Presentation & Publication

C&CS Webinar Updates

Hailley Marie Fargo Presentation & Publication ,

In my last post, I mentioned that I didn’t have many details on the upcoming webinar Ally and I are doing. As soon as I published the post, we got more details! So I’m happy to share those details. You can find the Zoom registration link on their website. The description of the webinar is below!

Centering Student Voices: Conducting Library Research with an Undergraduate 

Library research is often conducted around undergraduate students, but these students usually do not have a say in the research project design. If libraries can find ways to include undergraduates in their research projects, there is potential for not only student-centered research, but also an opportunity for the library to provide a meaningful undergraduate research experience. Additionally, both the student and library benefit from this collaboration. The student learns more about the field of LIS and refines their research skills while the library benefits by learning more about how our students can use their disciplinary background in our research setting. This presentation will present the process of hiring, training, and collaborating with an undergraduate student. Specifically, this presentation is an overview of Mapping the Student Engagement Journey, an exploratory, qualitative research project on student engagement experiences. The presenters will discuss how this research project benefits from the undergraduate student, who is both a collaborator and insider, helping to strengthen the project itself to gather results.

 

New year, same project!

Hailley Marie Fargo Presentation & Publication, Updates ,

We’re back! 2020 is starting off fast and furious and here at Penn State and we are just beginning week three of the semester. It has been wonderful to have Ally back in the office and we are ready to conquer the second half of this project. Some of our work has stayed the same (recruiting students and interviewing them) and other parts are new (analyzing the interview transcripts, writing manuscripts, and presentations). Lucky, we have a great support system, within the Libraries, at the Student Engagement Network, and with colleagues in the LIS field to help and encourage us as we move into these new parts.

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Summit Presentation & Next Steps

arm38 Presentation & Publication, Undergraduate Research, Updates

Hi everyone, it’s Ally! Last week was an exciting time for Mapping the Student Engagement Journey. Hailley and I had gave our first presentation on this project at Penn State’s 2019 Student Engagement Summit. We started by explaining Hailley’s motivation to create this project and my motivation for becoming an Undergraduate Research Assistant. It was awesome to share our project with the Penn State community and express our enthusiasm about this research.

Hailley and I, right after our Student Engagement Summit presentation!

Presentation Takeaways

We had our audience brainstorm variations of each student engagement opportunity type. As a whole, our audience listed many examples of Undergraduate Research, Professional Experiences, and Peer Mentoring but listed less variations of Community-Based Learning and Self-Directed Student Engagement. These results were not surprising to me, as these lists aligned closely with the opportunities I’m most familiar with. This activity made me wonder how Penn State can better advertise student engagement opportunities that are less well-known. After all, some students may be more attracted to Self-Directed experiences than more structured experiences, such as clubs and organizations. Hailley and I talked about this more when we presented Harris’ map. During the interview process, Harris told us, “That was a big problem I had with Penn State…the way social life is structured here, it’s like ‘You have to join a club to have friends.'” I’m glad we could share this quote with faculty and staff. I hope this aspect of our presentation demonstrated that every Penn State student views student engagement differently, and that’s okay! Overall, I thought the Summit was a great place for our first presentation and I’m really looking forward to our next presentation opportunity. 

What’s Next?

At this point, we have six of 24 student interviews completed so we’re one fourth of the way through! Our goal is to have 12 interviews done before winter break. To accomplish this, we’re planning on emailing students from all the remaining colleges that we need students from. Sending all these emails at once may be tricky to organize. However, we think it’ll be a helpful way to recruit six more students before winter break. Next semester, we hope to finish the other 12 interviews before spring break. After that, we’ll have lots of coding, data analysis, and writing to do! I’m definitely enjoying the interview process but I’m also really exciting for the next steps. I have some experience with qualitative data analysis but I know this project will help me take my skills to the next level. I’m also really eager to see how all 24 interviews connect to one another and what overall takeaways Hailley and I will find for Penn State and other institutions. For now, Hailley and I have more recruitment emails to send out in the upcoming weeks. I can’t wait to get the next six interviews started!

Student Engagement Network Summit Presentation

Hailley Marie Fargo Presentation & Publication , , , , , ,

On Wednesday, Ally and I had the chance to present initial findings at the Student Engagement Network Summit. We had a packed room and lots of excitement around our work. It was exciting to share our work with a wider audience and to feel that those in the room were excited as well.

Below are our slides — feel free to reach out to myself or Ally if you have questions. We’re excited to hear your thoughts and see what’s next for our project.

Coming soon: our first presentation!

Hailley Marie Fargo Presentation & Publication , ,

Ally and I are excited to share our upcoming presentation (and our first joint presentation about this project). We were invited to speak at the second annual Student Engagement Summit, hosted by Penn State’s Student Engagement Network. This will be a great opportunity to share updates with Penn State colleagues who are interested and invested in student engagement. And of course, to share our progress on this research project!

This year at the Summit, we were encouraged to make sure our attendees leave our session with something to take back with them. In that spirit, Ally and I came up with three questions we want attendees to consider that we think will help with takeaways:

  1. What do you currently know about how students you work with navigate the student engagement landscape?
  2. How would/do these findings impact or influence the work you do with student engagement?
  3. Based on the current chart of engagement types and their variations, what variations are missing? What would you change about the definitions of each engagement type? What resonates with you?

We hope these questions will spur interesting conversations and we also hope we will have a handful of student journey maps to share. After our presentation, we will share our slides on this blog, for those unable to attend.

If you’re at Penn State and available to attend the Summit, you definitely should. Registration opened last week!