Update: I am waiting for the keynote to come to the library on DVD since I was ill and missed the lecture. I will post a summary when I can get my hands on the DVD! I'm looking forward to hearing Dr. Barbara Holland, service-learning and civic engagement expert, speak at Wright State next week as part of the Presidential Lecture Series. She will present on Tuesday, September 13 at 7 p.m. in the Apollo Room. More information is here.
Wright State University was recently named one of the top ten colleges that gives back to the community by The Washington Monthly. You can also read more in the Huffington Post here. The story at Huffington Post highlights a committee of Wright State University staff members has formed a group called We Serve U to promote community service among WSU staff and facul
"Research for the greater good: Incorporating service-learning in an information literacy course at Wright State University" was published in this month's (June 2011) College & Research Libraries News. I hope this encourages other librarians to try a similar service-learning model for their information literacy course.
Wright State University is graduating its very first citizen scholar this June. The citizen scholar program was designed by the WSU Office of Service Learning and supports WSU's mission to "engage in significant community service." Students in the program complete multiple service-learning courses throughout their college careers. You can read more about it if you click on the link above.
This morning, I attended a breakfast at my institution to celebrate the many accomplishments of the Office of Service-Learning (including their AmeriCORPS VISTA volunteers) and faculty and staff at Wright State that are involved in supporting the academy's mission to "transform the lives of our students and the communities we serve." The mission also states that "We are committed to engaging in significant community service." Wright State was the only public institution in Ohio last year named to the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.
Since our class ended in early March, I've been reflecting on how we can improve the research portfolios. As it stands now, the students include annotated bibliographies in the portfolio, along with recommendations for the agency. The recommendations were a new requirement this past quarter. Our aim was to get students to synthesize the information they were finding, rather than just summarizing it. In most classes, they would write a paper. However, our class is only 2 credits, and the focus is supposed to be on the research process, not writing the research paper.
I'm pleased to announce that I received an award today at the Wright State University Learning Community luncheon. My partners, Craig This (a first-year seminar instructor at WSU) and Becky Garvin (Interim Director for Project READ, our community partner) and I were awarded "Outstanding Collaboration" fo
Days like yesterday don't happen often - but they make all the struggles of teaching worthwhile. Our students completely blew us away yesterday! A tradition of this course is that we invite our community partner staff members and the Director of the Office of Service Learning to the last day of class for a group reflection, and for the students to hand over their research portfolios to our partner.
Last week in class, our students spent time working in groups to revise their citations and annotations for the annotated bibliography and also begin to compile some recommendations based on their research. We met with each team separately to check on their progress and make some suggestions about how to improve their citations and annotations and how to start writing recommendations. Since our goal is for the students to experience all stages of information literacy, the recommendations they will write will be a way for them to synthesize the information they have found.