As a member of the faculty here at SCC I am encouraged to engage in campus service. Which means I should do things on campus. Fortunately, I would do things even without encouragement, but it is still nice to know that the college is interested in fostering this kind of internal community. So... what does campus service look like?
One of the first things I did on campus was volunteer to speak at the annual
Scary Movie Marathon. Around Halloween I saw a flier advertising the scary movies that were going to be shown and I thought that would be a great opportunity for me to bring some academic psychology to what otherwise would be a purely entertaining movie. That first year I spoke about the nature of fear, and about a different topic from psychology (Aliens,
Zombies, and Bloody Mary) each year since.
Last spring I helped to organize a week of
child abuse prevention events during child abuse awareness month. This included speakers from the community like Dr. Jamie Spurrier-Kondis a pediatrician specializing in child abuse, and also a nationally recognized advocate
Erin Merryn who went on to be named
Glamour magazine's woman of the year. I also got to speak at an anti-bullying event when speaker cancelled at the last minute.
Aside from talking, I serve on tasks force (is that right?) and committees. That really means I go to meetings and try not to doodle too much. Like with most meetings some are effective and others not. Either way I always try to bring some entertaining ideas to the table.Presently I serve on the
Long-Range Planning Steering Committee (LRC-SC) and the Distance Learning and Educational Technology (DLET) Task Force. Both are trying to create systems and plans where, in many cases, there was no system before. It is very challenging since so many interests are vested in both of these arenas. I suspect that there will be no way to please everyone in either of these groups, but hopefully we can find a healthy consensus for our plans.
I've also been helping with the promotion of The American Theater Festival. This is the most fun I think you are allowed to have doing campus service. The English and History departments work together each year to stage plays (
RFK and
Gertrude Stein) that are connected to American History. There are so many events aside from just the plays that are going to make this spring a fun time to be at SCC. If you are looking for more information you can check out the
ATF Facebook page. This year, in an effort to increase attendance to the plays we are trying to do more promotion on social media. Like this blog, the ATF has a blog, but the best part about it is that this year we found a very special guest blogger to write for us:
Gertrude Stein herself! So go ahead over to her
latest blog post and check it out!
