Randi Davenport, executive director of UNC’s James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence, has received a statewide award for her leadership in the Connected Learning Program (CLP) in Cobb residence hall.
The North Carolina Housing Officers Organization (NCHO) has tapped Davenport for its Faculty Partnership Award. The new award recognizes the outstanding contributions of an academic faculty member to the housing and residence life department at their institution.
The award “seeks to honor a faculty member who has helped bridge the gap between faculty and student affairs professionals, has enhanced the out-of-classroom experience of residential students and has gone beyond the call of duty to further the sense of community on their campus.”
Davenport will be honored at the fall meeting of NCHO Oct. 23 in Chapel Hill.
CLP, a joint project of the Johnston Center and Housing and Residential Education at UNC, was created in 2004. The program offers students the chance to shape their own learning experiences outside the traditional classroom. During the academic year, CLP students work in teams to develop innovative projects of their own design — ranging from research trips and lecture series to music performances and film-making workshops. The projects enrich the intellectual climate of the university as well as the lives of the individual participants, who live together in Cobb hall.
“As one of the primary stakeholders on the program’s advisory board, Randi Davenport continually advocates that CLP is an innovative and strong collaboration between academic and student affairs,” wrote colleagues in Housing and Residential Education in a nomination letter. “It is likely the best example UNC has for a true living and learning partnership between the two divisions.”
Davenport is an adjunct faculty member in the department of English and comparative literature. She received a bachelor’s degree in history from William Smith College, and a master’s in creative writing and a doctorate in literature from Syracuse University. Her memoir, The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes, is forthcoming from Algonquin in March 2010.
