By Jenn Grimm, PhD
ROAR is a capstone service-learning course that integrates into and gives back to the community. Students in ROAR from across campus provide services to community organizations through a full-service communications agency, in strategy, research, marketing, design, and production, providing its students with hands-on experiential learning opportunities that prepare them for their future professions. Below is my interview with the Executive Director of ROAR, Dr. Ted Gournelos, who serves as an Associate Professor of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University.
Jenn: Can you share with us the philosophy behind ROAR and how it started?
Ted: I think for me it started with a series of questions: “What’s the line between “student” and “professional?” When do they cross that line? Or is that line even relevant in a time when many of our fields evolve rapidly and many of our students are working? This is what I asked myself when I arrived at ODU a few years ago as a faculty member and as Executive Director of a “digital communications firm” that was still basically a dream. What we ended up creating, named “ROAR” by former Dean of the Strome College of Business Jeff Tanner, is a fully functional strategic communications agency that bridges not only gaps between student and professional, but teaches students how to be professionals that never stop being students. It synthesizes their theoretical knowledge, whether they’re from graphic design, visual studies, marketing, communications, or another field, and shows them how to apply it to real world problems brought to us by real world clients.”
Jenn: This sounds exciting. Does it work?
Ted: “Well, students getting promotions and jobs definitely feels good, and we’ve seen that happen with the 4 students that graduated after taking ROAR last year. But within our first year of operation, we’ve been able to also show successes in trust from companies and the community. Our videos are shown at major nonprofit fundraisers and are in CEO email signature lines, our posters are prominently on the walls of local businesses, and we’re currently building three professional web sites. On a numbers side, we’ve also managed to become profitable, which seems crazy as a university startup run primarily with students and a part time Director! That didn’t happen because we had students that already knew how to do things, which is even more surprising; most of our students didn’t know anything about the tools we use in the class. It happened because the students working in COMM490 (the class associated with ROAR) learn to teach themselves and teach each other, to critique and be critiqued, and to understand research as the beginning, middle, and end of all projects. In other words, to think of themselves as professionals that are perennial students.”
Jenn: This class sounds like a great opportunity for ODU students to gain practical experience. Can you share more about how you view ROAR as providing a valuable experiential learning opportunity?
Ted: “I think first we have to remember that there’s a reason why President Hemphill recently outlined an ambitious goal to have every student complete an internship during their time at ODU. That might not seem ambitious on the surface, as the word “intern” often conjures images of harried 20-year-olds in ill-fitting suits making coffee and copies while somehow absorbing knowledge through osmosis from older, more experienced mentors. But that’s not the reality, right? To a student, why should they intern/work for free when they can make $15-20 an hour working a “regular job?” And jobs themselves are also different, with remote work and meetings, increasingly independent workers, and demographic shifts. And let’s not forget that university students themselves are different: often older, in different life stages, and seeking something more specific and applied than a college diploma for its own sake. Employers themselves are rightfully wary of hiring students that might take more work to train than they save in costs, especially as there are few guarantees of any other benefit.
“So why is President Hemphill advocating for it? Well, experiential learning has been shown time and time again to have the highest impact on students in terms of satisfaction, retention, and facility with course material. In fact, fields like education and nursing already require it, and for good reason. However, we need to make sure to prepare students for their careers in a way that focuses on the impact of an experience and what they’ve done in that experience rather than grades that employers will never see (and will most likely find irrelevant). After all, when employers ask me to link them with students, they all ask for the same things: the ability to be professional, to be a self-starter, and to actually do things.”
Jenn: I love this concept of students actually doing things during their internship experience. Can you share a bit more about some of the projects that students have completed through ROAR?
Ted: “We created ROAR as a cross-disciplinary service-learning course that integrates into and gives back to the community, working with nonprofits as small as the Elizabeth River Project and Tidewater Arts Outreach and as large as the Norfolk Botanical Garden and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, as well as ODU programs like Music, Math, and OpenSeas, and even businesses that are willing to take a chance on students. The experiences students have with these clients, whether they are frustrating or uplifting, are paired with a focus on research, “upskilling,” and problem solving to bridge the gap between the university and competitive job markets. We prepare them with a perspective, space, and technology that makes the experience accessible to all students, regardless of background and skill level, and integrate students’ self-designed learning into the course to fill gaps or solve problems they identify early in the semester through market research and analysis. With the Chesapeake Humane Society, we reframed their “medical” approach to a “family” approach, often even speaking from the point of view of the animals to be adopted themselves; this took the form of posters, video, web design, etc. With the Department of Mathematics, we’re trying to reduce student anxiety around math, especially in their amazing tutoring centers, to make students feel welcomed, have them understand the relevance and fascinating world of math to their own fields, and realize that they aren’t alone in thinking it’s difficult. With OpenSeas, we highlighted maritime startup companies assisted by the organization through posters and social media posts by demonstrating to “normal” people how they aren’t just businesses, they’re problem solvers that are making big impacts in efficiency, climate change, and employment. And that’s just the beginning.”
If you are interested in learning more about ROAR, including samples of student work produced through the program, please check out their website. The student work produced through this course is impressive.
Service-learning is a teaching and learning strategy that incorporates community service and community-engaged projects into the curriculum of a course, like ROAR. Faculty who are interested in implementing a service-learning project may receive support from the Office of Leadership & Learning, which also coordinates Service-Learning Instructional Mini-Grants to provide funding for instructors seeking to create or sustain a service-learning course. These grants are available to instructors on all career tracks, including full- and part-time faculty members, staff, and teaching graduate students. Instructors can request between $500 and $1,000 per course section to support a service-learning project. If you are interested in learning more about service-learning or the mini-grants funding, contact Kara Boone, Assistant Director for Service Learning in the Office of Leadership & Learning, at kwerkmei@odu.edu.
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