Appalachian Rural Economic Development An Authentic Learning, Community Engagement, Service Learning Project

1. Appalachian Rural Economic Development:
An Authentic Learning, Community
Engagement, Service-Learning Project
Gulf-South Summit on Service-Learning
March 2-4, 2011
Roanoke VA
Dr. Peter H. Hackbert, Professor and Director,
Entrepreneurship for the Public Good and Natalie Crone,
Undergraduate Student and EPG Candidate, Berea College

2. Our pathway today
Why is Appalachian
rural economic
development
important?
What is the role and
contribution of the
scholarship of
engagement?
How have we applied
concepts to
scholarship of
engagement?
What is the student
view of the service-
learning work?

3. EPG Instills Entrepreneurial Leadership
Abilities via Authentic Learning,
Community
Engagement and
Service-Learning
Mission statement - educating and
inspiring students from
Appalachia to become service-
oriented leaders
1,500 liberal arts and pre-
professional students
150 years
Learning, Labor and Service

4. The EPG Program defines
“Entrepreneurial Leadership” as:

5. Changing Appalachian Communities

6. Can the EPG Program can be the seed?

7. The context or community partners setting

8. 13 Appalachian States

9. Distressed Counties

10. Poverty rate in Appalachian Kentucky – 15.8%

11. Percent of High College Completion in
Appalachian Kentucky – 17.1%

13. Rural Communities

14. Kentucky River Area Development District
Population Change from Census 2008
to July 1, 2010: -3%

15. Kentucky River Area Development District
High School completion 65% and
College completion 10.5%

16. 31% of households in the past 12 month
incomes are below the poverty level

17. At no time in our history has the need been
greater for connecting the work of the academy
to the social and environmental challenges
beyond the campus.”
Ernest Boyer (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered

18. Scholarship of engagement taxonomy
Practice Theory Problems Addressed Methods
Public Scholarship Deliberative Complex “public”
problems requiring
deliberation
Face to face
Open forums
Participatory
research
Participatory
democracy
Inclusion of specific
groups
Face to face
collaboration with
specific publics
Community
partnerships
Social
democracy
Social change,
structural
transformation
Collaboration with
intermediary
groups
Civic literacy
scholarship
Democracy
broadly
understood
Enhancing public
discourse
Communication
with general public
Social
entrepreneurship
Bring creativity,
direct action, to
challenge
hegemony
Complex “social”
problems requiring
structural
transformation
Creates and
sustains new
equilibrium
Sources: Barker, D (2004) and Martin, R.L. and S.Osberg (2007)

19. Authentic learning
“Experiences of personal relevance that permit learners to
practice skills in environments similar to those in which the
skills will be used.”
Lebow (1993)
“Real-world tasks that a person can expect to encounter on the
job, in the home, or in social contexts.”
Newman and Wehlage (1993)

20. Dare to Dream
My dream is…

21. Conditions for Authentic Learning

22. Place-based Education
• emerges from the particular attributes of a
place
• inherently multidisciplinary
• inherently experiential
• connects place with self and community.

23. Appalachian Rural Development
• Requires a shift in economic development
policy priorities toward entrepreneurship.
• Associated with rural vitality
• Requires a ecosystems approach
• Civic entrepreneurs are key
• Human development.

24. Community partners

26. Characterizing a Design Thinker
Empathy. They can imagine the world from multiple perspectives – those of colleagues,
client, end users, and customers.
Integrative thinking. They not only rely on analytical processes but also exhibit the
ability to see all of the salient – and sometime contradictory – aspects of a confounding
problem and create novel solutions that go beyond and dramatically improve on existing
alternatives.
Optimism. They assume that no matter how challenging the constraints of a given
problem, at least one potential solution is better than the existing alternatives.
Experimentalism. Design thinkers pose questions and explore constraints in creative
ways that proceed in entirely new directions.
Collaboration. The increasing complexity of products, services, and experiences has
replaced the myth of the lone genius with the reality of the enthusiastic interdisciplinary
collaborator.
Tim Brown, Design Thinking (Harvard Business Review, June 2008)

27. 1. A Focus on Community Partners/Human Centered
2. Broad, Multi-Disciplinary Influences.
3. Ideation with Prototyping.
4. Finding Alternatives.
5. Wicked Problems.
6. Emotion.
7. No more “Who cares and “So what?”
Design Thinking / Service Learning Engagers

28. Our pathway today
Why is Appalachian
rural economic
development
important?
What is the role and
contribution of the
scholarship of
engagement?
How have we applied
concepts to
scholarship of
engagement?
What is the student
view of the service-
learning work?

29. Cultural