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Conversations with Successful Partners

Page history last edited by ShareRiff 14 years, 11 months ago

 

When USFSP's Writing Program partners with a Mt. Zion Human Services, Inc., diverse interests and energies converge on the needs of Midtown St. Petersburg, FL, an area with the highest levels of illiteracy, education failure, crime, violence, poverty, and substance abuse in Pinellas County. This brief presentation is designed to initiate conversations our partnership's origins, it's evolution, and outline our plans for the future. The partnership began with the conversion of otherwise obsolete, donated computers into an open source computer network for youth and preschool programs at Mt. Zion Human Services (MZHS) in Midtown. The project grew. USFSP students in 3 different classes are writing grants, creating brochures and technical manuals, designing a monthly newsletter, installing and maintaining a computer network on the Linux Terminal Server Project  (LTSP) model, researching and implementing a mentoring program, developing new curriculum materials and assessment protocols for an existing after-school tutoring program, refurbishing the creative/art studio, and documenting the process along the way. The ideas, projects, and experiences continue to grow based on community need and student interests--merging these different vectors of interest organizes the dynamic, emergent, high-stakes, and often-times uncertain nature of this collective problem-solving effort, and, along the way, renders an ongoing real-time training in professional communication.  This particular USFSP-MZHS partnership, informed by the service learning tradition, reinforces and grounds our vision of a community-based professional communications program, and highlights the most important challenges, lessons, and possibilities that adhere in our manner of growing a networked (re)public--for our writing program, our students, and our community partners.

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