understand mass incarceration and connect with someone who lives it, to do something about it.”
Every summer since 2013, Professor of Biology Marten Edwards has taken students—clad in long sleeves and pants and doused in bug repellent—to the same 10 wooded areas in the Lehigh Valley. The group drags large rectangles of white corduroy across the ground; ticks mistake the soft fabric for the belly of a mouse, one of their favorite hosts, and latch on.
Collecting ticks and testing them for pathogens every year allows Edwards to identify trends and share that information with local hospitals. While the longitudinal study is funded by Lehigh Valley Health Network’s (LVHN) Luther Rhodes Endowment for Infectious Disease Research, Edwards shares what he learns with doctors from multiple health networks in the area.
“We get a much clearer understanding of what the likelihood of tick-borne infections will be in our patient population,” says LVHN’s Chief of Infectious Diseases Dr. Mark Knouse. “[Edwards] is very passionate about his work and we have learned an enormous amount when he and his students come to present their data and review posters with us.”
LVHN initiated the research to better understand how many ticks in the Lehigh Valley were carrying multiple disease-causing pathogens. At the time, many doctors knew to screen patients for Lyme disease, but LVHN wanted data on what else was out there. Edwards knew it would need to be a long-term commitment: “The data from any one particular year isn’t going to give you a very accurate picture,” he says. “Tick populations fluctuate naturally. If we were to just report from one year, it could be a heavy year or a light year. What we’re really interested in here is long-term trends.”
He and his student researchers published findings in 2015 and again in 2019; the goal is to publish every four years. Since the last paper came out, the field team has discovered longhorned ticks, an invasive species from Asia that arrived in the United States in 2017, for the first time in this region. The amount of disease-causing pathogens has remained flat, but that’s not a good thing: “We’re stable at a high level for the bacteria that cause Lyme disease,” Edwards says. “The others, while they’re still at low levels, is not a reassurance for someone who gets those pathogens. It’s extremely important for people to know that other pathogens are circulating in the area.”
Participating in this research benefits students because they’re able to experience the scientific process in a hands-on way. When they review research from other labs, they’re better able to identify potential issues because they’ve struggled with similar challenges in their own work. They also sometimes get to see how their efforts have affected members of the community who enjoy spending time in the places they drag for ticks.
“When we’re out in the field, we always talk to people who walk by: ‘Have you seen any of these ticks? You know there are ticks out here?’ People used to be surprised,” Edwards says. “Now they know. They say, ‘We’re going to check ourselves later,’ or, ‘Yes, I’m wearing my special tick socks.’ There’s a lot more awareness in this area. That’s extremely important. Lyme disease is preventable, and in the early stages, it’s very treatable.”
The LGBTQ+ community in the Lehigh Valley has a rich history, with the first known local LGBT organization, Le-Hi-Ho, forming months before New York City’s Stonewall riots in 1969. But, prior to 2016, the newsletters, photos and other materials documenting the early decades of LGBTQ+ activism in the region “were basically in people’s attics and basements and the trunks of their cars,” says Special Collections & Archives Librarian Susan Falciani Maldonado.
That changed when Adrian Shanker ’09, founder and executive director of Allentown’s Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center, approached Trexler Library about collecting and organizing these artifacts and making them available to the public. The partnership between Bradbury-Sullivan Center and the College became the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive. The archive includes materials from local AIDS advocacy organization Fighting AIDS Continuously Together Lehigh Valley (F.A.C.T.), including organizational records and memorabilia from fundraising events. More recently, through a Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium grant, the archive has gathered oral histories from LGBTQ+ community members who lived through the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s in the Lehigh Valley.
“There is a false narrative that suggests that LGBTQ+ people historically gravitated toward major cities, but with the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive, we make it clear that LGBTQ+ people live here, have always lived here and have made significant impacts on the Lehigh Valley community—including during the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic,” Shanker says. “Preserving local LGBTQ+ history provides a window into our past and a road map for future generations of advocates. That’s why this work is so important for our Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ community.”
Bradbury-Sullivan Center hired Muhlenberg students to work as digital archive assistants with a goal to digitize and increase access to the archival materials. While students from several disciplines (including anthropology and political science) have interacted with the archive, the integrative learning course HIV and AIDS in the Lehigh Valley utilizes it the most. Teaching and Learning Librarian Rachel Hamelers launched the course in 2019 specifically to make use of the archive. Her students—all of whom were born after the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the U.S.—work with archival materials and hear from local speakers to better understand what it was like to live through that era. A few of her students, inspired by something they saw in the archive in class, have gone on to conduct independent research related to the coursework.
Other students have also utilized the archive: For the past two summers, Mary Foltz, an associate professor of English at Lehigh University, has brought in undergraduate and graduate students to explore the existing material and plan how to expand it and exhibit it. Foltz and colleagues from other Lehigh Valley institutions and Bradbury-Sullivan Center have been instrumental in collecting the archive’s oral histories, and the group has a shared goal of making the archival material less scholarly facing and more approachable to the general public.
“Capturing the activism and the history of the LGBTQ+ community, or any marginalized community, is a really important contribution to scholarship and to the future telling of stories that have too often been brushed aside,” Falciani Maldonado says. “Taking this material in the archives and turning it into exhibit panels or a website that allows it to be consumed and enjoyed by the public, outside of academia, is the essential goal of public humanities work.”
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