Faculty member honored: Gillespie receives award for promoting service-learning
Michele Gillespie, Associate Provost for Academic Initiatives and Kahle Family Professor of History, has been honored with a state award for contributions to service-learning.
Gillespie received the 2010 Robert L. Sigmon Service-Learning Award during the 12th annual North Carolina Campus Compact P.A.C.E. Conference at Elon University. The award is presented to a Campus Compact institution faculty member and is named for a North Carolina native and pioneer in the national service-learning field.
A noted teacher, scholar, historian and author, Gillespie balances academic rigor with integrating community engagement into her work and her classes. She joined the faculty in 1999 and was named Associate Provost for Academic Initiatives in 2007.
Under her leadership, Wake Forest has launched the Institute for Public Engagement to build relationships with community partners, support publicly engaged teaching and service-learning courses, support volunteer opportunities, facilitate community-led research, and support student clinic services to the community. She oversees the Teaching and Learning Center and administers five competitive university-wide funds that support publically engaged programs and opportunities.
As director of the Lilly Endowment-funded Pro Humanitate Center, Gillespie coordinates service-learning initiatives for students, including a nonprofit summer internship program, a service-learning program at the San Carlos Apache Reservation, and an academic service-learning program in Managua, Nicaragua.
She received a Pro Humanitate Service-Learning grant for her History in the New South service-learning course, and was a fellow in Wake Forest’s Academic and Community Engagement program.
She is the author of several books, including “Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization: From the Antebellum Era to the Computer Age,” and she is currently working on a biography of R.J. Reynolds, and his wife, Katharine Smith Reynolds.
