Douglas Moody Wins Good Steward Award

Submitted by Alan C. Taylor on Fri, 04/25/2014 - 8:19am

Senior Lecturer Douglas Moody has been awarded the Presidents’ Good Steward Award for faculty by the Campus Compact for New Hampshire. Moody was nominated for the Good Steward Award for his service as the faculty adviser for the Nicaragua Cross-Cultural Educational Service Program (CCESP), an international service-learning program that is administered by the William Jewett Tucker Foundation.  The Good Steward Award is given to a member of the faculty, administration, or staff member who has contributed his or her professional expertise in service to the wider community and who has significantly advanced public service on their campus.

For the past twelve years the Nicaragua CCESP has arranged for groups of undergraduate students, medical professionals, medical students, and faculty to participate in service-learning trips to a rural region of northeastern Nicaragua in an experiential learning environment; Moody has been the faculty adviser for the CCESP since 2005.  Prior to the service trip, the participants take part in an educational seminar that informs them about issues of development, as well as about Nicaraguan history, politics, and culture.  Once in the country, a community health team volunteers in a regional medical clinic and works with local medical professionals to provide medical training, as well as to donate equipment and supplies to the Nicaraguan community. A second group from Dartmouth, the community development team, works in the local communities on a variety of construction and agricultural projects.

One of the goals of the CCESP is to find substantive ways for reciprocal inter-cultural exchange between the Dartmouth participants and the Nicaraguan community members, who host and interact with the visiting students and faculty, and medical professionals while they are on the two-week service trip. Moody explains that the members of the Dartmouth community who have traveled to Nicaragua over the years have experienced "transformative learning" from these cultural exchanges and he adds that he is "honored to be a part of such an important learning project." Institute for Writing and Rhetoric Director, Christiane Donahue, notes that this rich intercultural experience informs Moody’s Writing 2-3 course in the Institute, bringing unique perspectives to the course focus on racial and ethnic diversity in the United States.