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The Better Place Project: Creating Connections between the University and the City
By Stacey Martin and Darby Holman
The First-Year Experience is an exciting and opportunistic time for undergraduate students. They are acclimating to their new life; making friends, finding their path, and learning about all things that the University of Cincinnati has to offer. At the Learning Commons, our mission is to support students holistically in their transition to life at UC. This may be academically through offerings such as tutoring and supplemental instruction sessions, or it may be socially through the Learning Community program.
Introduction
Learning Communities are groups of first year students, typically all within the same major, who schedule the bulk of their classes together. This allows new students to see familiar faces in lecture halls that may comprise 200 students, and to create connections with those going through the same courses. Along with having their core classes together, they also meet once or twice a week in a Learning Community specific capacity with a Peer Leader– an upperclassman student who is trained to lead lessons relating to core competencies of the First Year Experience. These four target learning areas include Integrative Learning, Professional and Civic Responsibility, University Engagement, and Intellectual and Self-Management. Example lesson plans range from how to find organizations to join, how to present yourself in an interview, how to take care of your mental wellbeing, and even how to schedule classes. Students come into their first year generally nervous about their transition to college life, but Learning Communities have been shown to reduce this fear while creating connections and a sense of belonging.
Intersection with Service Learning
Each spring semester, Learning Community students take part in a Service-Learning initiative called the Better Place Project. This is a partnership with the Center for Community Engagement and even has roots in the UC Bicentennial Celebration, which took place in the 2018-2019 school year. The Better Place Project is designed to help students understand the connection between the University of Cincinnati and the Cincinnati community while also using, and further developing, skills from the classroom. Our hope with this program is to introduce students to the world of service learning early on in their college career, and give them the tools necessary to stay involved for the entirety of their time at UC. It is a semester- long initiative which takes part in multiple phases.
Service Learning Phases
The first phase is self-reflection. In the first 3 weeks of the semester, we ask Peer Leaders to facilitate a lesson plan in which students will self- reflect on their passions, hobbies, and overall goals. We then ask them to utilize these interests and align them to a service site in the Cincinnati community. One student may say they are passionate about sustainability while another feels strongly about access to education. In this scenario, each student should find an organization that supports their initiative and conduct research on their chosen site. At the end of this lesson, the classroom will come together to pick a site of interest to volunteer. This sometimes comes with heated debates and strong advocacy for different organizations, but we encourage students to volunteer on their own time if their place of interest is not chosen by the majority of the classroom. We also use this time as a way for students to present information to their classmates about the wide variety of service sites in the community!
The second phase involves reflection on service organizations and how they operate. At this time, the service site should be chosen by students and a date of service should be settled. We ask students in phase 2 to reflect on what it means to be an organization supporting the community. They have the opportunity to create their own service site and pitch it to the classroom. They must think about what they’ll offer, how they’ll fund it, how they will secure volunteers, how they will promote their organization, and much more. Students get to see the challenges that organizations face and reflect on these difficulties. By the end, the problems are discussed in an open format and students brainstorm how they can best support their chosen organization.
Lastly, after the day of service, students reflect on what they have learned, what that means to them, and what it means for the future. Working together as a class, students create a website that showcases their entire experience throughout the semester. These websites are then shared across all Learning Community sections so that everyone gets to see the great work their class is doing.
Outcomes of the Better Place Project
First year students praise the Better Place Project in their end of semester projects, upholding that this not only taught them about service learning, but gave them the tools to continue giving back to the community throughout their entire college career. One Learning Community section put it well by stating…
“From this experience, we hope to use our new perspective and new organizational skills inside and outside the classroom. We all took a vow to volunteer at least monthly from now on. Not only will we use our new broadened perspective for future service opportunities, but also in group situations, as the coordination centered effort required cooperation and unity among our learning community. Coming out of this experience, we are not only in touch with the community, but also as a team and as a unified learning community. We came into this experience as classmates and we walked out as a family.”
Looking to the Future
As Learning Communities continue to grow and expand, the Better Place Project will follow suit. This will require a sustained, coordinated effort between the Learning Community Program and the Center for Community Engagement, as well as with our partners in the Cincinnati Community. We hope to widen our scope to include more organizations and to get the support of more staff members at UC. As of now, this huge program has been led and coordinated by just a few individuals within the Learning Commons, but as demand grows, so will our team. We hope to have more ways of promoting our project and more opportunities for students to volunteer. This program has impacted so many students and community members already, and the number will continue to grow exponentially. We are so very excited for the future of this program and the creation of service- minded individuals at the University of Cincinnati. So much of the first-year experience is finding a sense of belonging at UC, and this program takes it a step further to finding a home in the Cincinnati community as a whole.
By Stacey Martin (she/her), Associate Director of First-Year Experience at the UC Learning Commons and Darby Holman (she/her), former Peer Leader Coordinator and graduate of the class of 2022.