Second UW Community Engaged Faculty Institute Completed

Eleven University of Wyoming faculty members recently completed the second year of the Community Engaged Faculty Institute (CEFI) program. The institute provides UW faculty with professional development to create or redesign community-engaged and service-learning curricula.

This year’s CEFI was administered by the Office of Community Engagement, with support from the Office of Academic Affairs; the Science Initiative Learning Actively Mentoring Program (LAMP); Service, Leadership and Community Engagement (SLCE); and the Wallop Civic Engagement Program and Stewart Family Enrichment Fund, both within the School of Politics, Public Affairs and International Studies.

Rachel Watson, director of LAMP, served as lead program designer and facilitator of the program this year.

“Across eight immersive sessions, faculty fellows developed curriculum in which student outcomes determined the high-impact service-learning, problem-based, experiential and transformative pedagogies that faculty adopted,” Watson says. “Simultaneously, the fellows became a community and realized that they are not alone in their pursuit of teaching strategies that truly enable students to immerse in authentic learning landscapes.”

The 2024-25 Community Engaged Faculty Institute cohort was composed of faculty from a wide range of disciplines and units:

-- Michelle Blakely, School of Pharmacy in the College of Health Sciences.

-- Christi Boggs, Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning.

-- Karagh Brummond, Honors College and Science Initiative.

-- Conxita Domènech, Department of Modern and Classical Languages in the College of Arts and Sciences.

-- Grete Gansauer, Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources.

-- Thomas Grant, Honors College.

-- Paddington Hodza, Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center in the School of Computing.

-- Katelyn Kotlarek, Division of Communication Disorders in the College of Health Sciences.

-- Alison Mercier, School of Teacher Education in the College of Education.

--  Diksha Shukla, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences.

-- Anne Stevens, Department of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Community partners and guest presenters included Jenny Ingwerson-Niemann, an associate lecturer in equine science who completed CEFI last year; Pete Gosar, executive director of the Albany County Downtown Clinic; Noah Hull, a UW alumnus and laboratory technical manager in global health for the Association of Public Health Laboratories; and Aubrey Edwards, a visual artist, educator, community-engaged scholar and anthropologist.

Feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive, says Chicory Bechtel, Office of Community Engagement associate director.

“I highly recommend the CEFI to anyone curious about bridging classroom learning and real-world applications, developing effective solutions for complex community issues,” Hodza says.

“The CEFI experience was not only timely for my 2025-26 course prep, but also provided fantastic resources and a support network to ensure this offering will be successful,” Kotlarek  adds. “I would highly recommend this institute to anyone thinking about integrating service learning into their course or degree program.”

Erin Olsen-Pueblitz , director of the Office of Community Engagement, emphasizes that the institute offers faculty a collaborative and supportive learning community to develop and redesign community-engaged curricula.

“Our institution is recognized as a Carnegie Community Engaged campus,” Olsen-Pueblitz says. “Professional development programs like this are one way our office provides institutional leadership to advance UW’s land-grant mission of community engagement and service within the state of Wyoming.”

For more information about CEFI or how to apply for future cohorts, call the Office of Community Engagement at (307) 766-4129 or email engage@uwyo.edu.