In 2006, the National Center for Urban Education (NCUE) began offering course redesign support for ISU faculty teaching courses for education majors. Over the past fifteen years, close to 100 courses, across five colleges at ISU, have been redesigned under NCUE to incorporate urban education and community-integrated teacher preparation content.
This year, NCUE teamed up with the Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) and the Center for Teaching, Learning & Technology (CTLT) to integrate the urban course redesign process into the university-wide Summer Institute offerings. Through this partnership, NCUE was able to offer interested faculty the opportunity to engage in an interdisciplinary collaboration that supports participants in cultivating partnerships with urban communities to co-create knowledge and positive social change.
One integral redesign aspect for this year’s NCUE cohort that will continue will be a three day immersion experience that will include community scholars, workshops and panels from the NCUE community and school partners from five Chicago communities: Albany Park, Auburn Gresham, East Garfield Park, Little Village and Pilsen. The nurturing of this explicit connection between faculty and community is part of the NCUE model of community integrated teacher preparation.
The NCUE 2021 cohort comprises ISU Education faculty from Special Education and Art disciplines and includes courses taken by Special Education, Art, and Secondary majors. The NCUE cohort will participate in the CTLT Civic Engagement redesign course alongside eight other ISU faculty from a variety of disciplines across the university including Family & Consumer Science, Politics & Government, Educational Administration & Foundations, English, Marketing, Languages, Literatures & Cultures, Communications and Teaching & Learning. In addition, five faculty from Illinois Wesleyan University will join the group making this truly a cross-institutional collaboration. We are grateful to continue our redesign journey in collaboration with CCE & CTLT!
