Research Posters at CCBP Ceremony Draw Enthusiastic Audience
- May 1st, 2014
- in News
By Kirsten J. Barnes
CCBP Graduate Student
The Fifth Annual Poster Presentation April 18 in the Bryant Conference Center, a preliminary to the Eighth Annual Center for Community-Based Partnerships Community Engagement Awards Luncheon, drew an enthusiastic and appreciative crowd.
This year’s chairperson for the Poster Presentation Committee was Dr. Angelia Paschal, associate professor in College of Human Environmental Sciences.
“This year we had 16 posters that represented various community engagement projects,” Paschal said. “We had a good distribution of faculty, staff and graduate students and each of these projects included community partners.”
Several of the students who presented posters are graduate students who also are members of SCOPE or Scholars for Community Outreach, Partnership, and Engagement, several of whom have also presented posters at recent Engagement Scholarship Consortium conferences.
Andriane Sheffield is one of those scholars and her poster, “West Side Scholars Academy: Building Rapport and Relationships with Community Members,” discusses her efforts to engage students in the program. The enrichment program already existed. However, the organizers sought assistance from UA for curriculum development and program evaluation.
“I started working with them in the fall and immediately recognized I was an outsider from their view,” Sheffield said. “The poster explains how I developed a rapport with them so we could have an effective partnership.”
Sheffield, an educational psychology doctoral student, said she had to educate herself about the participating students’ schools and communities. “I had to figure out where each student was academically,” she said so together they could focus the goals of the program, which originally had been very broad.
Although this scholarly endeavor is completely separate from her doctoral research, Sheffield said the experience has helped her develop research questions for her dissertation.
Coddy Carter, also an educational psychology doctoral student, created a poster about research he conducted with Dr. Sara McDaniel from the College of Education, on TEAMS+ (Tuscaloosa Encouraging Adolescents through Mentoring and Support).
The project works with students who are transitioning from detention facilities and returning to school. “My role was to make sure they were setting goals for the day and to see if they needed extra help with their academics,” Carter said. “The goal was to get everybody an individualized education plan to deal with their at-risk factors, which included mental health and academic issues.”
McDaniel received a CCBP Seed Grant for this project, and the poster shows how the funds were utilized.
Carter’s research shows that students coming out of detention struggle to become integrated back into their school. “So either they don’t go back to school at all, or they have a hard time succeeding when they do go back when they don’t have extra supports in place. This is kind of a new model to try to help them,” he said.
McDaniel partnered with Tuscaloosa One Place, which already was providing case management and electronic monitoring for the students involved with TEAMS+. “We added the educational advocacy and mentoring component,” she said. “We are very appreciative of the seed fund grant that funded this project.”
Social work doctoral student Fan Yang, presented her “Heart Touch” program, which also received seed funding from CCBP. “Heart Touch is a cultural enrichment program,” Yang said. “We go to three elementary schools and collaborate with Tuscaloosa’s One place. We do fieldtrips and letter writing exchanges with students in China.”
The 16 posters reveal a great variety, Paschal said, including health, leadership, educational, advocacy and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). “We are really pleased to see the former seed funded projects present posters. We definitely applaud the presenters for their work in community engagement.”