Online Learning and Tools

IA’s online learning opportunities and tools include our Teaching and Learning Circle, Meet IA sessions, IA Member Workshops, and other virtual programming.

To stay up to date on upcoming IA virtual programming and other learning opportunities and tools, please sign up for the IA listserv, which includes a monthly newsletter and announcements on special events and opportunities.

If you would like to propose a topic for our Teaching and Learning Circle, or if you have questions about the learning opportunities or tools below, please reach out to us at connect@imaginingamerica.org.

– Teaching and Learning Circle

The IA Teaching and Learning Circle (TLC) is an online learning community that builds peer support and conversations about the opportunities, joys, and challenges of producing public and activist scholarship, as well as designing and delivering community-engaged courses and projects. Organized and facilitated by IA staff and featured guests, each online conversation engages participants in collaborative thinking, dialogue, and group work around a set of questions and dynamics that emerge from the featured topic. Our TLC Study Groups are more intimate, members-only spaces for more in depth conversations about pressing issues of shared concern within the IA consortium.

Past TLCs include:

• TLC: Artists and Scholars Changing Culture, Creating Change: Findings from an Imagining America Research Initiative, with Kal Alston and Erica Kohl-Arenas, Thursday February 23, 2023.

• TLC: Graduate Education Counterspaces: Imagining America and Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE), with D. Romo, Trina Van Schyndel, and Dillon S., Thursday May 11, 2023.

• TLC Study Group: Live your Values, Transform the Academy, with Christopher Long and Nicky Agate, Wednesday, March 2, 2022.

• TLC Study Group: No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education, with Leigh Patel. This Study Group explored the critical ways in which study and struggle have been linked. With examples from political education in social movements and their public pedagogies, we thought together about how social change has happened and its possibilities in higher education. On Wednesday, January 19, 2022.

• TLC Study Group: Transforming Institutional Culture through Connection and Courage, with San José City College President Rowena M. Tomaneng on Wednesday, November 10, 2021.

• “A Recipe for a National Coalition: Performing Our Future” on Wednesday, September 22, 2021.

• Finding the Roots of Theater for Social Change, with members of Open Channels, a new online learning community of popular theater artists from the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora. On Wednesday, May 18, 2021.

• In the Struggle book talk hosted by Imagining America with Daniel O’Connell and Scott Peters, authors of In the Struggle: Scholars and the Fight Against Industrial Agribusiness in California, and special guests Miguel Altieri and Janaki Anagha, on Wednesday, September 29, 2021.

• Sites of Exchange and Collaboration in Art Practice and Education A talk with artist, educator, and agitator Robin Hill about the collaborative work she has enacted in her professional practice as well as the work of her students and ideas of site-specificity and sense perception. She was joined by guest speaker Cathy Koehler, resident Director of the McLaughlin Reserve, an important wilderness research resource for Hill’s teaching and practice alike.

• Creating Culture Change through Regional Cluster Organizing A conversation with the IA SoCal Cluster lead organizer Rissi Zimmermann and founder Maria Avila, as they share an approach to regional organizing in alignment with IA’s mission and values, the benefits of regional organizing to cluster members, and the role of collective leadership in creating institutional/organizational and community culture change.

• The Activist Academic: Engaged Scholarship for Resistance, Hope, and Social Change A Conversation with Colette Cann and Eric DeMeulenaere facilitated by Erica Kohl-Arenas, with special guests Margo Okazawa Rey and John Saltmarsh.

• Decolonial Desires: Is a Third University Possible? A conversation with la paperson (K. Wayne Yang, UC San Diego) guest facilitated by Jack Tchen (Rutgers-Newark) on hotwiring university “machines” to the practical work of decolonization. Co-hosted in partnership with The Globalsl Network.

• The Just and Inclusive Campus: Small Wins and Enduring Challenges in Supporting Equity and Public Scholarship, reflecting on the current state of diversity and inclusion work on academic campuses, and the relationship to engaged teaching and scholarship. Led by Kal Alston (Syracuse) and KearyAnn O’Meara (Maryland College Park).

• “Beyond the Stats: Representation, Counter-Narratives, and Education as an Organizing/Survival Strategy,” featuring coursework and the pedagogical approach of Beyond the Stats (BTS), a collective of formerly incarcerated and system impacted students enrolled at UC Davis. Led by BTS co-founders Tina Curiel-Allen and Daniel Mendoza.

• “Organizing Against Violence: Towards a Pedagogy and Praxis of Anti-Colonial, Anti-Capitalist, and Anti-Patriarchal Resistance,” featuring the work of an IA consortium learning group led by Mallika Bose (Pennsylvania State University) and Kush Patel (University of Michigan).

– Meet IA

Meet IA sessions help orient prospective, new, or current members (i.e. leadership, faculty, staff, and students at IA member institutions) to the IA network. Attendees can expect to interact with IA staff and National Advisory Board members, as well as hear about current and upcoming IA initiatives and programs. There will also be time for questions throughout the session.

Below are Meet IA dates and registration links for the 2023-24 academic year:

• Thursday, February 22, 2024, at 1 pm PT / 4 pm ET
• Wednesday, May 22, 2024, at 1 pm PT / 4 pm ET | Register here

– Information Sessions

Various IA initiatives may present information sessions throughout the year. For example, we have held information sessions on IA’s two student fellowship programs: 1) Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellowship and 2) Joy of Giving Something (JGS) Fellowship. We have also held information sessions regarding proposal submission for IA’s National Gathering.

– Dissertation Dish

Dissertation Dish is webinar series and a collaboration between the International Association for Research on Service Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE), Imagining America, and LEAD California (formerly California Campus Compact). Each Dissertation Dish highlight quality emerging research in the field of service learning and community engagement by providing a platform for recent doctoral degree recipients to share their work more broadly.

Past Dissertation Dish webinars include:

• “Evaluating Engaged Research in Promotion and Tenure: Not Everything that Counts Can Be Counted,” with Lauren A. Wendling, Director of Institutional Success, Collaboratory. On Thursday, December 1, 2022.

• On Becoming a People’s College: An Appreciative Inquiry, with Sean Crossland, Assistant Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Utah Valley University. On Tuesday, October 11, 2022.

• Engaging Sameness: A Phenomenological Study Of The Community Engagement Experiences Of Latinx Students At A Hispanic Serving Institution, with Dr. Marisol Morales, Executive Director of Carnegie Elective Classifications, American Council on Education (ACE). On Tuesday, August 2, 2022.

• Engaging Feminism, Transforming Institutions: How Community Engagement Professionals Employ Critical Feminist Praxis to Re-Imagine and Re-Shape the Public Purpose of Higher Education, with Dr. Star Plaxton-Moore, Director of Community-Engaged Learning, University of San Francisco. On Tuesday, June 28, 2022.

• A Framework for Justice-Centering Relationships and Understanding Impact in Higher Education Community Engagement, with Dr. Melissa Quan, winner of the 2021 IARSLCE Dissertation of the Year Award, Director of the Center for Social Impact at Fairfield University. On Wednesday, April 27, 2022.