Alex Braithwaite
Note: Titles and affiliations appear as they were at time of award.
Cultivating compassionate and culturally-grounded public service: The Asylum Project
The Asylum Project addresses intersecting challenges faced on and off campus in our Borderlands region: barriers to student persistence in degree programs and declining levels of empathy in society at a time of growing need for compassionate public service. The project combines culturally responsive pedagogy, critical service-learning, and compassion training with the goals of increasing students’ sense of belonging, self-efficacy, and persistence; bolstering their understanding of human suffering (empathy) and desire to alleviate it (compassion); and better preparing them to serve vulnerable immigrant and refugee communities with compassion. As such, the project reflects UArizona’s land-grant mission and compassion “core value,” as well as our College of Social & Behavioral Sciences and School of Government & Public Policy priorities around justice and inclusion.
Project Outcomes
The Asylum Project focused on exploring the pedagogical and personal benefits of community engagement and mindfulness practices in the classroom within the context of a particular class, Immigration and Refugee Policy (POL 388), as a space in which to incubate ideas and interventions. Drawing on trainings from three programs at the University of Arizona, namely, the Curriculum Design Institute, the Experiential Learning Design Accelerator, and the Digital Borderlands Fellowship program, the Fellow completed multiple redesigns of this class over the project’s 3-year timeline. These involved integrating culturally responsive exercises in which students center their own stories of migration, as well as group projects in partnership with community organizations. Because students’ work inside and outside of the classroom often required engagement with materials documenting human suffering, students were also trained to draw upon a toolkit of strategies for coping with what arises in working with such challenging materials, including methods of breathwork and mindfulness practices. Data collected over the three iterations of the class will be utilized to test a series of hypotheses about the impacts of these experiences and toolkits on students’ sense of belonging, self-efficacy, and preparation for public service. Learnings and results will be published in discipline-focused journals on pedagogy, along with more reflective writings on the tremendous benefits the Fellow felt as a professor and academic leader from progressive exposure to the trainings and methods central to this project.
Presentations
DEC 2025: Cultivating Compassion for Student Engagement in Public Service, CUES Cause as Compass Podcast Series Pilot, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.
Broader Engagement
MAR 2024: Research Questions, Session 1 of the Engaging with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Workshop Series (Panelist), University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Note: This engagement continued through additional invited presentations in January 2025 and January 2026.