03/25/2025
This spring, 11 SUNY Cortland faculty members joined three of their colleagues from last year in a fledgling democracy engagement program tasked with directly linking Cortland classrooms and the students’ communities — to the benefit of both.
The 11 university educators are participating in the Cortland Applied Learning Practitioners Democracy Engagement (CALP DE) Fellows program, through which they will incorporate applied, that is, experience-based, learning and democracy engagement principals into existing syllabi.
CALP DE Fellows are a community of practice for SUNY Cortland colleagues who want to design or refine their own courses. Students in these courses apply their knowledge to address real life issues, according to John Suarez, director of SUNY Cortland’s Barbara A. Galpin ’68, M ’74 Institute for Civic Engagement.
The original three CALP DE Fellows will reflect on how this work changed their understanding of the purpose and importance of their teaching as well as on new opportunities for scholarship during a sandwich seminar on Thursday, April 17, in Old Main Colloquium.
The presenters, who will begin at noon, are Deborah Silvis, childhood/early childhood education; Gabriel Colella, English; and Jason Page ’08, M ’12, recreation, parks and leisure studies.
Below are the newest CALP DE Fellows with department and course prefix and title:
- Chelsea Stinson, foundations and social advocacy, FSA 479: Social Curriculum and Behavior Support
- Qwynne Lackey, recreation, parks and leisure studies, REC 129: Advocacy
- Cody Harrington, childhood/early childhood education, EDU 481: Internship in the PDS
- Jose Ortiz, foundations and social advocacy, FSA 100: Urban Education
- Noah Wason, English for PWR 330: Rhetoric in the Public Sphere: Surveillance and social media
- Paul Arras, communication and media studies, COM 235: Introduction to Media Literacy
- Chris Badurek, geology, GRY 301: Climate Change and Society
- Samantha Applin, sociology, SOC 329: Critical Thinking in the Social World
- Xiaoping Fan, physical education, EDU 355: The Physical Education Curriculum: Planning and Practice
- Justin Bucciferro, economics, ECO 105: Political Economy and Social Thought
- Karen Davis, psychology, PSY 329: Special Topics in Psychology [its connection to law]
In early 2024, Suarez was picked to be among 10 fellows for SUNY’s new Civic Education and Engagement and Civil Discourse Initiative, tasked with advancing the 64-campus system’s commitment to civic engagement as an essential outcome of higher education.
From 1999 through 2017, Suarez’s English Composition service-learning students applied course content as they participated in community programs dedicated to, for example, addressing food insecurity and to tutoring and mentoring area youth.
From that, Suarez learned a hard lesson: refocus to enable his students to effect more lasting change by partnering with an appropriate level of government, which can address causes of issues through, for example, changes in policy.
“In addition to working with a not-for-profit agency or coming up with your own project, students are partnering in some way with government,” Suarez said. “The difference is that government not only has greater resources, usually financially, but more importantly, it comes up with the policy, with the laws.”
On April 17, Assistant Professor Page will discuss how he reworked the lecture style course Rec. 293: Recreation Inclusion and Diversity. His students had struggled to connect with outdated syllabus content.
“The onus for me was on starting to connect these overall themes of incorporating greater diversity and inclusion into recreation services but also having the students look at it from a local government perspective so they could understand how all of these systems worked to provide programming,” Page said. “Then students would do some problem solving of issues they had found locally.”
Last fall, Page’s students started gathering data and speaking directly to the recreation professionals in their hometowns, both big and small, downstate and upstate. They analyzed their findings together.
“I think it’s just about creating the spaces for conversations,” Page said. “I think a lot of the challenge we have is in conversations we think are sensitive, for example, ‘What if we talk about diversity and say the wrong thing?’”
His students instead sought barriers and obstacles affecting anyone and everyone.
“In the conversations, we were talking about familiar things, and we felt safer having these conversations,” Page said.
Assistant Professor Silvis will revisit how she reworked a required course for students in SUNY Cortland’s early childhood development major, Integrated Curriculum Development for Young Children. The class already worked directly with children through the Head Start schools of Cortland County Community Action Program, Inc. (CAPCO).
“Students reported learning how to help children cast ballots, create polls and surveys and generally go ‘beyond community helpers,’ which is a standard social studies topic in early childhood education,” Silvis said.
“I hope that, through an emphasis on social studies in early childhood education, my students recognize entry points for democracy engagement starting in early childhood,” she said.
CALP DE Fellows are awarded a one-time $1,000 stipend to offset the significant time and effort involved in redesigning their existing course.
Ten of the most recent fellowships were made possible thanks to an alum with a long history in education, volunteerism and philanthropy, retired Long Island physical education teacher Barbara Galpin’68, M’74. Last year, she bestowed on SUNY Cortland a naming gift that aims to educate SUNY Cortland students through projects with positive real-life impact. The 11th stipend this year was supported by the Haines Fund, tapped by SUNY Cortland President Erik J. Bitterbaum.