The annual George D. Levy Engaged Teaching and Research Award recognizes a faculty member whose community collaborations serve as models for outstanding community-engaged learning in the classroom or through research.
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What if children could design their own playgrounds? At Fall Creek Elementary School in Ithaca, this idea is coming to life through a community-engaged learning initiative led by Janet Loebach, the Evalyn Edwards Milman Professor in Child Development in the College of Human Ecology.

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Fellows come from all over the university, bringing their particular passions and living out the public purpose of their discipline through teaching and researching in, with and for community.
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Design Age Friendly Environments

Janet Loebach’s community-engaged learning course, Designing Age Friendly Environments, focuses on how built and designed environments can support or limit  healthy development and aging. The largest component of the course, comprising approximately half of the coursework hours, is a community-engaged project in which students explore, critique, respond to or propose age-friendly conditions, designs, initiatives and/or policies in partnership with one or more local community partners.

As a Faculty Fellow in Engaged Learning, Loebach is extending her expertise and learning new strategies and tools for facilitating student-community collaborations, and sharing these strategies with students. She is also working on ways to make the course more valuable to community partners, ensuring that they are highly involved in driving the development and outputs of projects.

“I want the course to be an opportunity for students to really listen to the needs of the community (and develop the skills and strategies for doing so), but also to recognize the value that community members and organizations bring to table. My intention is to frame the community-engaged projects as work with community members not for them.”  —Janet Loebach