Revealing our Roots: Dennis McCunney on shaping creative spaces within the Collaborative

Dennis McCunney works in the Center for Student Success at East Carolina University, and serves as adjunct faculty member within several ECU programs. Dr. McCunney has presented his research in several arenas. He serves on the board of directors for AllPeopleBeHappy, a global learning nonprofit. Recently he shared his Collaborative origin story with us.

I have an interesting job, because I'm trained in community engagement, nonprofit work, and leadership education. I was moving along in that direction, career-wise, with my writing and teaching, and serving as an administrator – or scholar administrator, as I like to describe it. I started out as the Service Learning Director about 15 years ago.

And then I started working more with our diversity programs and intercultural learning programs, including overseeing a community center and our veterans center. I had carved out a space for global learning within our work, falling under the umbrella of alternative break experiences. I just kind of branched out, working with student populations that were considered more marginalized or at risk.

So, just continuing to work with a variety of different community partners and donors. Then, in May of 2024, the UNC system, like many other systems, changed its diversity policy, and eliminated a variety of positions that had a diversity education component. So, my job changed significantly. I moved departments to work more specifically in student success programs. That was challenging for me professionally and personally, because a lot of my identity was wrapped up in that. I had spent a lot of time learning those fields, those functional areas.

When I changed jobs, I was able to continue working on some of the leadership education programs and some of the global learning programs as well. And, I am also now doing first-year retention programs and assessment, as well as some research activities with respect to first-year student retention. I also lead some faculty development work, and some career development programs. Now I’m really very much a generalist, with a job description that was pieced together based on some of the things I had been doing, and some of the things that were needed within the institution.

That has been a learning curve, but I've considered myself to be a pretty adaptable person and professional. I don't often say no to challenges or new opportunities. Through that career arc, my involvement with the Collaborative has been consistent. I think I discovered it initially as being GlobalSL.

I connected first to Eric Hartman and Nora Reynolds, directly, in maybe 2017 at an IARSLCE conference. We were branching out into the world of global service learning on my campus, and I was serving as the service learning director at the time. I had a number of faculty colleagues who were interested in exploring that pedagogy, and looking for ways to assess student learning, and thinking about how to partner with a spirit of reciprocity  with community partners.

I think I had met Nora at an IARSCLE conference before we invited her to do a day-long workshop on global service learning at ECU. We had maybe 45 faculty there. It was really cool, and surprising to see so many people coming out of the woodwork interested in this topic. There were faculty members who had been doing study abroad already, but had not been able  to really figure out the long-term community partnership piece of it. Before then, it was always working with a vendor or a third-party provider: sending students, they have the experience, they come back. It felt very one-sided, one-directional, with not much mutuality, reciprocity, or long-term partnership, especially with communities in the Global South.

There was a wake-up call for a lot of our faculty participants to say, “We can think of new models, new questions to ask, new relationships to build,” and that was exciting. That was the impetus to actually start up some programs. Primarily, our relationship was through AllPeopleBeHappy as our community partner, and then we branched out from there.

Then I met Eric at the Collaborative’s Global Service Learning Institute at Clemson University In 2019. It was a small gathering, but we met and realized that we had some Philadelphia connections. We've become friends and sometimes now connect when I'm up in Philly, to go for a run around Haverford College's campus.

I envision the Collaborative as an umbrella or big tent to live out some of our common values. It's not just a study abroad professional association. It's not just a sustainable development or just an international education professional association. All these fields come together, we're not confined by the disciplinary boxes that our fields might put us in, or the particular training that we have.

We're united in a shared vision, and that's unique. I'm involved in other professional associations, but many of them feel very focused on program development. That’s a good thing, it's important to think about best practices with those sorts of programs or types of pedagogy. But what I really love about the Collaborative is that it's focused on a vision and shared values. Hopefully our professional development opportunities and our networking opportunities and ongoing education reflect those values that we share. I haven't found that in other professional associations that I've been a part of in my 20-plus year career in higher education.

I sat on the Collaborative’s steering committee for a little while, and I've always served on the knowledge mobilization team. I've appreciated thinking about ways to get the word out and engage with folks who have curiosity and are looking for shared connection, and potential overlaps with their work.

Since Clemson, I've tried to be a regular participant at the Institutes as much as possible, and presenting at every institute that I go to, to share some sliver of our work. What's always been important to me – I really appreciate the friendships and the relationships that I've been able to maintain through the Collaborative. Again, certainly there's overlap between some other professional associations and the Collaborative, but I've appreciated the consistency with some of the folks who are still involved here.

I now have more time to give to the Collaborative. Before my job changed in the last 2 years, I was supervising 8 people in 5 different departments. That was a challenge to put in the time, the mental energy, the intellectual energy that I wanted to. So I was a little bit more of a bystander with the Collaborative, as compared to now, when I can put a little bit more time in.

The podcast is giving me really good energy, and it's giving the Collaborative really good energy. There are a thousand different things to talk about, new activities happening all the time, and new ways of looking at things. The podcast is helpful, for me as a professional, to have that space, and to use it as thinking time for me, selfishly. And it also makes me pay attention to some of the current conversations that are happening, or some of the more recent and relevant literature.. 

Mac [Benavides] and I just did a session on cultural humility, which is a very important  topic. Much  has been written on that. About 5 years ago, Erin Sabato, Nora Reynolds, Robin Young and I wrote about measuring cultural humility through the Global Engagement Survey for an AAC&U publication. We looked at how cultural humility is measured through a variety of different professional associations. It was primarily focused on  global health, but we also wroteabout the GES.

The GES [Global Engagement Survey] has been a consistent tool that's connected me to the Collaborative, and probably is one of the ways that I got introduced to it as well. We started using the tool as a way to bring together seemingly disparate groups on my campus to say, “Here's one way to not only measure our international programs, but our domestic programs as well, all programs that have a critical reflection and global citizenship learning outcome attached to them.”

It's been a carrot, or unifying tool to help me bring more faculty colleagues into the fold. I've appreciated that there's all sorts of ways you can work with that instrument; it’s been a through line for my own involvement in the Collaborative.

We're trying to pay attention to the literature, but also make some of these topics accessible to a variety of different listeners; people who are considering themselves to be experts, and then also newcomers too. We want to be able to be talking to all those different audiences, including community partners who may not be using the kind of academic language we're using. And students who are new to some of these concepts, but deeply interested. Scholars who are researching and publishing on these topics on a regular basis.

So the podcast is a cool space, and there's a lot of potential for it. I just really enjoy the conversations that Mac and I get to have. It's a cool, creative space.