Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching & Service

This summer, the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service (CSJ) awarded the junior government major its annual David F. Andretta Summer Research Fellowship, which he is using to conduct a qualitative research project on the role of play in childhood education. He is conducting this research while teaching preschool-age children at the JumpStart program in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

WAMU Arts and Culture Reporter Mikaela Lefrak sat in on Professor Ben Harbert’s “Music in U.S. Prisons” Community-Based Learning course this past spring, and reports, “When half of your classmates are inmates, you go to them. On a bright, hot Friday morning toward the end of the spring semester, about a dozen sleepy Georgetown University students loaded themselves into a white 16-passenger van for their weekly drive across town to the D.C. Jail…”

This past May Campus Ministry and the Center for Social Justice launched the first Magis: India trip. Here, Emily Jonsson, COL’ 20, reflects on her experience: "Those that know me well, or those that have ever encountered any piece of writing containing a fraction of my heart, know that I perpetually struggle with capturing the transcendent essence of what makes a moment, a moment. Such a struggle is remarkably comparable to the one I face now when posed with the question, 'How was India?' It was – indescribable. Challenging, beautiful, colorful, lively, thought-provoking, and compelling in all the best ways..."

The Alternative Breaks Program (ABP) provides students with the opportunity to practice service and reflection on weekend and week-long immersion trips, both domestically and abroad. Since its beginnings, ABP has expanded to its present-day total of 23 trips offered to students during breaks in the academic year, each with eight to 10 participants. ABP encourages participants to think about ways to continue the conversations sparked on their trips and to keep engaging with the issues that arose.