Faculty have the option of identifying their courses as civic engagement (“CE”) courses in UM-Flint course schedules. The “CE” indicator in the course schedule will help students search SIS for courses that provide significant learning experiences in and with the community. The indicator is also used to track such courses for institutional reporting and to identify courses that are eligible for the UM-Flint Civic Engagement Course Support Program.
Based on existing practices at UM-Flint, courses are eligible for the “CE” indicator if they have at least one of the three following components in the course syllabus:
1) The course contains an assignment that requires all students to work on a project for a real-world client or community partner (i.e. service-learning). Such assignments are connected to specific learning outcomes, provide a structured way for students to analyze and connect the project experience to learning, and address community needs.
2) The course contains at least two of the following types of experiential learning activities, involving the entire class, that are connected to specific learning outcomes:
• An assignment requiring students to gather evidence from or make observations in the local, regional, or broader community
• An assignment requiring students to make presentations to/for a community group, K-12, business, non-profit, government, association or other external audience
• An assignment requiring students to participate in meetings or events in the community
• An assignment requiring students to interview people in the community
• A field trip to illustrate or give students first-hand experience with course concepts
• At least two speakers or panels of community experts
3) The course is a clinical, practicum, or for-credit internship which reciprocally benefits students in the class and the community.
The “CE” indicator can be added or removed from your course at the section level via the course scheduling process facilitated by the Office of the Registrar. Only courses that will meet the Civic Engagement Course Indicator eligibility requirements should be listed as UM-Flint “CE” courses in the course schedule.
Please contact your Department or Program Chair to make changes, using these instructions for the online course scheduling worksheet:
• After logging into the EMS Campus/Campus Planning Interface, go to the Academic Browser. From there, double click on the course of interest to open the course details page.
• Within the Course Details tab, select “Edit Course Details”.
• Under the User Defined Fields area, you will see a field titled “Civic Engagement Indicator – select yes to add CE indicator to the section”. The default setting is always going to be “no”, even if your course section had the CE indicator in a prior semester. Using the drop down menu, please change the setting to “yes” to add the indicator, and click the Save button.
While the EMS Campus/Campus Planning Interface system is in the process of being customized for our campus, this online system is not fully communicating/syncing with Banner and the Office of the Registrar will be manually adding the CE indicator to the course schedule in Banner. As a result, please note that the “yes” setting will not appear when Assistant Registrar Stacy Lee re-opens the EMS Campus/Campus Planning Interface for final course schedule proofing: You will see the CE indicator setting is set to “no” for all course sections during the proofing phase. Therefore, please double-check the schedule once it is published to SIS to verify that relevant course sections do correctly have the CE indicator. If you find a discrepancy, please immediately notify Stacy Lee by email (stacylc@umflint.edu) to make the correction.
Once the schedule is published to SIS, “Civic Engagement” should appear as an attribute for courses that have been signed up for the CE indicator. (Please note that “Civic Engagement” is not a General Education attribute. The Office of the Registrar identified the attribute field as the best place in SIS to list the CE indicator.)
To verify that the Civic Engagement setting for your course section is consistent with how you will teach that course, search SIS for your course section(s) to see whether or not “Civic Engagement” is listed as an attribute. If “Civic Engagement” appears as an attribute, the course section must meet the minimum eligibility criteria provided above and University Outreach will provide course support if desired by the instructor.
For a list of all courses with the Civic Engagement indicator, use the Advanced Search option. In the Advanced Search screen, simply highlight the Subject(s) of interest (hold the Shift key on your keyboard to select all subjects) and choose “Civic Engagement” as an Attribute Type before clicking the Section Search button.
If you have any questions, please contact Mona Munroe-Younis (810-424-5481) or Jonathan Jarosz (810-424-5468).