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As students and soon-to-be graduates prepare for life beyond campus comforts, ����̽̽’s Community-Engaged Learning Office (CELO) wanted to showcase student achievement beyond the classroom over the last year.

On Tuesday, April 30, CELO welcomed students, faculty, alums, and community partners to the Davis Center’s fourth floor for the first-ever Showcase of Community-Engaged Learning. Twenty-five service-learning projects were highlighted, with over 60 student-participants in attendance presenting their efforts and putting their curriculum into practice around the community.

“This is the first ever showcase of its kind at ����̽̽,” said Susan Munkres, director of CELO. “We support these classes through faculty trainings, small grants, and resource development. These are all students who have been nominated by their faculty for exemplary community engaged work in their classes.”

The projects showcase a few of the more established service-learning classes, from almost every college and concentration on campus, and were presented by the top-performing students in each cohort to illustrate the work students have invested into their studies and how they are applying it to real world problems.

“Many students from these classes go into leadership roles in the programs they’re part of and further into internships,” said Munkres. “Many of these students come out of service-learning classes and go into community-based research with the folks they’re partnering with. There’s a lot of interconnections.”

Each graduating student showcased will be presented with a graduation cord for demonstrating excellence in community-engaged learning.

Here are a few stories and presentations that were featured in this first-ever showcase:

Habitat Restoration for the Golden Wing Warbler

This year, Environmental Science students collaborated with the Charlotte Park and Wildlife Refuge to build a breeding habitat for the Golden Wing Warbler, a threatened bird species. The project, part of a Restoration Ecology class, aims to address the declining population of these birds from Vermont to the Great Lakes region.

“Vermont is the only state in New England with breeding grounds for this species,” said Halsey Mclaen '24, “and we’re at the easternmost range of their breeding region. The most important thing they need for breeding is early successional forest habitat. We’ll be cutting down trees, removing invasive species, and planting chokeberries, silky dogwood, lots of small bushes and some grasses to hopefully create a good habitat patch for these Warblers to breed.”

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has identified Charlotte as an important place for the species, said Hailey Snider '24. “The town just got a grant from the Cornell lab to create more habitat for the Warbler. When we started thinking about projects, this site was already identified as a good fit for this habitat.”

Throughout the semester, the students developed a management plan and monitoring protocol for the habitat, in hopes that their efforts promote a viable and sustainable breeding ground for this species.

"The day after this showcase is actually a workday for us,” Lindsay Haigh '24 said. “We’re going out to Charlotte and implementing our plans in different areas of the park."

These students’ efforts are a culmination of their research and problem-solving coursework, applying that knowledge to promote sustainability.

“Restoration is expensive,” said Nicole Hardy '24. “We created our budget and calculated that this restoration effort would cost about $26,000 over a few years. Doing the labor of assessing the site, cutting the trees down, planting new trees is useful for a community partner.”

The project not only benefits the environment but also provides valuable fieldwork experience for the students. “This is pretty typical field work in our area,” said Hardy. "All of us are really interested in pursuing work like this in the future."

Fit Kids & Kiddie CATs on the Move: Enhancing School Readiness in Preschoolers through Physical Activity

Now in its eighth year, Fit Kids Applied Research service-leaning course continues to support school readiness in preschoolers through its highly structured, research-based fitness program designed by Betsy Hoza and Erin Shoulberg.  

Hannah Mildt '24, a psychology student involved in the program, explained its structure: "Fit Kids gives undergraduate students the opportunity to run a physical activity program called Kiddie CATs on the Move in local preschools. It’s six hours of volunteering per week, focusing on getting preschoolers to reach moderate to vigorous activity levels for 30 minutes per day 2-3 times per week."

This semester, the program’s student leaders assessed physiological and behavioral impacts on preschooler participants, focusing on behavioral inhibition, cognitive functioning, and emotion regulation, to name a few.

Mildt, who has been part of the Fit Kids program for multiple semesters, highlighted its positive impact – both for the children and for ����̽̽’s student facilitators.  

"I came into Fit Kids in the fall of my junior year with no experience with kids in this age group, and it really sparked my interest, said Mildt. “I now work at Lund Family Center, a childcare center for kids aged 0-5, and I don’t think I ever would’ve applied for a job like that if I hadn’t had this experience. I just really liked having the connection with those kids and have a hands-on impact on them, and this course really allowed me to do that.”

Exploring Food Access with the Agroecology and Livelihoods Collective

Eight students participated in a fellowship program with the Agroecology and Livelihoods Collaborative (ALC), an initiative dedicated to applying agroecology principles to the farming industry and food systems around Vermont and across the country.

“Every week we took groups of students to four different farms,” said Sadie Southall '24, a senior in the Accelerated Master’s program studying food systems. “Students got hands-on farm experience growing organic vegetables, we did soil sampling, which informed farmers how to grow vegetables and fertilize their fields. We interviewed the farmers on how their farms align with the principles of agroecology. The final part was showing how all these different aspects come together.”

“[Agroecology] is about bridging the gap between farming and communities that may not have the kind of food access that we at a university do,” said Ethan Pezzini '24, a senior studying Agroecology. “The whole impetus behind agroecology as a movement is to revamp the way we do agriculture; revamp the way we do research to be more people focused.”

“So many have no idea where their food comes from,” said Ashley Winter '25, a junior studying Environmental Studies and Pre-Law. “They don’t have much understanding of how much work it takes to produce the food that they eat.”

“Some students had been on farms before, others had no idea, so it gave everyone an idea of how a farm runs and the challenges farmers face every day,” said Anna Flaherty '24, a senior studying Agroecology. “We were on the farms right after the flooding happened [in July 2023]. Farmers were adapting a lot, students really got to see how people were reacting to a crisis.”

The fellowship was transformative for many of the student participants presenting at the showcase, who see agroecology as an important answer to addressing food system challenges in communities across the country.

“Agriculture often is villainized as contributing to climate change, water pollution issues, soil degradation,” said Winter. “This class has shown me that agriculture can be our biggest solution to fighting a lot of these issues, doing agriculture in this way is incredible.”

Celebrating Indigenous Culture through Virtual Storytelling

����̽̽ Students studying introductory-level Spanish embarked on an expansive project with Addison County School District to celebrate the storytelling of indigenous cultures of Central and South America through virtual media. The Hispanic Tales project celebrates the stories, art and mythologies of indigenous peoples and shares these stories in Vermont classrooms.

"Throughout the semester, each student studied a different indigenous population, compiling a portfolio of writings about their communities, food, and traditions," said Elizabeth Roadcap '24, a senior majoring in Molecular Genetics who took the course as an elective. "Our final project was to select a poem or a story from that indigenous population and record ourselves speaking it while creating an animation to complement the narrative."

The result of this collective effort will be a virtual library comprising approximately 40-50 Spanish language virtual read-alouds that can be used in middle school and high school curricula.

Roadcap chose to focus on the Mapuche people in Chile. "My project involved reading a poem and creating an animation to go along with it, animating the story as I’m reading it," she said.

Finding the stories and poems proved to be a challenging yet rewarding task. "It depended on the indigenous community," Roadcap said. "Mine was a little hard to find, so I had to find scholarly articles analyzing the Mapuche peoples’ poems and finding a poem I could understand. Essentially, it was about learning about the communities that led to the stories."

The project became an immersive language-learning experience, Roadcap said. "It was a great way to supplement my Spanish learning, to put the language into context. It improved my language learning, and it all feels more contextual beyond just learning the words; it makes me want to interact with people and learn about them more than just what they’re saying."

Building Careers for Tomorrow through Service-Learning

“Service learning occurs at all levels of the curriculum,” said Susan Munkres. “We know how difficult it is for folks to conceptualize the real diversity of what is happening at ����̽̽. We see it because we go to class presentations nonstop the last two weeks of the semester while very few people see this work. All these students have been working closely in the field with a faculty member who is mentoring them in off-campus settings and building relationships, so the transferrable skills workshops we offer in these classes help students identify the career skills they are building. Many of our faculty report anecdotally to me jobs their students are getting based on their placements and their service-learning activities.”