Today’s “Student Shout-Out” goes to senior Communication Studies majors Ali Wasserman and Sarah Hirsch, who travelled to San Diego last weekend to attend and present at the 14th Annual Continuums of Service Conference!
Ali Wasserman, Professor Ho, and Sarah Hirsch, getting ready to present at the conference
Their presentation at the conference came from work that Ali and Sarah did as part of Professor Ho’s Ethnography of Communication course, a service learning course here in the Communication Studies major. The three of them attended the conference with their community partner, Jake Levitas, who is Project Director of TenderVoice (www.tendervoice.org), a community organization in the Tenderloin. The Continuums of Service Conference is a service and service-learning conference (thus the name), and their presentation was titled: “TenderVoice: A Case Study in Sustainable Service-Learning.” In their presentation, Ali, Sarah, and Professor Ho shared information about their partnership with TenderVoice. They focused on how their experience is an example of a successful, sustainable, and ongoing partnership between USF and a community organization. According to Professor Ho, “the presentation was great and we received a lot of great feedback and questions about our project.”
Here’s more from Professor Ho: “Service-learning classes have the goal to usefully integrate classroom learning and service. The service should be both useful to the community and a place to both test out and use classroom knowledge to serve better. Service-learning is different from volunteering because when students volunteer, they aren’t typically bringing knowledge, theories, or research with them to that experience. This is also different from internships, too, where the purpose is really to help students learn about and immerse themselves into an organization and a job-role. What we presented at the conference was about the mutually beneficial relationship in which student goals (to learn, to serve, and to get work experience in non-profits) overlapped with faculty goals (to teach ethnographic research methods) and community partner goals (to further develop the TenderVoice project and to provide computer skills to Tenderloin residents).” The partnership is so successful that students enrolled in Ethnography of Communication this fall will also be working with TenderVoice.
Congratulations to Ali, Sarah, and Professor Ho on their conference presentation!
Check them out below, enjoying the SoCal sun!
