Community-Engaged Learning and Good Relations

Meet Eric Severson

Dr. Eric Severson is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Philosophy Department. We interviewed Eric to learn more about his approach to community-engaged learning, the philosophy of "good relations", and how students benefit from place-based education.

Q: Dr. Severson, you teach several classes on environment and ethics. From your years of teaching experience in this area, what approaches have you found most effective in inspiring students’ desire to learn and grow, while also deepening their understanding of our relationship to place—its history, and our shared role in shaping its future?

Eric Severson: For me, the single most important pedagogical move is to demonstrate that there are teachers everywhere - plants, animals, neighbors, weather, water, air, land - constantly offering generous lessons about the world to anyone with the dedication and discipline to listen. To model this, I almost always bring something from the outdoors with me into the classroom - in the fall term, it's always a different mushroom. More importantly, I move with students outside of the classroom onto the land, into the neighborhoods, and among the many teachers of our common home. The streets and plants and trees and neighbors offer their stories and lessons, and since I only get a precious few weeks with my students, I'm always hoping to teach them how to listen to them when I am not there.

Q: You incorporate experiential learning across many of your courses. What do you see as the key strengths of this approach? How do you weave it into your teaching practice, and could you share an example or case study that illustrates its positive impact—both for students and for the organizations, communities and locations where they engage in first-hand learning?

Eric Severson: One of the oldest jokes in philosophy involves a legend—which seems to have given a chuckle to Plato about a man named Thales, who is often given the vaunted title "First Philosopher." He is said to have spent so much time looking at the heavens, with his head in the clouds, that he fell into a well on the ground and had to be helped out by a young girl who watched the whole debacle in amusement. This joke, unfortunately, lands a little too close to home when it comes to the teaching of philosophy, which commonly finds itself deeply comfortable scrawled on chalkboards, confined within rectangular classrooms, and taught as memorizable data that students can learn with flashcards. The ideas of philosophy and ethics are mostly practical—what could be more practical than determining the right way to make big decisions? But the discipline of philosophy has too often been taught abstractly and in a manner that does not resonate with our bodies, our lives, our relations.

I'm inspired by a number of Indigenous leaders, including local tribal elders, who approach philosophy and ethics as an effort to seek "good relations." These can be talked about in the abstract, but abstracted discussions of "good relations" are a farce if they are not practiced and activated in actual relations with land, animals, neighbors, plants, water, etc. In other words, first-hand experience is first-philosophy, the conditions that call philosophy into existence. 

We talk, in my courses, about the overlapping oppressive forces of economic inequality, racism, and environmental threats. These multiple vectors of intersectional oppression create immense barriers to the health, wellbeing, and flourishing of our Seattle neighbors. These ideas, however, are like black-and-white sketches compared to the experiences students have working with the Black Farmers Collective at Yes Farm. The teachers they find there include Yesler neighbors and BFC leaders, but also the weeds they pull, the earth they break open, the misty Seattle air, the roaring of I-5, and a vista overlooking a city that is somehow both breathtakingly beautiful and strikingly ugly. Urban farming is a first-hand experience of relations, good and bad, not secondary to the ideas found in old books. These books are important, but take up with the second-hand; they help us consider our best ways of responding to the world that summons philosophy to its duty, which I think is first of all responsibility. 

Q: Growing community-engaged learning is a focus at Seattle University. Several of your classes have a community-engaged learning component. What insights, takeaways or key lessons would you offer fellow faculty members about collaborating with community partners and building meaningful relationships?

Eric Severson: All of my classes include robust community-engaged learning placements. These require considerable time and energy, for faculty and for students, and can be a potential burden on community partners if they are not done carefully. My first advice would be to start slow, with optional or limited engagements, and to build on the relationships established before adding larger classes and extensive Community Engaged Learning requirements. Be sure to utilize the incredible resources at Seattle University's Center for Community Engagement. The staff at the CCE are adept at matching placements to faculty and particular classes. 

Last spring I was teaching an Environmental Studies class, and—based on established trust and partnership with the Black Farmers Collective—we were invited to support an incredible event called "Black Earth Day." At Black Earth Day, folks from around the region bring their wisdom, skills, plant-starts, and delicious food, for a full day of sharing resources and learning from one another. Our students were invited to set up, tear down, serve ice cream, staff booths, greet visitors, and in many other ways participate in a day that was a wondrous celebration of local environmental care. For many students, the memory of that day, and the "good relations" they helped facilitate between land, food, plants, animals, and neighbors, will last far longer than anything else they experienced in my course.

Q: Congratulations on the grant you obtained with your partners in the Core (Dr. Lydia Cooper and Dr. Hillary Hawley) focused on “Character at the Core: Building Capacity and Community at Seattle University”. How will community engagement and environmental ethics fit into this work? What are your hopes for outcomes for this initiative?

Eric Severson: Thank you! The grant is issued by the Educating Character Initiative, out of Wake Forest University, and the funding is sponsored by the Lily Foundation. Our proposal dovetails with the development of a revised and reimagined University Core journey, which has been rebuilt to emphasize an intentional process that brings students through developmental stages that lead them to become people of responsibility and action. The ECI was particularly intrigued by our emphasis on Community Engaged Learning in our proposal. One cannot offer students an education that shapes them for a just and humane world without also helping them move in responsiveness to the actual world in which we live. So, the capstone course of the new University Core includes a required Community Engaged Learning component, many of which will be directly involved in environmental work. The ECI really appreciated that our "Character at the Core" proposal has a careful and deliberate approach to preparing students for engagement. First-year courses involve gentle exposure to community (and environmental!) needs. In the first stage of their core journey, learning and listening are emphasized, as foundations for the good work they are preparing to do. As they progress across their Seattle University experience, students learn to ask probing and courageous questions, careful to avoid causing fresh harm as they come to understand the world. In the final stage, they are engaged in sensitive and important community projects, like the "Black Farmers Collective" event I describe above. 

The ECI grant will support faculty in the development of the "Climate and Sustainability" Core Pathway, which means students will take at least 3 courses in the Core (4 overall) that have a direct emphasis on environmental issues. This is one of 5 optional pathways through the Core that allow students to demonstrate sustained care for one of the major curricular priorities at our university.