Spring 2016 ACE Courses

In this presidential election season, students will create radio projects that examine the prominent issues and possible candidates of 2016.  St. Olaf’s student-run radio station KSTO will then broadcast these radio “reports” to help educate the St. Olaf community and promote knowledgeable voter participation.

The ACE component of this class is a joint project between a St. Olaf College class taught by Professor Meg Ojala and a Carleton College class taught by Professor Linda Rossi.  Funding for this project is provided by a Mellon Foundation-sponsored Broadening the Bridge grant.  Students learned from two naturalists from River Bend Nature Center in Faribault, Minnesota as they walked through Caron Park, a Rice County Park in rural Faribault, and took photographs. Student photographs and accompanying writings will be presented to the public at an event to be held at Carleton’s Weitz Center for Creativity and at St. Olaf College’s Groot Gallery in Northfield, Minnesota.  The digital images will also be donated to Rice County Parks and Facilities.

Students in this senior capstone course will have the option to complete research projects for the following community partners: Mirosol Farms/Young Peoples Action Network, Rice Creek Wildlife Management Area, City of Northfield, and the Greater Northfield Sustainability Collaborative.

Students pursued historical research on a topic of their choosing related to the environmental history of Northfield and presented their final projects in a public symposium at the end of the semester.  The students’ research papers were shared with the Northfield History Collaborative and made publicly accessible on its website (click here).  Any oral histories they conduct will be added to the collections of the Northfield Historical Society.

Part of a multi-year project, the civic engagement component of this course builds upon past work by St. Olaf students regarding immigration issues.  The Rural Immigration Network project aims to create a useful and well-used online network of national scope, which will share practical information and cultural knowledge.  It seeks to reach rural communities diversifying through immigration across the United States.  Students in this course conduct research to translate social science findings pertinent to community leaders in rural communities into a standardized format suitable for sharing online.   These findings will help to identify innovative, positive responses to immigration in rural communities.  Taught both fall and spring semesters during 2015-16, students will contribute submissions to the Rural Immigration Network, including either a “Recipe for Action,” “Research Brief,” or “Call for Research”.

For the ACE component of this class, student groups conducted research projects for two on-campus offices and one off-campus non-profit organization.  In addition, the entire class assisted with education-related research for Hand-in-Hand preschool in Northfield.

Students assess strengths and problems of diverse groups, organizations, and communities and use the systems perspective to help client systems frame goals and plans for social change. Students develop plans for implementing change that are reflective, scientific, just, and grounded in the liberal arts.  As a class, students participated in a project for Rice County Foster Care to create a more “Foster Care Friendly” Rice County.  Students will prepare a poster display of the results of the community engagement activity to be presented during a reception for community stakeholders involved and the social work department.

In order to help meet the learning objectives of this course, we ask students to participate in an off-campus project, Envolvimiento cívico en / “Civic engagement at” Greenvale Park.  Students will volunteer at Greenvale Park Elementary School in support of after-school and evening programming for Latino and Hispanic elementary students and their families.  The after-school PLUS program serves K-5 students identified as needing extra academic, social/emotional, and/or English language support.  Volunteers help students transition from the end of their school day and then with the club they have scheduled for that day (topics include art, science, theater, fitness, etc.)  Evening activities include clubs for elementary students, Homework Help tutoring, adult education classes, and childcare for ages 2-5.

As part of this course, we ask students to develop projects that reflect their interest in theater and what they want to do with theater once they graduate.  This project will incorporate research work that they have pursued on their own and they will put that research into a material project.  Interested students will have the option to develop a community-engaged project of their own design.  Two students will produce 3 performances of, “What’s the Difference?” a Plays for Living play that helps students consider themes of cliques, bias, and self-identity.  The performances, which also include a discussion session following each play, will be offered in 4th and 5th grade classes at Sibley Elementary (Northfield) and Prairie Creek Community School (Castle Rock).  Another student will teach a class on theater improv with children in the Greenvale Park Community School after-school program.  A fourth student will work with high school students in Northfield, creating a piece on theatre/art in their lives.