by Elizabeth Lucas
Four years ago my parents made the bittersweet decision to move from Costa Rica to Pennsylvania after 19 years. Here and there I asked myself if getting an education in the USA was truly better than one I could be getting back at home. Most of the time the answer was “no, not really.” It was not until my senior year that I finally realized how privileged I was as I would not have been given the same opportunities and experiences in Costa Rica as I had here in the USA. One of the main reasons for this was my involvement with GoodWork.
The Bloomsburg GoodWork Initiative took off during the Fall 2011. Psychology Teaching Assistants (myself included) were asked to participate and run small discussion sessions with half of the ACT101 incoming freshmen (students who are at a financial, cultural, social or educational disadvantage). The sessions ran for 6 weeks. Two sessions were dedicated to each of the 3 E’s of GoodWork. We encouraged students to reflect and talk about what each E meant to them, who were their role models for that E, and how they as students have demonstrated that E. Students were very much engaged and participated even more enthusiastically than I would have imagined.
Teaching Assistants would meet after each session and discuss if we needed to modify anything and compare notes on how students did that day. We had some common threads between all groups. When the students were asked to define Excellence and Engagement they had a good grasp on the meaning, but when they were asked to give an example they would sometimes say something like: “going to all of your classes.” In regards to Ethics, students had a hard time defining it, giving examples and for the most part they had all partaken in unethical behaviors. Personally, what was most shocking was that some of the students were not able to come up with role models in their lives. As Teaching Assistants, we encouraged students to explore these ideas further and talked about how these ideas could be applied in their next four years as students.
I hope that there was as much value to these discussion sessions for each of the students that participated as there was for me. The questions that we asked them every week were also questions that I was asking myself. I think that as human beings we go through the motions of every day life without taking the time to reflect about what it is that we are doing or the purpose to it. Some of us might know what we want to do “when we grow up” and we want to be the best we can be at it. For others, we might still be trying to find that passion that will motivate us to wake up and go to work every morning. Some of us might already know the answer to those two, but we are trying to figure out a way to do it the right way because we are conscious of the demands society has.
It was because of that initial participation, that when Dr. Jennifer Johnson asked if any one of the Teaching Assistants would like to take GoodWork any further as an independent study, I jumped right in. At first, my focus was to look at what worked and what did not work during this first initiative and finding improvements for future GoodWork activities. I created surveys for everyone who participated in the sessions (Teaching Assistants, Facilitators and students) and from there, I focused on areas that needed improvement. I presented a poster at the Eastern Psychological Association conference in March 2012.
In the spring of 2012, I also began to work with Dr. Jennifer Johnson, Dr. Mary Katherine Duncan and Dr. Joan Miller. We met weekly to assess another set of data from students and kept thinking of ways to keep GoodWork moving forward at Bloomsburg University. We were granted permission to create the Freshman Orientation Summer Reading for the incoming students in the fall of 2012. One of the videos I proposed is going to be used for this assignment. The four of us along with Dan Haverstock (GoodWork independent study student for the upcoming year) were also invited to attend a meeting at Project Zero with Wendy Fischman, Lynn Barendsen, Margot Locker and Howard Gardner. It was of great pleasure to finally meet the people whose papers and research I had been reading about all year. It was also incredibly rewarding to share everything that we had worked on so hard during the last year. We were given great feedback and suggestions for the ideas we had for moving forward.
Previously I mentioned that if I had not gone to college in the USA I would have not gotten involved with GoodWork. I might have not been given some of the opportunities and learned as much about myself as I would have back at home. GoodWork allowed me to reflect on what it means to do GoodWork as a student and a young professional and how it affects our daily life. It got me thinking about what kind of professional I want to be and what values I want to take with me. My involvement in the discussion sessions taught me how to lead a group and improved my ability to present research and talk in public. I learned that even though I was only a student, my opinion was important, I could work hand in hand with professors I considered my mentors in order to create something bigger and make a difference.
I’ve successfully graduated from Bloomsburg and will be starting the next chapter of my life as a graduate student at Temple University in the fall. I will be taking everything that I have learned these last four years and especially this last one and applying it to my life as a student there and eventually my professional life. I am hoping that in some way I can still stay involved with GoodWork at Bloomsburg University and perhaps start GoodWork awareness at Temple.