Project lead: Ashley Laux (Associate Director of FLAG)
Vivero Fellow (2024-2025): Libby Eggert
Website Link: https://igestories.sites.grinnell.edu/
The Grinnell College Institute for Global Engagement (IGE) creates opportunities for students and faculty to develop their knowledge of the world. The Institute works to advance Grinnell’s global learning goals by facilitating collaboration across academic departments, centers, and programs to promote international learning and research. The Institute includes initiatives related to short-term and faculty-led global programs, off-campus study, support for language learning and intercultural communication, co-curricular engagement, and strategic partnerships.
We would like to create a ‘story platform’ for IGE’s Off-Campus Study (OCS), Grinnell-in-London (GIL), and Faculty-led Learning Across the Globe (FLAG) programs, potentially using Sites.Grinnell, where students can submit multi-media stories (photos, short video clips, first person narratives like a short blog post) about their participation in IGE short-term and semester-long programs. We hope to create a platform that utilizes different tags (for example program title, program location, academic discipline) so that visitors to the platform can find stories based on their interests. We hope to share the platform with different audiences (prospective students, current students, alumni) so that visitors can hear from students directly about their global experiences. We could use the published stories to enhance pre-departure trainings and information sessions about programs. Once this is developed, faculty members leading Course Embedded Travel (CET) and Global Learning Program (GLP) courses could also be encouraged to use this as a reflective tool – for example, assigning students to submit a reflection/story during their course travel or right after course travel. While it may not be possible in the scope of this project, we would also love to get a compilation of resources about digital storytelling that we could utilize to train our Global Envoy student staff members in how to tell their own global stories (that they would then contribute to the platform).
The Vivero Fellow working on this project will have the ability to develop digital storytelling skills along with learning and utilizing Grinnell’s digital tools to create the story platform. The Fellow will have a chance to work with passionate and fun IGE professional staff and Global Envoy peer mentors to co-create the platform and workflows to sustain it in future academic years.
