College of Coastal Georgia Office of Service-Learning Announces 2016 Faculty Fellows Program

Brunswick, GA – The College of Coastal Georgia Office of Service-Learning has announced Sarah Hartman, Ph.D. and Lydia Watkins, DNP as the inaugural Service-Learning Faculty Fellows for 2016.

The Service-Learning Faculty Fellowship is sponsored by the Center for Service-Learning. The goal of the program is to create opportunities through which a faculty member can share his or her successful service-learning teaching strategies, assist other faculty members in their service-learning education and implementation, and contribute to the overall development of the service-learning program. To be eligible to apply for the Service-Learning Faculty Fellowship, faculty must be employed full-time at the College, have successfully taught a minimum of three (3) service-learning courses, and must complete an application process.

During their Fellowship year, participating faculty receive a stipend to be utilized for service- learning and/or civic engagement professional development opportunities. Faculty Fellows are responsible for co-facilitating the annual Service-Learning Scholars Workshop training program in spring, creating and facilitating at least one service-learning workshop for faculty peers, mentoring emerging service-learning practitioners, and sharing their experience at the annual Service-Learning Symposium in April.

About the Faculty Fellows:

Dr. Sarah R. Hartman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education and Teacher Preparation, and has been a service-learning faculty member since 2012. Dr. Hartman is a past recipient of the Excellence in Service-Learning Outstanding Faculty Award in 2014. Currently, Dr. Hartman is teaching two service-learning courses – Effective Instruction: Social Studies and Effective Instruction: Language Arts. In the social studies course, teacher candidates are creating lesson plans to teach on-site at the local cemetery to middle school students. The lessons integrate social studies benchmarks in a real-world classroom setting. Dr. Hartman hopes “to see service-learning become more impactful in the everyday lives of K-12 students; thus helping to excite and expose more folks to the notion of service-learning.”

Dr. Lydia Watkins, Assistant Professor of Nursing, has been a service-learning professor almost as long as she has been a professor at CCGA. Since completing the training in summer 2012, Dr. Watkins has taught four service-learning courses at the College. She is also a recipient of the Excellence in Service-Learning Outstanding Faculty Award in 2015. She has attended and presented at the Gulf South Summit on Service-Learning & Civic Engagement through Higher Education the last two years. She would like to assist other faculty in developing and executing service-learning courses and helping them tie projects to course learning outcomes. Dr. Watkins expressed that she has “a passion for service-learning” and understands the “importance of it as we help model civic engagement for our students.”

For Immediate Release
December 16, 2015
Contact: John Cornell
(912) 279 5703