One of the challenges for Alisa Carse has been to balance students' acquisition of critical philosophical knowledge with demanding significant personal engagement from each student in a time-intensive community-based learning (CBL) project. In her four-credit course, Responsibility, Resilience and Self-Respect, Dr. Carse worked with the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service (CSJ) to connect each of her students to a community-based organization, where they spent at least 30 hours working on-site throughout the semester.

Her aim was to breathe life into the philosophical content of the course while developing students' moral reflectivity about their experiences at their CBL sites, and encouraging them to contemplate the moral and psychological challenges they were witnessing in the communities with which they were working.

In addition to the community-based projects, Dr. Carse added a second layer of pedagogical complexity to her course through curriculum infusion, whereby student mental health and wellness issues are meaningfully integrated into academic course content. This focus on the personal mental health and wellness of her students stemmed from Carse's concern for educating the whole student and her conviction that curricular learning is best achieved by tapping into students' emotional and personal sides. Carse has been supported in this work by CNDLS, CSJ, and Student Health through an Engelhard Faculty Fellowship. More information on Connecting the Safety Net to the Heart of the Academic Environment and on becoming a Faculty Fellow can be found on the Engelhard Project page.

For more information, strategies, examples, and resources regarding cura personalis in the classroom, visit our Cura Personalis Teaching Commons page.