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Meet the Staff (above image)
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The staff of the Office of Experiential Education, standing, left to right, Sally Anastos, Academic Learning Specialist; Ernest Byers, Graduate Assistant; Christie Boronico, Assistant Provost of Experiential Education; Kathy Forkin, Career Service Specialist; sitting, Deb Floch, Graduate Assistant and Arlene Anderson, Career Service Specialist.
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Christie Boronico, Assistant Provost, regarding the Office of Experiential Education
What is the goal of the Office of Experiential Education?
The goals of OEE come from the UNH Strategic Plan, which compels the University to become a leader in Experiential Education. In short, they include establishing an experiential education initiative that brings together existing opportunities, expands the number of placements and supports the connection of experiential education to the curriculum. We champion experiential education on campus, including creating a university-wide infrastructure to develop, support and monitor opportunities for experiential education such as study abroad, internships and service learning. We’ll consider ourselves successful when we’ve had all UNH students graduate having had an experiential learning opportunity.
How do you accomplish this?
Our office wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything without the support of the faculty and other UNH offices. We work hard to gain support across campus through communication, transparency and inclusion. We began last fall with a broad representation of faculty on the Experiential Education Team. After establishing a relationship with the National Society of Experiential Education - which resulted in UNH being named the Northeast Campus for the (National Society for Experiential Education) NSEE Experiential Education Academy - our team studied best practices in experiential education.
Those best practices included NSEE models and institutions recognized by U.S. News & World Report as being the best. That led to a proposed definition of experiential education for UNH. Then the team broke into sub-teams to move each portion of the definition forward (study abroad, internships, academic service learning, and faculty-mentored student research). We studied current UNH programs to establish benchmarks. We had 19 UNH faculty/staff graduate from the NSEE Experiential Education Academy. We are continuing the momentum this year with the teams; UNH faculty are giving five presentations at the National NSEE conference in October.
Talk a little bit about your staff, and about the department’s history.
We started last July. Kathy Forkin did career prep work with students, and I worked with the Experiential Education vision put forth by Steve Kaplan and the Strategic Planning committee. Our graduate assistant, Deb Floch, took on the role of creating and managing Career Services workshops and Kathy increased the number of students visiting our office. She also brought the Connecticut Professional Coaching Association to campus to help.
As the EE faculty developed a strategy for where the University was and where it needed to go with EE, we added Arleen Anderson to work with faculty/employers on our internship programs. This year, she is bringing in Michael True from Messiah College. He runs an internship office considered to be an example of “best practice.” In July we brought Sally Anastos to the team to advance the vision of Academic Service Learning. She is looking at models for faculty development related to Service Learning Curriculum Development and will establish UNH as an active partner in the Connecticut Campus Compact, an organization with 20 years of service learning experience. We are fortunate to have a graduate assistant with professional experience, Ernest Byers, who is advising students on study-abroad programs and coordinating visitors from other countries on campus. We will continue to build our relationships with our two international partners, and increase our goals related to students studying abroad. Janice Sanderson from the associate provost’s office is helping us out with administrative support and is an invaluable part of the team.
What is your busiest time of year, and what departments do you work with most frequently and why?
Everything we do is cyclical. However, with all of our different initiatives, there doesn’t seem to be a down time. We ran our staff retreat and goal planning session in July, which allowed us to do our program planning in August and hit the ground running when faculty and students were back in September. Even so, we had faculty-led-study-abroad activity in July and August and were involved in planning for the UNH United Way Day of Caring.
We work with everyone. There isn’t an office we haven’t tapped for support or inclusion of some kind. Physical Plant made the United Way signs for us. The University Police let me in at 3 a.m. a few times to proctor exams for a study-abroad student who had to take his exam in the middle of the night. I worry that my email address has made it to many people’s “SPAM” list, and that I might have a reputation for asking for things. But in retrospect, we really accomplished a lot in a short amount of time because of the campus-wide willingness to help us. I’m reminded of the Joe Cocker song that goes, “Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends …”
If you’re curious, this is what our department wants:
Kathy Forkin wants to be invited into classes and student club meetings to share info on our resume writing and interview skills software
Her graduate assistant, Deb, wants faculty to encourage students to attend the career prep workshops.
Arleen Anderson wants to work with faculty to identify the employers they want to strengthen relationships with.
Ernest wants a database of study-abroad courses approved for transfer back.
Sally Anastos is looking for faculty who want to add service to their pedagogy.
Ernest wants a database of study-abroad courses approved for transfer back.
I want another great Experiential Education Day Celebration. Last year we enjoyed a lot of student/faculty support and really managed to showcase our Experiential Education Achievements and the expanded numbers of faculty and staff earning EEA certification!
Where are you located?
We just moved from Maxcy Hall to Kaplan 210; hence the Open House we had last week. We expect to continue growing.
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