I took this picture on a student’s smartphone during class. I use it here to illustrate my point in today’s post: it is a good thing to get Quest I students out of the classroom during class.
Getting out of the classroom can be a nice tool in your first-year-experience toolbox. I am familiar with three ways of doing this at UW Oshkosh: the downtown tour, the campus tour, and the scavenger hunt. I will share those here, and I hope others can chime with their ways of getting students out of the classroom in the comments section.
The students posing, above, were in my Fall 2014 Quest I. We had just been discussing the Independent Order of Odd Fellows’ Hall in which Manila Restaurant is housed. On our long walk on the Wiouwash Trail to get there, we talked about Oshkosh history and the signature question of “How do people understand and engage in community life?”. The walking tour took a little research (start here and here), but there are a surprising number of historical markers along the way. It lent itself to our getting to know one another, to talking about what makes a community, and to my mostly non-Oshkosh students getting to know their new adopted city.
On a different day, we made a much shorter tour around campus. We started from our classroom in Sage, heading to Shapiro Park, near the Fox River, then Pollock House, Reeve Union, Dempsey Hall, and Swart Hall. Handily, the Polk Library office has compiled several histories of buildings, events, or groups at U.W. Oshkosh. Dempsey Hall was a place to talk about the 1916 fire, Black Thursday, and the Algoma Street Riots, while Swart Hall was a place to talk about U.W. Oshkosh’s long tradition of teacher training, part of which is depicted in the New Deal art in the main lobby. I found students eager to know their place in the history of the university, and happy to see more student resources in person. I usually task my peer mentor with leading us through Reeve, pointing out where to do this or that. (At Pollock House, the USP staff are always welcoming to USP students).
All Quest I courses require some co-curricular activities. The way that I, and many of my History Department colleagues, have incorporated these is to frame them as a scavenger hunt. For my class, I ask students to “collect” a couple co-curricular activities in each of these categories: cultural events, events that help you get to know UWO, events that help you get to know Oshkosh, student organization events, and office visits with me and our peer mentor. Each “collected” event gets the student one point in her final average. No double-dipping is allowed, but attending the annual Pow Wow could count as a cultural event or getting to know UWO. My peer mentor, of course, picks a couple that she will be at, and advertises these in class. I also like to attend a couple, usually a Taste of Nations lunch and an on-campus film showing. Students prove to me that they attended by showing some artifact or souvenir: a ticket stub, a selfie, or a short reflection on the event. Jeff Pickron, I hear, frames his differently. He gives students one day to whirl around campus “collecting” lots of things. That is a nice way of helping students get to know one another and the campus.
What about you? How do you get Quest I students out of the classroom and attending co-curricular events?
– Gabe Loiacono, History
The QUESTioner 