Timothy Ponce, Ph.D.

Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of English,
College of Liberal Arts

Service Learning Course(s):

• Grant and Proposal Writing (ENGL 3379)

“Service Learning is a pedagogical tool for the generation that is currently inhabiting our university system."

Dr. Timothy Ponce’s interest in service learning came about upon discovering that UTA did not have a grants and proposals writing course. Through Dr. Ponce’s undergraduate grant writing course, students write up grants for fictional entities and fictional projects. In order to make his students more involved in the course and to develop a sense of urgency that wasn’t manufactured, Dr. Ponce decided to partner with local nonprofits to help them write grants. Dr. Ponce and his students have worked with Mansfield Mission Center to help with grant writing and research. Through this collaboration, Dr. Ponce’s students were able to match different foundations and agencies with their grant needs. Through the grant research, Dr. Ponce and his students used the resources available through the UTA database to help demonstrate the efficacy of the programs offered by Mansfield Mission Center.

Dr. Ponce believes community partners are the future of the university system and that the two should be synchronized as the university grows its roots both locally and globally. He is an avid supporter of service learning as he sees his students getting a much richer education experience as they are working with more than just the theoretical. Dr. Ponce advises faculty interested in service learning to just try it out. He believes one of the fears of service learning is the extra workload that is expected, but he wants faculty to know that in his opinion, there isn’t more work, it is just a different kind of work. He believes in some ways, there is even less work involved in service learning because professors no longer have to consider fictional situations for their students to learn from. Instead, they are put in real world situations and exposed to all of the inevitable unexpectedness that is impossible to obtain in a general classroom setting.