Posted by Jay Livingston
Poster presentations have long been a part of academic conferences. At the ESS today, in the Grand Ballroom, seventy undergraduates put up posters summarizing their work. Some of the posters were syntheses based on library research, but several of the students had done their own original work. These kids were better than all right, and there was a quite a diversity of method.
Sara Tomczuk (The College of New Jersey) has worked summers on Long Beach Island (“down the shore”). Motels, stores, and restaurants there bring girls from Eastern Europe to work, paying them far less than they would pay Americans. Sara interviewed some of these girls about the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of these arrangements.
* * * *
Erin Pollard (Ursinus) used official records and persistent telephoning to dig out information about the racial composition of private and public schools in five cities.
* * * *
Christa Vanet (Penn State, Abington) observed interactions between the homeless and the non-homeless.
* * * *
Tamaria Green and Regine Saintilien (The College of New Jersey) did a case study of a toxic waste dump slated to be located near a school. They got their information from the DEP, from their own attendance at a variety of meetings, even from Google-eye overhead photos of the area.
* * * *
Skye MacKay (University of New Hampshire) did a survey to find correlates of having been tested for HIV. Interesting, the largest beta was for age, not number of sexual partners.
* * * *
The graphics were often impressive, especially for those of us who remember the hand-drawn posters of the previous century. But even more encouraging was listening to so many students who were truly excited about their work – the process of research as well as the results.
1 comment:
The posters do look good, but I'm still not switched on to them as a medium for expressing ideas. At my place, a few years ago some final assignments saw posters replace essays. My first response was "why have we been hammering in the heart of essay writing if the students aren't going to be assessed on it in the final year?" Am I just old fashioned?
Post a Comment