Cortland Applied Learning Practitioners’ Community of Practice

Introduction to the Community for Applied Learning Practitioners: CALP

Three SUNY Cortland programs that support faculty development in applied learning are Problem/Project-Based Learning (PBL), coordinated by the PBL Team (contact person is Beth Klein), Common Problem Pedagogy, whose principal investigator is Bruce Mattingly, and the new Community of Applied Learning Practitioners (CALP), coordinated by John Suarez.

In October of 2018, a six-member Advisory Panel chose five faculty members’ proposals to be supported by the CALP program. Those faculty members, their community partners, and their campus mentors will receive stipends to support development of their applied learning projects.

Mentors, in sharing their applied learning expertise, form a “community of practice.”  The five CALP faculty members named below will serve as mentors for faculty a year from now. 

In this way, the members of SUNY Cortland’s CALP program are a resource for those who want to design or refine their applied learning courses. They will also be part of the SUNY-wide Community of Practice program.

SUNY’s program helps expand and hone applied learning across the SUNY system so that graduates are well-prepared for a basic job- interview question:  “So, what experience do you have?”

Applied Learning’s real-life, authentic-learning experiences give students the opportunity to answer that question clearly and confidently.

The descriptions of these five “inaugural” CALP courses demonstrate the breadth and depth of these courses. Students will engage in unique multicultural projects; they will partner with not-for-profit organizations and with a government offices.