PLO 3: Community Engagement, Leadership, and Service Learning
Demonstrate a desire to effect positive social change through enacted leadership and advocacy by way of community engagement, service learning, and the practice of compassionate emotional intelligence as an intellectually independent and accountable professional who embodies the practice of responsibility for participation for lifelong learning.
To satisfy PLO 3 I am once again calling back to my work with Artifact 2. This artifact is a video that was created for CAL 2970 during the Fall 2021 semester. Artifact 2 satisfies all of the criteria found in PLO 3 and is a great example of how an assignment or project can engage with one’s community, display leadership skills, is a practice in service learning, and is created by emotionally intelligent creators that are exercising intellectual independence.
The video we made that is artifact 2 was a group project. We were not given an opportunity to make our own groups, so this experience involved stepping into a group of strangers and collaborating. I generally have no problem taking a leadership role on projects like this, but I like to feel out the group a bit before volunteering myself. With this particular group, I did act as leader. I organized brainstorming sessions, when we would tour the building, and disseminated roles to group members based on their perceived strengths and what they felt comfortable doing. This project was a cartoon that required me to use animation software to create each person in our group. This was something I could have done myself, but I did not want to take creative control over my classmate’s “self” images, so I sat down with each one of them and designed a character to their specifications.
The video itself was meant to educate and inform our classmates and future students within the CSUSB community of what kinds of buildings and services are provided in Chapparal Hall. The video was then posted on multiple social media platforms, as well as publicly on YouTube, where it has since been viewed a couple hundred times. The group project and the resulting video clearly demonstrate the integration of academically relevant service activities and addresses community needs. While I struggled to understand the relevance of the assignment at the time, it has since become much clearer, and knowing that our video has provided a service to CSUSB students is nice too.