About the Experience: For EDU 6051: Culture, Power, Equity, Influence I created an action plan course as my signature assignment. Here, I created a hypothetical 8 week course to be taught at my alma mater, Allegheny College, that focuses on engaging minorities in small liberal arts colleges using discussion, curated resources, and reflective assignments. I enjoyed creating this course and hope to be able to enact it someday at an institution to provide an in-class component to the extracurricular engagement that minority students are more likely to experience. This project can be view in its entirety here.
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In my final course of the master's program, EDU 6225: The Capstone, I authored a case study as a follow up to my action plan course. In this project, I examined the feasibility of a course like Engaging Minorities at a small liberal arts colleges, where minority enrollments are statistically lower than larger universities. Using statistical enrollment data, I examined Allegheny's enrollment trends and offered suggestions to support the recruitment of a diverse student body as well as recommendations to provide in-class engagement, such as specific states to pursue in recruitment efforts and ways to make academic curriculum more conducive to minority engagement. My case study can be viewed here.
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What I Learned: This project provided two opportunities for me to reflect on both my undergraduate experiences and everything I learned throughout the master's program. The fact that these projects book-ended the program allowed me to take a look at one issue from two different perspectives. Not only was I able to apply an entire program's worth of skills and knowledge in my case study, I was able to reflect on one of my first projects, find a potential flaw, and work within the system of higher education to find a solution. In both cases, my objective is to get more people into a high-quality, supportive educational setting.
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Skills: Both my action plan course and my case study allowed me with opportunities to exercise my research and analytical skills within the body of higher education research. I also worked within contemporary qualitative and qualitative research resources to explore a relevant issue in today's higher education landscape. Furthermore, creating the final deliverables gave me an opportunity to create engaging assignments and a presentation with visual, oral, and written components.
