Professor Mick teaches Rhetorics of Gender and Poverty as well as the Capstone for Poverty Studies. She serves on the SHECP Governing Board.
SHECP Governing Board Member, Connie Snyder Mick, Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, has co-authored, “Service-Learning in Higher Education: Teaching about Poverty and Mental Health.” Her co-author is James M. Frabutt, and the chapter appears in “Service-Learning: Enhancing Inclusive Education,” 2017. This publication is part of a series, “International Perspectives on Inclusive Education,” published by Emerald Publishing Limited. Dr. Mick is associate director and academic director of the Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame as well as the co-director of the Poverty Studies Interdisciplinary Minor.
Mick reflects, “This book on inclusive education gave me the opportunity to consider how the pedagogy of service-learning can disrupt misperceptions of poverty. My chapter includes a literature review of service-learning courses that address poverty as well as case studies of two poverty-focused courses I teach. I argue that courses with direct service help students think relationally about people and poverty while community-based research courses help students think systemically about policy and poverty. I suggest that the most effective teaching about poverty includes both of these methodologies and it also accounts for students who themselves might come from a poverty background. I lift up the SHECP summer internships as a model of effective service-learning about poverty in the United States.”
The abstract reads, “Within tertiary education, service-learning can offer deeply engaging and transformational experiences for students, broadening their consideration of a host of social justice issues of our time, including diversity and inclusion. This chapter describes how service-learning interfaces with two areas in particular, both of which have wide-ranging public health implications and are generally misrepresented in public media: poverty and mental health. Representative studies are highlighted and case examples are presented in each domain, concluding with recommendations for future research. The authors argue that service-learning courses addressing social justice issues such as poverty and mental health can lead to deep learning in students if they are sequenced to include both direct service-learning that concretizes the issue and community-based research that highlights the public policy challenges and implications of addressing that issue systemically.”
To learn more, visit, http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/S1479-363620170000012014