2006 Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellows

Monroe Weber-Shirk

Senior Lecturer, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering

Our mission is to improve water treatment technologies so that communities can afford safe, clean water while providing an exceptional educational experience for university students. Our focus is on small-scale water treatment systems that can operate without an external power source and that can be maintained by rural communities. We are working with Agua Para el Pueblo in Honduras with the goal of increasing their capacity so they can scale up the technologies and address the turbidity problems in community water supplies. To accomplish this goal we will establish CEE 255-455 as a new service learning course; enhance CEE 454, Sustainable Small Scale Water Supply course to include service learning; recruit Master Engineering students for the project; and involve additional faculty in the project.

Mary Katzenstein

Professor and Acting Chair, Department of Government, Arts & Sciences

In my application for the Kaplan Family Fellowship, I propose to establish a spring semester class taught at one of the local adult prisons in which Cornell students and student-inmates will be jointly enrolled.  The idea for this class has evolved out of my experience teaching Government 314 (Prisons) over the past five years on the Cornell campus and my experience this current semester volunteering an evening a week teaching a course on theories of power at Auburn prison.  This will constitute a service-learning class in the sense that it will involve Cornell students in experiential learning about the criminal justice system.  Through the final class project on voting/felony disenfranchisement, moreover, the expectation is that both sets of students will be motivated to think deeply about the meanings of citizenship and political participation.  The class will include 10-15 students from campus and 10-15 students from the selected facility.