03/25/2025
This spring, 11 SUNY Cortland faculty members joined three of their colleagues from last year in a fledgling Democracy Engagement Fellows program tasked with directly linking Cortland classrooms and the students’ communities — to the benefit of both.
This spring, the 14 Cortland Applied Learning Practitioners (CALP) participated in a series of seminars designed to refocus their course curriculum to emphasize several new teaching methods.
The faculty, also called “Dragons for Democracy,” have incorporated applied learning — learning by doing — strategies to one of their course syllabi focusing on collaboration with government.
Applied learning means, for example, that a workshop attendee participates while learning, putting their own knowledge to work, according to John Suarez, director of SUNY Cortland’s Barbara A. Galpin ’68, M ’74 Institute for Civic Engagement.
For now, this cohort is a resource for SUNY Cortland colleagues to design or refine their own courses. Their students will apply their knowledge to address real life issues outside the classroom and take the lead in class discussions.
SUNY Cortland’s Democracy Engagement Fellows also will participate in the interrelated SUNY-wide Community of Practice program.
Three original cohort members are seeking new colleagues to participate. They 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 “Dragons for Democracy 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.
Year after year, Suarez’s Composition students worked in a food kitchen feeding people while fulfilling their civic engagement requirement until, eventually, the clients’ children and grandchildren started showing up.
From that, Suarez learned a hard lesson: refocus to enable his students to effect more lasting change.
“In addition to working with a not-for-profit agency or coming up with your own project, you are partnering in some way with government,” he 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.
“If you go from civic engagement to democracy engagement, the difference is that you’re still working on the same goals in terms of improving people’s lives on whatever the issue happens to be,” said Suarez.
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 starting to connect these overall themes of incorporating greater diversity and inclusion into recreation services but have 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 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.
Democracy Engagement 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. She bestowed a naming gift that aims to educate SUNY Cortland students through projects with positive real-life impact. The 11th stipend was supported by the Haines Fund, tapped by SUNY Cortland President Erik J. Bitterbaum.