Ithaca College

Alicia Swords, assistant professor of Sociology, has been selected as one of seven finalists for the New England Resource Center for Higher Education's (NERCHE) 2011 Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement for Early Career Faculty. Dr. Swords was recognized for her effort to co-create the service learning for social justice program with the Tompkins County Workers’ Center, her work to offer students opportunities to connect with and learn from a national network of poor people’s organizations dedicated to building a broad-based movement to end poverty, as well as her leadership to develop immersive curricular experiences with a Dominican Republic grassroots social justice organization. As the review committee chair wrote in his letter to Dr. Swords notifying her of her finalist status: “We would like to thank you for your commitment to connecting your teaching, research/creative activity, and service to community engagement in the context of social justice and for pushing the boundaries of faculty work in fundamentally new directions.”

NERCHE’s annual award is named for Ernest Lynton, who framed faculty scholarly activity as inclusive, collaborative, and problem-oriented work in which academics share knowledge-generating tasks with the public and involve community partners and students as participants in public problem solving. In the notification letter, Dr. Swords’ community-engaged work was noted as a model of the public scholarship that Lynton championed.

The recipient of the Lynton Award will be announced in late July 2011, and the Lynton Award will be presented at the 17th Annual Conference of the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU) which will be held in October in Indianapolis.