Fluorescent Glow

This narrative describes aspects of my semester teaching English as a Second Language in the city jail. I had expected to be able to draw grand conclusions about incarceration, inmates and policy, but instead I discovered that the inmates sitting in front of me were, above all else, simply students. The article also includes a digital story about the experience. The narrative is intended for those with interest in jail or prison education

The Empathy Project: Using a Project-Based Learning Assignment to Increase First-Year College Students’ Comfort with Interdisciplinarity

Empathy and interdisciplinarity are both concepts that are current and relevant—across professions, in research, and in academia. This paper describes a large, interdisciplinary, project-based assignment, the Empathy Project, which allows students to delve into and increase comfort and skill with interdisciplinary thinking and collaborative learning, while improving the core college skills of written and oral communication, ethical and quantitative reasoning, and critical thinking. As I revised the assignment based on student feedback and results, I found that group conferences and time in class to work collaboratively were beneficial. Additionally, building increased scaffolding into the assignment, including greater student and group accountability, helped students develop and maintain self-direction. Students reported that the project was interesting and challenging and appreciated the opportunity to work with other students, to create something entirely different, and to be able to bring creativity into their projects

First-Generation College Students: A Qualitative Exploration of the Relationship Between Parental Education Level and Perceptions of Faculty-Student Interaction

While quantitative research has determined that first-generation college students (FGS) are less likely to interact with faculty than are their non-FGS peers, this qualitative study examines how incoming first-year college students, both FGS and non-FGS, perceive faculty-student interaction and whether they consider it important. Addressing different types of interaction with college instructors, both in-class and out-of-class, participants across a range of FGS status shared their views through surveys, individual interviews, and focus groups. Focusing specifically on incoming first year students, this study also explores the motives for, impediments to, and encouragements to faculty-student interaction that students identify. Finally, the study examines the origins of students’ perceptions of such interactions. It finds that FGS and non-FGS come to college with different cultural and social capital pertaining to this, and that non-FGS have a greater familiarity with the field and expected habitus of college. However, FGS demonstrate an ability to access their social capital in order to obtain valuable knowledge that informs their perceptions of college and of faculty-student interaction. Further, in the focus groups, FGS described emerging comfort with faculty over the course of their first months of college. The origins of students’ perceptions often differed, as non-FGS were more likely to describe being influenced by family, while FGS more often explained how they accessed their social capital in order to obtain cultural capital and practical knowledge regarding college and faculty-student interaction. Meanwhile, FGS’ and non-FGS’ motives for interacting with faculty, and the impediments and encouragements they identified, were frequently similar. The motives included their desire to learn and share opinions, as well as their interest in obtaining letters of recommendation in the future, while comfort with classmates and faculty and interest in class were commonly named as encouragements to interact with faculty

RAM$mart Financial Wellness for Health Profession Students

College students today are graduating with more debt than ever before. As such, it is critical that our graduates are equipped with the right skills and frame of mind to manage their finances. This includes understanding their income, taxes, and expenses; managing debt; budgeting; saving; and retirement planning. Money management can be intimidating for anyone, regardless of background or education. While online resources are made available to our students, these resources are often overlooked, and do not necessarily set out to engage students or address the issues they may face in a convincing or compelling way. Most of the financial resources easily accessible on the web and on VCU’s sites are intended for undergraduate students. However, graduate students and in particular students in the health sciences professional programs (medicine, dentistry, pharmacy) can accrue a tremendous amount of debt, but are not exposed to as many mandatory or voluntary budgeting and financial resources. The RAM$mart Financial Wellness Program is a set of online modules that will allow students the opportunity to learn the basic principles of money and debt management. We are focusing this phase on professional students in the Schools of Medicine, Pharmacy, and Dentistry, with the intent to engage the whole VCU student population in the future. The RAM$mart Financial Wellness Program will include modules on a variety of money management topics designed to get the attention of students and to provide them with practical steps they can take at the beginning of, and throughout, their graduate professional education to minimize debt accumulation. There will also be modules designed to inform students of various loan payback options upon their degree completion, and of available community and online financial resources. Through attention-grabbing and entertaining modules, including such things as humorous video snippets and interactive questions, students’ awareness of budgeting and financial responsibility will increase significantly