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Campus Spotlight: Kennesaw State’s 2015 Constitution Day Events

By Carlton Usher, Associate Professor of Political Science, Kennesaw State University

For the previous seven years Kennesaw State University (Ga.) has honored Constitution Day by extending the day into a week of activities. This year was no different.

Jerry Gonzalez and KSU students

Our week of activities started on Constitution Day with voter registration activities on both Kennesaw and Marietta campuses. Michael Sanseviro, Dean of Students, led the effort to promote voter registration on behalf of ADP and CLDE. Registration sites were located on both campuses and included voter registration tables and student leaders serving as what Dean Sanseviro calls “roving registrars.” These roving registrars are student leaders with iPads canvassing the campuses encouraging students to sign up to vote on the spot. Sanseviro also collaborated with SGA president, TurboVote, and the Center for Student Leadership to focus on first-year and first-time voters.

On September 19, Professor Carlton Usher led a teach-in on the constitution and religious freedom. Each student was offered a pocket constitution and small gifts furnished by the New York Times were awarded to the winners of the constitution quiz.

Usher also coordinated two other events to advance civic learning. On September 22, Voter Registration Day Jerry Gonzalez the founding and current Executive Director of Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials (GALEO) and the GALEO Latino Community Development Fund was invited to campus. His lecture titled Electoral Involvement and Participation: A Latino Perspective was informative and engaging. As one student puts it “though I am not Latino, I walked away understanding the issues a little clearer, immigration especially. I am glad you invited us to this program and I met

KSU first year students focused on lecture

some great people.” Another remarked that “… the high level of conversation during the Q&A shocked me a bit, I assumed my friends of other ethnicities did not know the issues, it turns out they do, I feel good about that.” Some major themes of Gonzalez’s lecture included charging students to become involved, staying involved, staying abreast of the issues and to impact change now. He discussed the Georgia electorate, voting rights, immigration, representative government, and the impact of new laws on Georgia’s Latino citizens. The ethnically diverse audience was fully engaged and several students registered to vote at the end of the lecture. Our speaker was pleased with the high level of civic and electoral understanding of our student population. It was a great learning experience for all including staff and faculty who dropped by to offer their support for our work.

Tierra G registering to vote

To connect with the perpetual mission of advancing global learning and student engagement at Kennesaw State University, Michael Slackman, International Managing Editor for The New York Times gave a lecture on September 24 titled Currents in Global Reporting and Democracy. After a great introduction by a student leader, Slackman offered us on a compelling narrative of his work abroad. He successfully framed the discussion of global reporting within the context of citizenship, democracy, and participation. He engaged the students on popular subjects such as Middle East politics, citizen media, natural disaster reporting, and the challenges of global reporting. His enthusiasm for the subject coupled with firsthand accounts of his work made for a great afternoon. The audience, mostly first-year students were fully engaged and had plenty of post lecture observations and questions. Several journalism students remarked later about how helpful he was discussing the profession with them. His willingness to help and using his personal biography to explain his work was greatly appreciated by the students, staff, and faculty in attendance. It was a splendid and informative affair.

Michael Slacker, Carlton Usher and KSU students

Overall, Constitution Week was a great week of activities and lectures for our students, staff, and faculty. Our tradition of extending constitution day to a week focused on student civic empowerment requires various partnerships, long –term planning and support from the office of the provost; all of which made the planning quite rewarding. With all the exciting additions to ADP at Kennesaw State University, we are sure our tradition to encourage greater engagement from an already engaged university will continue with great success.

Keep Your Campus Globally Connected, Anytime, Anywhere, via NYTimes.com

The New York Times in Education offers a wealth of resources, activities and events to engage students in and out of the classroom. NYTimes.com enhances the educational experience for students and faculty alike by connecting them to the world off campus, enhancing awareness of current events and fostering critical thinking.

To learn more about our newest offering, Academic Site License, or our other affordable education digital offerings, please contact Lynn Hall, National Education Director at lynn.hall@nytimes.com.

And be sure to check out the free AASCU/The New York Times Teaching Toolkit.

The New York Times in Education Teaching Toolkit

We encourage you all to read and share AASCU’s latest free publication, The New York Times in Education Teaching Toolkit. This toolkit builds on a long and productive partnership between AASCU and the Times—one that produced our American Democracy Project.

This toolkit showcases some of the great work happening on AASCU and ADP campuses, while providing a roadmap for those who want to expand their teaching techniques and strategies to include current events, and Times coverage and resources. We have collected observations, learning outcomes, course descriptions, assignments and course syllabi from real instructors who are currently using The New York Times in their classrooms. The result is a rich resource for anyone looking to bring the outside world into the classroom.

While compiling this toolkit, we paid close attention to learning outcomes. When possible, we have highlighted courses and assignments that we think help students to become stronger readers, writers and critical thinkers; to develop an increasing sense of global awareness and level of civic engagement; to widen their understandings of cultural diversity and social relevance, and to demonstrate ethical behavior and leadership skills. These outcomes, along with so many other reasons, are why we are proud to share this toolkit with each of you.

We hope you will take a look. Please feel free to let us know how you’ve incorporated the Times into your own classroom. The toolkit is available for download on the AASCU website.

Campus Spotlight: Georgia College’s Times Talk Program

By Gregg Kaufman, ADP Campus Coordinator, Georgia College

The 8^th year of the Georgia College Times Talk program is coming to an end this month. An unprecedented number of participants, over 1500 as of this writing, have gathered to address a variety of current and controversial topics. The Times Talk program has become a part of the university’s culture and is a dependable resource for quickly responding to campus as well as national and international issues. Student broadcast and print journalists trust the Wednesday Noon civil discourse as they cover the Wednesday sessions when reporting on specific stories.

A small segment of the Social Media and Hate Times Talk participants on March 5.

A controversial and embarrassing incident occurred on campus this semester  due to the “community-based vent application” Yik Yak. The app is designed to communicate anonymous comments relative to a specific locale and in the unfortunate case of GC, several insensitive racial statements targeting young campus visitors. As news spread about these prejudiced comments, a grass-roots response from students, faculty, and staff mobilized to use the incident to candidly dialogue about what some are referring to as racial “microaggressions.” To paraphrase the organizers, “How can we gather concerned people together to talk about this? Let’s see if this week’s Times Talk could be used to begin a conversation.”

Indeed, Times Talk became the starting point for what has become an ongoing dialogue as over 175 students attended a March 5 session and another 90 shared their thoughts at the following week’s Healing a Wounded Community Times Talk. The GC 360 weekly campus television show covered several Times talks over the course of the academic year. You can view these segments in the March 11 and April 1 broadcasts.

Co-moderator Emmanuel Little, Diversity Coordinator, standing and Dr. Andy Lewter, Dean of Students, not pictured, moderated the Times Talk.

Times Talk also hosted a debate on the Georgia Legislature’s HB60 bill that expands gun-carrying legislation after which Times Talk participants engaged in Q&A with the Rhetoric student debaters. Times Talk will be used as the first  hour of a Crimean Crisis: Democracy at Stake Teach-in on April 16.

While the weekly sessions provide a venue for discussing any number of current event issues, the Times Talk series also provides a dependable, “stewardship of place” resource that is responsive and adaptable to critical issues of interest to the campus community. Once more, it is important to note that the physical space for Times Talk is in a study area of the GC Library. No longer a bastion of quiet, the library becomes a public place for dialogue and pizza consumption!