Students with the Virginia Ball Center will embark on projects dealing with sustainable agriculture, the history of Indiana, Brown County and the Indiana Dunes next year.
The Virginia Ball Center announced next year’s four immersive learning sessions. The two Fall Semester projects deal with advocating for sustainable architecture and creating a fourth-grade textbook on Indiana’s history.
Ron Morris, a history professor who is spearheading the textbook effort, said he taught fourth grade in the past and there is a widely-recognized need for a new textbook — a demand his team can fill.
Morris wants to create sample chapters of an online textbook with video clips, Web links and a Spanish version.
“Indiana is not a populous state so textbook publishers don’t put an emphasis on [us],” Morris said. “People have dreamed of doing an Indiana text for elementary students but the roadblock has been cost of full color printing. Now that we’ve moved beyond that, we have the opportunity to do something very different. The goal behind this is to [give] students a richer experience with text.”
He also wants sample chapters to model the complete text and generate more interest and support for a continued project.
Andrea Wolfe, an assistant professor of English, will lead a team of students in research on sustainable agriculture, traveling to Virginia and Washington, D.C. After the research phase, the students will form an idea for a public policy change to positively impact sustainable agriculture and create a website and videos to promote the idea.
She wants their work to reach legislators, educate the public and possibly enact change.
“Engaging the public with the idea of sustainability in farming [is one of my goals],” she said. “I don’t think many of us are really that aware where our food is coming from; we aren’t in touch with what is on our plate. We should be and in order to move towards sustainability, this is one thing we need to become aware of.”
Jenn Blackmer, associate professor of theatre, will lead a team of students to explore the history of Brown County and Nashville, Ind., through creating an original musical in spring 2014. It will premiere in a staged reading at the Brown County Playhouse.
Also during the spring, students with landscape architecture professor Christopher Baas will create short animations, posters, a documentary and children’s book to recreate a Prairie Club trip from Chicago to the Indiana Dunes. The Prairie club, which was a group of distinguished Chicago citizens, tried to preserve the dunes as a national park.
Projects through the center are funded mainly through the Edmund and Virginia Ball Foundation. Each year, four projects submitted by faculty are chosen, with two running each semester. Each project has around 15 participating students.
Students interested must apply and be chosen by the professor leading the project.
Joseph Trimmer, Virginia Ball Center director, said professors lay out the groundwork for their sessions with the topic they want to focus on and a final project, but students also have input.
“Professors announce the theme of the project, whether they want to do a film or a play or whatever but the students shape the way in which it is created,” Trimmer said. “The faculty member quickly becomes a student in his or her own class and they all work together. The operative word out here is ‘we.’ They collaborate together.”
