Categories are Overall Service-Learning, Community Impact, Innovation and Creativity (i.e. problem solving) and Collaboration/Leadership

Overall Service-learning-participants should demonstrate the best service-learning project overall at the service-learning showcase. This project incorporates all of the qualities of social causes, innovation, creativity, collaboration and leadership.

Community Impact-the criteria for this poster is for service-learning participants to have an impact in the community by working on social causes that improve the capacity and infrastructure of the organization. 

Innovation, creativity and advocacy- the criteria for these awards will focus on using the ingenuity of students and creativity of service projects in the community to solve community problems (i.e., building ramps for seniors, painting murals for a school or city block, neighborhood clean-ups, mobilizing a march, organizing voting drives).

Collaboration/leadership-this criteria will recognize the collaboration and leadership skills needed to bring together a group of people to conduct a service project. It is important to coordinate the efforts behind the scenes to get volunteers to and from service-learning projects. For example, engaging youth in projects, mentoring and tutoring activities, participating in a day of service.

PowerPoints should be created as a stand alone artifact. In the first round of review, judges will review your PowerPoint (in .pdf format) to understand your academic service-learning experience. 

PowerPoints should be no longer than 8 slides. In the next section, content for your PowerPoint will be listed. 

Description in words and graphics of your service-learning experience using the following guidelines:

Community Partner

• Community partner’s name, mission and target population served
• Include photos and logo

Personal growth through your service-learning experiences- lessons learned

• Share personal reflection
• Personal awareness
• Future goals and aspirations

Academic Connection

• Relate information back to the academic discipline
• What principles from class relate to the service that was conducted?
• What you learned that you could not have learned in the classroom?

Impacting the community

• Nature of your service-learning activities
• Community impact/ capacity built 

Acknowledgements

• Community partner/ Volunteer Coordinator/ Supervisor 
• Faculty supervisors/Mentors
• Resources

All judging will be done virtually. In the first rounds, our panel of community partner leaders will review each digital .pdf poster/PowerPoint submission based on the below criteria. Submissions that are deemed as finalist will be notified and invited to participate in the second/ final round of judging, which will consist of a live Zoom mini-presentation and chance for the judges to ask questions of the students. More details are in the next section. 

The Criteria for Judging the Poster

• Ease of Viewing
• Content
• Spelling and grammar
• Integration of the service-learning concepts (service-learning and academic discipline)

Poster elements should align with:

Academic Service-Learning Standards for Quality Practice

Meaningful Service: Service-learning actively engages participants in meaningful and personally relevant service activities

Link to Curriculum: Service-learning is intentionally used as an instructional strategy to meet learning goals and/or content standards.

Reflection: Service-learning incorporates multiple challenging reflection activities that are ongoing and that prompt deep thinking and analysis about oneself and one’s relationship to society.

Diversity: Service-learning promotes understanding of diversity and mutual respect among all participants

Student Voice: Service-Learning provides students with a strong voice in planning, implementing, and evaluating service-learning experiences with guidance from the instructor and community partner.

Partnership: Service-learning partnerships are collaborative, mutually beneficial, and address community needs.

Progress Monitoring: Service-learning engaged participants in an ongoing process to assess the quality of implementation and progress toward meeting specified goals, and uses results for improving and sustainability.

Duration and intensity: Service-Learning has sufficient duration and intensity to address community needs and meet specified outcomes.

Finalist Presentation Notes- students/ student teams selected as finalists will be asked to prepare a brief (1 minute) overview of the project and then engage in a question and answer/ discussion time with the panel of community partner judges. 

Finalist will be notified by email notifying them of their status. Emails will be sent to Team Captains for all team entries. 

All presentations/ Q & A sessions will be held via Zoom.