Page 49 - Campus Technology, January/February 2019

Coverage of our 2018 Impact Award honorees will continue in our next issue.
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cess of growth and development and social engagement. It
our focus on service for the community.”
During the subsequent semester, even as everybody re-
turned to their original offices and units, “we’re taking seri- ously into account how we plan our spaces and replicate some of those experiences that really worked well post- Maria,” he added.
Service Learning and Community Engagement
Those makeshift classrooms that dotted the campus forced everybody to sit “at the same level, in the same kind of chair, and you couldn’t tell who was the professor and who were the students,” Marxuach observed. “They were all at the same level, learning together.”
was one of the unintended results of this effort. It was not un- usual to have students and faculty come and say, ‘We ought to continue doing this,’ because there was something really special going on in those learning experiences.”
In these constrained conditions, class became what Marxuach described as “a service learning and community engagement project.” Students and faculty went out into their communities to help out. Nursing, psychology and so- cial work students provided services and support, including helping families work through their FEMA public assistance applications. Art and education students took activities to communities to reach kids who weren’t in school because so many of the schools in the commonwealth were closed.
ration with dozens of other entities, nonprofits and com- munity groups; we went directly with our students and our faculty and our staff to 17 towns on 17 missions.”
Marxuach said that the campus learned a lot from the experience “in terms of things we want to do going for- ward” — so much so that the university is in the process of an academic redesign to increase “the amount of active, creative community impact learning opportunities for our students.” For example, the school is introducing a new “immersion journalism” course to allow students to em- bed themselves and do reporting from within a community. “We realized how important this kind of [hands-on project] is to meaningful learning, [so] we’re going to increase its role within the curriculum,” he added.
“We want an education where our students are en- gaged in active and creative learning, that has impact on their communities. And a critical piece is learning together in teams. Everything they will do in life later on will prob- ably be in teams. In this day and age, those teams will be across time zones, across countries, across languages, across cultures. The ability to work together to accomplish objectives, to impact the community for the good, is criti- cal,” Marxuach asserted. “The learnings of that experience have allowed us to define much more clearly the path of the university in terms of the kind of education that we want to offer our students.”
Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for Campus Technology.
“We’re taking seriously into account how we plan our spaces and replicate some of those experiences that really worked well post-Maria.”
— Gilberto J. Marxuach Torrós, Universidad del Sagrado Corazón
Journalism, photography and film students documented what they saw. Faculty invited busi- nesses to move onto the cam- pus to continue their operations.
“It was really uplifting to see how faculty and the stu- dents turned their academic curriculum into a community
Seating wasn’t the only thing they had in common, he said. “All of them were living the same reality of the hurricane. They were all going through the same reality in their personal, their family and their community lives. So, there was a sense that all of them were in the same boat, learning from the experi- ence together, and using class as the context for that pro-
engagement and social engagement vehicle,” marveled Marxuach. “Everything we did post-Maria at the university, what started as an effort to help the immediate members of our community — students, staff and faculty — evolved into an island-wide solidarity effort. We had 600 to 700 student volunteers; we were part of a network of collabo-
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2019