English Lecturer Emily Hostutler was recently awarded the 2020-2021 Koret Scholar Award which is currently supporting two research activities that are in conversation with one another (one scholarly, one creative) centered around the success of community engagement work in the first-year writing classroom. The completed work will also be presented at SSU’s Research Week at the close of Spring 2021.
The first activity involves an analysis of past and current community projects, driven and designed by students, that supported their learning outcomes and emphasized SSU's Core Values. Additionally, a follow-up survey was administered to the same students. This research is underway. The second activity is a creative expression of the themes of those projects via a community partnership with Soco Monarch Project and Petaluma Bounty, with who we have collaborated on creating a mural. This mural is a broad, inclusive representation of the positive social and community impact students are making early on in their undergraduate careers in their English Composition courses, as well as an abstract embodiment of many of the values that our communities share.
The mural has been erected at Petaluma Bounty (time lapse video below) and can be viewed on April 25th in a covid safe drive through.