Duke's plan seeks to empower students at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels to become more engaged with their own educations, integrating knowledge across their classes and into their own lives. Duke's curriculum already features innovations that extend from the Focus Program for first-year students through joint degree programs for professional students. Now Duke will pursue other changes that help students build on their academic knowledge and make new connections with the world they will experience beyond the classroom.
In February, Duke announced plans for a new civic engagement program called DukeEngage. Through DukeEngage the university will provide funding and faculty support to undergraduates who wish to apply their classroom learning to addressing societal issues locally, domestically, and around the world. The program was endowed with $15 million each from The Duke Endowment and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
DukeEngage does not officially start until summer 2008, but through a pilot program, some 80 returning students spent this summer working on service projects in more than 15 locations, from Durham to Ukraine. One group of DukeEngage students worked in Kenya with the team of Sherryl A Broverman, associate professor of the practice in the Department of Biology. The work was part of the ongoing collaboration between Broverman and Rose Odhiambo at Egerton University in Nakuru, Kenya. Four students in Nakuru had the opportunity to help with HIV-awareness and -testing campaigns and develop a support program for HIV-positive students. They also helped Egerton University draft a new gender and sexual harassment policy.
Other students, among them Andy Cunningham (pictured above), worked in Muhuru Bay. These students led Camp WISER (Women’s Institute for Secondary Education) and prepared for the planned 2009 opening of the WISER boarding school for girls, among other activities. The school will be the first boarding school for girls in Muhuru Bay and aims to reduce sexual abuse of girls and guarantee their right to safe and effective education.
The group’s time in Kenya taught them the value of both classroom learning and real-life experience. As Andy expressed in his blog, “We have realized that international development is not isolated to those who spend their entire lives in the classroom; nor is it only about those who devote their entire lives to being ‘on the ground’, but rather, it is an intersection of both -- a delicate, complex, but empowering combination.”