Karen Engler practices community engagement through service-learning projects and similar approaches she incorporates into her class curriculums. As a professor in the Communication Sciences and Disorders department at Missouri State, Karen developed a class in the fall of 2010 which focuses on serving individuals in the community who are deaf or hard of hearing. Many of her students go above and beyond what is expected of them and work on various projects such as the Lawrence County Deaf Group Start-up project with community partner, Deaf Awareness Group of Southwest Missouri, High School Transitions project with Vocational Rehabilitation, and Senior Communication Needs Program project with Northview Center at Doling Park. In addition to the mentioned service-learning projects, Karen incorporates community outreach projects into her other class curriculums. Her students have been given the opportunity to study and improve the acoustic environment in a classroom for a preschooler with hearing loss, obtain experience in developing auditory skills of young children with cochlear implants, and creating individualized home activities for children in MSU’s Preschool for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in order to provide families with activities to address the language, literacy, auditory and speech development of their children. Karen exemplifies the Public Affairs pillar of community engagement and therefore has been nominated as the Public Affairs Faculty Spotlight for the month of March!