Classroom Experience
Learn more about what the students volunteering at your site are learning and thinking about in the classroom.
"En/Route will be exactly what you choose to make of it. It can send you on a path for the rest of your college education with great experiences in your toolbox to continue questioning, wondering, learning, and experiencing, if you allow it to."
--Shannon Wheeler
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“My first day in an En/Route class I was told that we were here to challenge past misconceptions and close the separation that is create between academia and the marginalized. As young academics preparing to go into the world with knowledge and experience I was challenged to build relationships with those we are taught to fear or mistrust.”
--Fatima Estrada Rascon
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En/Route: A Full-Year Experience
En/Route combines learning in community and in academia to create a First-Year Experience for your students that explores the meaning service in our everyday lives.
Alongside their service at your placement sites, all incoming students in the En/Route program enroll in two first-year writing and speaking seminars tailored to the experience of a Freshman exploring and acclimating to a college environment and to the realities of robust, regular service.
In practical terms, the En/Route First Year Experience takes place in two linked courses over two semesters. These courses are:
Writing as/for Advocacy​.
​Writing for Social Justice
I In “Writing for Social Justice” we analyze texts ................................................written by authors who use social
analysis as a platform for advocacy.
We approach this theme in two ways: via weekly
fieldwork at a Denver program or agency seeking to
address basic human needs and to promote justice;
and via reading, reflection, discussion, and writing at
Regis University. Our goal is to trace the connections
between academic life at Regis and life in and
beyond the city of Denver.
This year, we will read (and talk and write about)
Fr. Greg Boyle's Tattoos on the Heart and others.
We will explore the alignment between
this kind of writing (“writing for others”) and your
own service to others. Writing and service
come together in the research paper.
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Fall Semester Faculty
Writing for Social Justice
Dr. Karen Adkins (RU 01)
Dr. Becky Vartabedian (RU 02)
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Life Stories
Dr. Abigail Gosselin (RU 03)
Fr. Greg Boyle - "Compassion and Kinship"
Father Gregory Boyle, founder and executive director of Homeboy Industries, is an acknowledged expert on gangs, intervention and re-entry and today serves on the U.S. Attorney General's Defending Childhood Task Force. This playlist offers you a variety of videos about his work with gangs and his work with Homeboy Industries.
How Ought We to Live?
Building on the work in "Writing for Social Justice," the spring semester’s “Philosophical Explorations” focuses on texts that help us to be more responsive to the central question of Regis University: how ought we to live? We will consider, in particular, places in your service experience where you have especially felt the force of this question in your own life.
Among the several texts planned for this spring, we will read Philip Hallie’s Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (an examination of the collective efforts of the French village of Le Chambon to save Jewish lives during World War II and an attempt to offer a philosophically-adequate account of “how goodness happened there”); Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (a disturbing report on the connection between Adolf Eichmann’s inability or unwillingness to think for himself and the broader moral catastrophe of the Nazi’s final solution); and Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito (classic accounts of the relationship between the examined life and a certain moral readiness to resist complicity in injustice).
A “Critical Incident Presentation” serves as the spoken and personal complement to the fall semester’s Objective Value Essay. Given first as a traditional speech, then translated into digital storytelling format, this presentation offers a detailed account of and reflection on an episode (or series of connected episodes) from your placement experience which has challenged, changed or deepened your perspective in a significant way.
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Spring Semester Faculty
Dr. Karen Adkins
Dr. Dan Justin (paired with Dr. Becky Vartabedian)
Dr. Jason Taylor (paired with Dr. Abby Gosselin)
