Creating an Effective Proposal for Poster Session @ CLDE 2016.

Reminder: Proposals — including those for our poster session — are due Monday, Feb. 1st through our online submission form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1u5-y6qJ83nhezEJtaJZzuh9srUfnv3gMt6kHhkmGLmA/edit 

---

 

By Anne Weiss, Director of Assessment, Indiana Campus Compact and CLDE 2016 Planning Committee Member

A brief guide regarding effective, informative, and creative poster sessions.

What Can a Poster Tell CLDE Attendees?

The success, failures, but importantly the lessons we have learned and can share with others is very valuable for our attendees.  Please consider sharing these moments!

• The impact on your civic learning or development due to your experience with a course-based project (international or domestic).
• Individual projects linked to planning or participation in political and current events, topics, problems, demonstrations, buy- or boycotts, canvasing, etc.
• Collaborative projects (community service, advocacy, political engagement, community-engaged research, creative activity, etc.) with one or more faculty, staff and/or community partners.
• Individual or team-based projects around campus policies regarding the political engagement of staff/faculty or students (e.g., creating and implementing policies around social media and political engagement).
• Individual or group research projects around (but not limited to):
  • voting patterns, policies, and voter education;
  • political science (domestic or international);
  • sociology of political engagement;
  • the law and student affairs (e.g., risk & liability of political engagement);
  • utilizing institutional data (NSSE, NSLVE, etc.) to inform practices and pedagogies;
  • citizen education;
  • and so much more!

The Abstract is KEY![i]

An abstract serves the function to entice individuals to read and review your work—in this case your poster.  Granted, this may be hard to do in just 80 words, but make those 80 words count!

Components of an abstract vary by discipline.  You are free to follow the conventions common to your field of study and you may want to talk with a faculty member or other mentor as you prepare your abstract.  Alternatively, you may use the following headings to structure your abstract:

• Background— Describe the setting of the project/activity. Include a statement that describes the political, public or civic issue or question to be addressed. Who was involved?
• Objectives— What was your project trying to accomplish? What dimensions of an issue did your project address? How were the outcomes defined and by whom?
• Methods— What steps did you take or strategies did you use to achieve project objectives?
• Results— What happened as a consequence of your activities in and with the community or campus? What were the products of your project (if any)?  What was the “impact” (see box insert) of the project on the community(ies) or campus constituents served?  What was the impact on you and your fellow collaborators?
• Conclusion—What information was learned that can be used by other groups or organizations? What did you learn?

Regardless of the nature of your project, you will have opportunities to collect data on your activities.  You may want to include some of these in the abstract.  You will definitely want to include these and/or related types of data on your poster.

[i] Adapted from “Creating an Abstract about Your Advocacy Project,” Fisch, SF; Griffin M; Livingston J. RAHC Community Medicine Educational Cooperative, 2010.