Speaker Bios

Civic Engagement and Service-Learning

Policy Seminar for Administartors

December 4, 2008
12:00 - 3:30 p.m.

Peter Levine is Director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, which is part of Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. Levine is also Research Director of the Tisch College. Levine graduated from Yale in 1989 with a degree in philosophy. He studied philosophy at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, receiving his doctorate in 1992. From 1991 until 1993, he was a research associate at Common Cause. From 1993-2008, he was a research scholar at the University of Maryland's Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy. Levine helped to launch CIRCLE at the University of Maryland as its deputy director (2001-5) and then its director. In the late 1990s, he was also deputy director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. Levine is the author of The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens (University Press of New England, June 2007), three other scholarly books on philosophy and politics, and a novel. He also co-edited The Deliberative Democracy Handbook (2006) with John Gastil and co-organized the writing of The Civic Mission of Schools, a report released by Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE in 2003. He serves on many governing boards and advisory boards of organizations involved in civic renewal.

Alan Melchior is the Deputy Director and a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Youth and Communities at the Heller School at Brandeis University. He brings nearly twenty years of experience in managing a wide variety of wide variety of policy, evaluation, and technical assistance and training initiatives in the fields of youth, education, and workforce development. Much of Alan's recent work has focused on the evaluation of service-learning and community service-related initiatives. In the past decade, he has led a number of major service-related evaluation projects. These include the national evaluations of the Serve-America and Learn and Serve America, School and Community-Based Programs for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS); studies of the institutionalization of service-learning for the CNCS and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and evaluations of several national service-learning programs, including the Earth Force, Active Citizenship Today (ACT), and Do Something programs. Other projects have included evaluations of college access programs, school-to-career initiatives and comprehensive community partnerships, as well as studies of the uses of technology in youth and community-based programs. Overall, Alan brings a strong commitment to the use of research and evaluation as a means of strengthening programs and services for young people.