Promising
Practices
I attend the 16th annual promising practices
conference held at RIC on November 2, 2012. This event covered a wide range of topics
within the centralized topic of civic engagement. The conference had four different sessions
with a wide variety of selections for the attendee to go to. The first session I choose to go to was all
about civic engagement "Undergraduate Engagement Initiatives: A Workshop
for Students." In this session
students from the civic engagement class described different projects that they
had participated in last year. The
project that I found most interesting was the democracy wall project. The idea was that they placed a large paper
wall up in a public place and asked a political question. Students then could write their opinions upon
this wall and discuss the topic. I felt
that this could be translated into a social studies classroom. It could allow students to express their
opinions about issues they are interested in anonymously.
The
second session was the RIC/Central Falls Collaborative I. I went to this one because as a Secondary Education
student, I will be attending the SED 407 class held in Central Falls High
School and I felt that I should like to know more about the program. I came away from this session with a positive
view on attending this class in the spring semester. I look forward to being a student in a residential
teaching program.
The
third session was the one I found the most interesting. It was called “Immigration Oral History and Advocacy
Writing for Social Change.” This session
gave the most useful information for me, an aspiring social studies
teacher. The presenters talked about a
lesson that they had each carried out in their classes. The first one was a project where the
students had to interview a recent immigrant, as most of the students in the
class were either recent immigrants or 2nd generation Americans;
this project was relevant to them. The
project looked interesting and informative and led to a better understanding by
the students on immigrant history. I
would most defiantly try to incorporate this into my future classroom. The second presentation was about teaching
students to write a persuasive letter to a leader of some kind about a topic
the students cared about. I found this interesting
and thought it was a good way to teach students how to become engaged citizens.
The
final session I attended I felt was the least relevant for me. It was called “The Building Blocks for
Successful Community Engaged Learning.”
This event was more geared towards University level engagements. The focus was on how to get the college or universities
and professors to focus more on community engagement projects.
Overall,
the Promising Practices conference was interesting and gave me ideas that I may
be able to incorporate into a future classroom.
I gained knowledge about my SED 407 class next semester as well. I would defiantly attend such a conference
again and I felt that I came away with a new understanding about the role of
colleges and community engagement.
Elizabeth Bitgood
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