MURFREESBORO,
Tenn. — One by one, students in MTSU management professor Jackie Gilbert’s
class came to the front and took their classmates through slideshows of their
community service hours at local nonprofits during the spring semester.
It was
the final meeting of the spring Principles of Management 3610, an upper level
Experiential Learning/MT Engage course for juniors and seniors held in the
Business and Aerospace Building.
A
minimum of 10 community service hours combined with culminating in-class
presentations were a requirement for this class, which forced Jones College of
Business students to apply theory gleaned from textbooks to real situations
inside and outside of the classroom.
It’s
another example of the university’s ongoing efforts to not only improve student
academic success but also prepare them for success careers. More MTSU courses
are incorporating the hands-on learning emphasis of the EXL and MT Engage
initiatives, the latter being the university’s latest quality enhancement plan
to improve student learning.
“EXL
(experiential learning) is learning by doing,” Gilbert said. “So I try to have
these activities where I can get them immersed in the topic and where they
actually have to present something to their peers, and in addition to that,
they work in teams.”
Gilbert’s
Principles of Management class gave these students an overview of management
responsibilities and a foundation in skills such as planning, organizing,
leading and controlling, with a specific emphasis on understanding employee
behavior.
The 33
students in the spring course earned final grades derived from homework
assignments, journaling, community service, chapter quizzes, in-class
assignments and class participation. Working in teams is a must in Gilbert’s
course, with students signing a team agreement on how they’ll interact with
each other. Teams also developed a conflict management plan.
An
“extreme animal lover,” MTSU senior Shea Kramer volunteered at Rutherford
County PAWS (Pet Adoption and Welfare Services) to fulfill her service hours.
And after spending time at the west Murfreesboro nonprofit, the Florida native
is now strongly considering adopting because “seeing those animals stay there
week after week was really heartbreaking.”
But for
Kramer, a health care administration major with a minor in psychology and
health care services, working at PAWS also drove home the importance of
communicating with staff and volunteers, a skill she feels will help her in her
current managerial role outside of class as well as her eventual goal of
running her own elder care facility or hospital.
“I feel
like it’s a class that everybody should have to take,” Kramer said. “I was able
to tie in a lot of the things I learned in Dr. Gilbert’s class toward becoming
a better manager, and knowing to ask people what they think instead of
micromanaging them and telling them this is what should happen.”
Other
hands-on components in the course included a competition in which student teams
created an original motivational song that would jumpstart the day for a
company’s employees. For extra credit, student teams developed cultural
presentations that included food samples.
Gilbert
invited three judges to provide feedback as well as selection the motivational
song winner: Dr. Mary Hoffschwelle, a history professor and faculty fellow
director for MT Engage; Carol Swayze, director of the Experiential Learning
Program; and Jill Hodges, a counselor at St. Rose of Lima Catholic School in
Murfreesboro.
“Students
certainly had fun creating their motivational songs and we judges enjoyed their
work!” Hoffschwelle said. “While having fun, students also learned how to
collaborate with each other and to communicate their classroom learning to a
new audience through music and visuals.
“Engagement
like this helps students think about their learning in new ways and enhances
the skills necessary for success in their academic and professional lives.”
For
cultural presentations, students served and described foods associated with the
culture, and some even dressed in “traditional” attire or showed photos and
artifacts. Kramer’s team presented Southern culture, with Moon Pie, sweet tea
and cornbread samples to enjoy. Other teams highlighted cultures from across
the globe, with Saudi Arabian and Ethiopian culture among other presentations.
“We had
a very diverse class,” Kramer said.
Take
Dawit Tesfaye, a junior majoring in informational computer science with a
business minor. He was part of a group of four students, with him and two other
students being natives of Ethiopia while the fourth member was from Ghana.
Tesfaye
said the group’s presentation of Ethiopian culture focused on some of the
things for which African nation is known — discovering coffee, Orthodox
Christianity, the Lalibela labyrinth of churches and long-distance running, for
example.
A
self-admittedly “shy” person naturally, Tesfaye said learning the dynamics of
working within a team environment and developing presentations will prove
useful in his career: “The more you do it, the better you get. I was really shy
when I first came here … the more I started standing out and speaking, the more
confident I get.”
That’s
the point, Gilbert said.
“One of
the reasons we did that was to learn about diversity in a fun,
nonconfrontational way,” Gilbert said. “I think it created a closeness and a
curiosity that typically you wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
To get
an experiential learning component in diversity, students had access to the
virtual reality software “Second Life.” It allows users to create virtual
“personas” in which they can change facets of their real personas such as
gender or race. They would then navigate through this virtual world to see how
others perceive them.
“The
nature of the internet is changing … it’s rapidly morphing into a more dynamic
visual world,” Gilbert said. “That’s what they’re going to be encountering in
the next five years.”
There
are already instances of people experiencing forms of discrimination in this
virtual world, so “will discrimination laws apply in the virtual world once you
start holding business meetings (there)?” Gilbert said.
“Those
are some of the things for them to consider.”
For more
information about the MTSU Department of Management, visit http://www.mtsu.edu/management/.
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