The Long Awaited CEAP Poster Session Post

IT"S FINALLY HERE!

The first blog post from Scott this year.

I wanted to debrief the happenings of the CEAP poster session that occurred last Dec. 3rd.

First of all, a little introduction to CEAP: CEAP (pronounced "seap") stands for the Calvin Environmental Assessment Program. Bi-yearly students and cooperating teachers collect data from environmental studies they've done around Calvin and the surrounding community. The studies are then published on posters and displayed in the Science Building for an event called the poster session.

This years poster session was kicked off with a lecture given by Prof. Keith Grasman. His speech, entitled, "Canaries in the Coal Mine: Lessons from Fish-Eating Birds about Pollution in

the Great Lakes", described the many ways bird populations of the Great Lakes have been afflicted in the past decades. Chemical scares from DDT and PCB's have caused population depletion and reproductive problems in certain bird species. Although actions have been taken to reduce these chemicals and revive the bird populations, various other chemical pollutants still plague the Great Lakes. Prof. Grasman enumerated the problems bird populations face today and hypothesized several solutions. He also described some of the work he and his classes had personally done in this field of study. The speech was an hour long and very informative, accompanied by a detailed slideshow.

The poster session was next. A problem was suddenly presented for me though. The cookies and coffee the Catering Service had promised were not set up, and there were ten minutes remaining before people crowded into the Science Building Atrium for the poster session. I had to take drastic action. I ran up the stairs to the 2nd floor scanning up and down the hallways for any sign of the cookie and coffee cart. There was nothing in sight. So I briskly walked out the door and peered across commons lawn for any movement. Nothing. It was over. There was no cart. There would be no cookies and coffee. Just when all hope seemed lost, I walked downstairs to find two nice students with gold Calvin College Catering name-tags setting up tables and refreshemnts. I was saved. With the refreshments set up, the poster session could go on.

At the poster session, over a dozen students presented on subjects ranging from the architectural development of the business districts on Wealthy and Cherry street to the energy consumption of Calvin College campus facilities. Spectators could wander around from poster to poster, asking questions, listening to the students talk, or just reading the posters. The posters were colorful and informative and the presenters were enthusiastic about their material.

Overall the poster session was great. I hope to advertise a bit better this coming semester to attract a larger audience. But I look forward to working on it again.

Joy in the business of the season

Looking at the weather forecast today, I was a little sad to know that this beautiful sunny day might be the last fall day of this year. Pretty soon, with all of the snow coming in, the view outside my window will look like the beside picture (taken winter of my freshman year).

Yet, in an unexplainable way, I was excited to see snow this Monday for the first time since last April. Perhaps, the end of fall is here for a new beginning of winter season. And perhaps, this time in between Thanksgiving and Christmas is not just the final stressful end for us, but a hopeful beginning of what we can do better next time. As often as we feel down by the darkness of a cold winter, we are often discouraged and worn out by the business of the pre-Christmas season. With all the things that need to be done before Christmas such as final exams or work projects, Christmas shopping, etc…, we are worn down and thus forget how meaningful this time of year is.

At least, we know that the meaning is there if we just take a moment to look. There will be snow and winter breeze even when we are burdened by study, work or other responsibilities, if only we would spend one moment to find joy in such beauty. In the same way, when we are troubled by life, we find others that care for us enough to bring peace into our lives again. May we learn to not be isolated by the coldness of winter and the business of our lives, but may we be lightened up by the freshness of cold air and be joyful for such loving gifts we are to one another.

We Practice: Covenant Making

At the beginning of every year, the student staff of the Service-Learning Center honkers down in a room for a couple of hours with the intention of creating a covenant. It’s quite the involved process. We grapple with the task of somehow developing a collective description, a sort of mission statement, with the hopes that it might best reflect upon the work we do and the nuances involved with doing it.

After hours of producing, we then attach ourselves to this covenant. Through revisiting it, creating visual representation, reminding each other, and pushing one another to put these words to action, the goal is to produce a living covenant.

The covenant of the 2009-2010 S-LC staff reads as follows:

“Rooted in the hope of what can be, together with conviction and humility, we practice. *Clap*

Crying out

Asking for forgiveness

Engaging

Educating

Challenging

Hospitality

Building

Joy

Faithfulness

*Clap* Rooted in the hope of what can be, together with conviction and humility, we practice.”

Each person on staff has chosen one of these practices to focus on throughout the year. In order to better remind ourselves of these practices in our daily lives, we took some time during our staff retreat to create individual paintings of our practices. These will hang together in our office.

In order to work on these disciplines together, the group has decided to shape our staff weekly staff meetings around the covenant. Aside from beginning our meetings with it, we’ve been taking turns leading the meetings. Each week’s theme focuses on one of the practices, and the assigned staff member provides points of reflection, activities to bring to life some of its different aspects, and questions for discussion.

It’s been a challenging and humbling reminder of the different practices involved in a life of faith. It’s evident that some of us are more gifted in certain practices more than others, but that as we challenge one another to grow in new areas, these practices can come together to shape both us individually and as a whole community, in rather exciting ways.

Education, Service-Learning, and Christian Practices

A few weekends ago, the S-LC staff enjoyed our annual fall retreat. For the discussion portion of our evening away, we discussed two essays; one, a chapter in Craig Dykstra's book, Growing in the Life of Faith - we discussed chapter five, "Education in Christian Practices." The second essay was an address by Nicholas Wolterstorff entitled, "Christian Learning in and for a Pluralist Society." Below is a window into our conversation:

Two different Latin roots provide us with the English word "education." They are, first, "educare," which means to rear or bring up, as a child – to train, shape, or to mold, and second, "educere," meaning to draw out from within, or to lead forth. Both meanings are represented in the word "education." Many of the hot debates about education today are rooted in the differences between educere and educare.

Wolterstorff answers the question, “why make what is simple (the gospel of Christ) so complicated?” What is the place of Christian learning in a pluralist society?

Dykstra discusses what Christian practices have to do with education.

Practices are loosely defined as “habitations of the Spirit,” or “forms of participation in the practice of God.” “Patterns of communal action that create openings in our lives where the grace, mercy, and presence of God may be made known to us.”

Wolterstorff says that Christian learning allows Christian faith to shape it, from measuring what is legitimate to investigate, to affecting how one treats fellow learners and investigators. He says that “Christian learning is faithful learning. Learning faithful to faith in the triune God, learning faithful to the Christian community and its tradition, learning faithful to the Christian scriptures.”

Christian learning is also the learning that forms and shapes us. He uses the concept of “Christian enculturation.” He says, “being a Christian will incorporate a certain identifiable cultural formation. And for the acquisition of that formation, education is indispensable. Not necessarily academic learning; but certainly education.”

Wolterstorff sees learning ultimately as eucharistic, or grateful, and eirenic, or peace-bringing. It also carries the potential to bring destruction, and it isn’t always grateful, but in its purest forms it is eucharistic and eirenic. He also says that “Christian learning contributes to our shalom by interpreting reality and answering our questions.”

Wolterstorff shudders to think that the American Christian impulse is to downplay “the learning that helps to keep alive and hand on that tradition which consists of the eucharistic and eirenic cultural activities of our forefathers and foremothers in the faith.” Learning allows us to remember and be inspired by those who have gone before and who can instruct and inspire us for the work of the Kingdom.

He discusses the fact of our national directional/religious pluralism. In this context, “the business of Christian learning in our pluralistic society is to give content to the Christian voice in that dialogue which ought to be taking place in the public square of American society.” That public square is full of ideas about what justice and peace look like. Wolterstorff argues that Christians ought to bring the prophets, the gospel, the Christian wisdom of the ages, humbly to bear within that public square.

He makes the claim that “if there is to be that voice on behalf of biblical justice, there must be Christian learning.” The conversation that includes the Christian voice in dialogue with other voices may never take place, but if it ever does, Christian learning will be indispensable in order for a Christian voice to participate. Christian learning, according to Wolterstorff, must be accompanied by Christian virtues.

Dykstra then, in explaining what the practices are, and how they fit into a program of education, concludes that Christian practices, while sharing much in common with other types of practices, have the fundamental difference of not being about mastery and control – but of being about receiving gifts and grace instead.

Christian practices (think Crying Out, Asking for Forgiveness, Engaging, Educating, Challenging, Hospitality, Building, Joy, and Faithfulness) are human activities that are cooperative, socially established, and coherent and complex. They contribute to human moral progress.

“Practices are those cooperative human activities through which we, as individuals and as communities, grow and develop in moral character and substance.” Importantly, Dykstra argues, they can be taught, and hence, passed down from one generation to the next.

The way to learning a practice, according to Dykstra, is through good coaching, lots of words, attention and analysis, apprenticeship, some reading, conversation and argumentation, and a lot more physicality than we think. We need models, mentors, teachers and partners in practice. We also need to be models, mentors, teachers and partners in practice.

Dykstra acknowledges that we live in a world with multiple layers of practices, not all of which are Christian. What are some of our regular practices that are embedded in other layers of our layers outside the specific orbit of our Christian faith?

Here is where Wolterstorff and Dykstra overlap. Dykstra agrees with Wolterstorff in his comments relative to the intersection between our civic and our Christian practices and commitments. “Education in Christian faith must concern itself with the mutual influences that various practices have on one another, as well as with whatever complementarity or conflict may exist between the goods internal to Christian practices and goods internal to others. Because we are all citizens, for example, we must inquire in to the nature, effects, and implications of our simultaneous engagement in practices constitutive of Christian life and those central to public life in the broader culture. We need to inquire, for example, into the continuities and discontinuities between medical practice in our society and practices of care for the ill and the dying that are now and have been in the past characteristic of the church. This applies also to a wide variety of other social practices.”

Dykstra ends with an explanation of how Christian practices are peculiar from other practices. Fundamentally, this difference lies in the area of mastery, excellence and control. Rather than mastery, the human task according to the Christian story is to use the gifts of God rightly as gifts for good. Trust and grateful receptivity replace mastery and control as the end goals. Rather than excellence, we aim for faithfulness.

It is no coincidence that faithfulness is the final practice in the S-LC covenant for this year.

Questions

How are the practices in our covenant, like baseball learn-able? Teachable? Able to be analyzed?

How do they actually get practiced?

In what ways is the learning that attaches to service-learning like educere (draw out), and in what ways is it like educare (shape, mold)?

How are the practices that the Service-Learning Center enables and encourages designed to equip Calvin students to participate in the public square dialogue that Wolterstorff talks about?

How are our practices (Crying Out, Asking for Forgiveness, Engaging, Educating, Challenging, Hospitality, Building, Joy, and Faithfulness) designed to educate us with educere, or educare?

Want to serve next Spring? How about going on Spring Break Trip?

If you asked me these questions two years ago, I would say why not spend it with your friends and family instead? Don’t you do enough service-learning during your semester for your classes? But surprisingly, going on a service-learning spring break trip was one of the most eye-opening experiences I had last year, which greatly motivated me to do what I’m doing now at the Service-Learning Center.

An attempt to get away from campus and my mundane life brought me to Boston last spring break. In that one short week, I met and learned about the lives of amazing but ordinary people, formed relationship with fellow Calvin students whom I either just met or knew casually through classes. I was surprised by how I enjoyed getting physically tired by the end of the day and yet still feeling excited about working the next day. We were so grateful to be working alongside Boston Project staff members, who shared with us how the ministry came about and what it has done over the years as a part of Boston urban neighborhoods. It was also in this week that I was faced with many questions as we shared in our devotions what it means to do service in such places as Christians. The question of injustice has challenged us to look deeper into the familiar Micah passage and to understand what we were doing there and what we could take out of our service. It was certainly not easy to be dealing with these questions and engaging in honest conversations about privileges, injustices and faith, but it was surely eye-opening dialogues about how God has worked through the brokenness of our world and our own lives. In the midst of the frustration and confusion we felt as we tried to do our short-term service, we realized that there is tremendous hope in God’s word when he called us to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with him. The work of Boston Project Ministries reminded us of this promise. We left energized but also challenged to be aware and involved with our world with humility and faith.

Fortunate to have such great experience with Spring Break Trip, I was also amazed to hear from my friends as they came back from theirs. Now as I work in the Service-Learning Center, I am so pumped to be one of the first people to learn about the new Spring Break Trips. This year our office will have nine different Spring Break Trips that will take place across the nation, from the local communities of Grand Rapids to the urban ministries in Boston, Chicago, Knoxville, and other organizations that are committed in community development through creative means, intentional faith, and disaster relief.

Furthermore, the more exciting news is applications are now out for all students who are interested in being either participant or leader. Feel free to come by the Service-Learning Center to pick up applications or to chat with us more about questions that you have about the specific Spring Break Trip or just the application itself. Visit the link below, which will take you right to our website that includes the applications and more information about Spring Break Trips: http://www.calvin.edu/admin/slc/opportunities/spring-break-trips.html

Kent County-wide Food Drive is at the S-LC this coming Saturday, October 10

Like usual, we are so excited to be part of the annual ACCESS Food Drive that serves over 7000 households in Kent County each month . ACCESS is a twenty-five year old network of congregations and individuals that serves the greater needs of West Michigan neighborhoods in terms of hunger and poverty. One of their great programs is Hunger Initiative in which they have variety of food drives, pantry networks and food assistance programs that serve Kent County community.

Food Drives are designed to increase the supply of high needs items that sometimes are not always available at the food pantries such as soup, canned fruits and vegetable and personal care items. The County- Wide Food Drive is held on the second Saturday of October every year. It is ACCESS goal to collect close to 90 tons of food to help restock their food pantries which have been depleted after this summer.

Along with 1,700 volunteers, our office is hoping that we will see even a greater number of food items this year. Look for bright green boxes covered with Food Drive poster around campus or come into our office to drop off your donations. All nonperishable food items are collected on Friday, October 9th to be delivered to ACCESS on Saturday.

PARK(ing) Day 2009

This is the first year our SLC office joined PARK(ing) Day, along with the Off-Campus Program. Our transportation coordinator, Tina Bolt, who was one of the people in charge of making this happen, has put together a nice short blog to express what she has learned during this day. Check it out and learn more about what PARK(ing) Day is all about and what as Calvin College staffs and students did in this event.

PARK(ing) Day originated in 2005 by Rebar, a San Francisco art and design collective. Rebar wanted to raise awareness on the lack of park space in the city. By putting change in the meter of a parking space allowed Rebar to lease this real estate for a temporary amount of time. Rebar chose to lease a single parking space for the day and instead of parking a car chose to creatively transform this space into a small park. PARK(ing) Day is now an annual global event where any citizen can participate. The event has taken place in more than 50 cities including Chicago, New York, Toronto, London, Barcelona, and Grand Rapids!
This is the second year Grand Rapids participated in the PARK(ing) Day event. Calvin has participated in the event for both years. In 2008 Calvin’s Social Justice Coalition took part in the event, and this year the Service-Learning Center and Off Campus programs partnered with the Creston Neighborhood Association to participate in the festivities of PARK(ing) Day 2009. Recently the Creston Neighborhood Association received a Kaboom grant. The intent of this grant is to use playgrounds as a rallying point to initiate more community development and crime prevention. There is a hope that the neighborhood would come together to fix up a playground and this would result in more communication with one another. For further information visit http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/07/sweet_place_for_a_park_will_ge.html
“Our park” was located on Louis, just east of Monroe right on Rosa Park Circle. The theme of “our park” this year was the importance of play in our lives. People were invited into “our park” to play a game, share a favorite play memory or to just hang out. The theme of the importance of play in our lives incorporated the Creston Neighborhood Association very well.