Faculty of ArtDr. Luisa Canuto (FHIS) is hiring one graduate academic assistant as a Project Assistant with her CCEL-funded project, “‘Experiencing’ the language with mind and heart: Community-Engagement opportunities for UBC students from the Italian program.”
The Italian program intends to design comprehensive Community Engaged Learning Guidelines which will enable all language educators in the program to develop and integrate community engaged learning practices and processes into their courses.
The rationale behind the plan to develop these guidelines is based on feedback from language instructors and undergraduate students who, over the years, have lamented the lack of hands-on experiences that connect classroom learning to real-life situations and may provide an alternative to more standard assignments.
These guidelines will leverage what we have learned from our experiences with service learning since 2007 to create sustainable, evidence-based learning activities that support and enhance our course learning outcomes. Largely based on the Toolkit for Service-Learning in Higher Education (Seifer and Connors, 2007) our guidelines will respond to the needs of instructors and students from a UBC language program.
More specifically, our guidelines will include the following components:
- A list a community partners both local and international, which will include detailed information on each partner (i.e., contact person(s); their goals and expectations to partner with us; etc.). We anticipate this phase to be particularly critical and time consuming as it will involve extensive research to identify and develop the most effective partnerships.
- A list of community engaged learning opportunities, from speaker series to research-based and capstone projects, depending on our students’ language and academic level.
- A range of different community engaged learning assignments, based on students’ language and academic level.
- Evaluation resources for instructors and community partners, including grading and rubrics to evaluate students’ participation in community engaged experiences.
- A template syllabus which includes a section on community engaged opportunities for students.
- Reflection activities for community partners, faculty and students.
The Program Assistant will be involved in all project phases. Specifically, they will:
- Connect with potential partners
- Ensure effective communication among faculty and community partners
- Track project testing phases
- Contribute to the development of the Guidelines.
The Program Assistant will be expected to work an average of 4 hours/week between November 1, 2024 and March 15, 2025, with an expected break between December 15, 2024-January 15, 2025.
Note: The posting is designed for 4 hours per week for a total of 50 hours. However, the numbers of hours per week can be increased if the selected candidate prefers to complete their contract in a short period of time.
Hourly rate: $33.80 + benefits
Total hours: 50 hours
Start date: November 1, 2024
End date: March 15, 2025
- Good interpersonal and communication skills, i.e. comfortable leading conversations, composing professional emails, and responding to inquiries
- Interest in or knowledge of community-engaged learning, particularly as integrated into post-secondary instruction
- Some knowledge of instructional or pedagogical design
- Experience in or knowledge of language education
- Strong attention to detail and organizational skill
- Skilled in collecting and sharing information with others
- Ability to conduct research based on criteria provided
- Advanced competency in Italian language is an asset