By David Gordon, associate editor
Four “Humans of UW-Stout” projects have produced more than 500 visual and verbal Facebook portraits of people who were interviewed on the Menomonie campus.
They also provided a wide range of benefits to the students who participated.
A total of 91 first-year UW-Stout students worked on the projects this past year, as part of their course work in four first-year English classes taught by Genesea Carter, an assistant professor of English at the school.
Like a similar project at Eau Claire’s DeLong Middle School, this one was modeled on the well-known “Humans of New York,” an online project featuring on-the-street interviews with thousands of everyday people doing amazing things. (See http://www.humansofnewyork.com/.)
Carter said her students worked individually or in pairs, over the course of a month, to interview and photograph five strangers on the campus and to write up the interview. The material, gathered in the fall and spring semesters, was posted on Facebook, where more than 500 pictures and stories are now displayed.
“First-year students are in a unique position as both outsiders and insiders to their campus community as they learn to transition from high school to college,” Carter said via email. “I wanted this project to be a way to get first-year students out of their comfort zones and to meet new people, but– and most importantly – I wanted them to realize that they are contributing members of the community.”
Most of the first-year students are savvy social media users, she noted.
“This Facebook project capitalizes upon their technological literacy while also teaching them to engage with people around them in a new way,” she said.
Lessons learned from the project
Carter explained that, to be successful curators of stories and pictures, the students had to approach their subjects with a willingness to listen without judgment and to be genuinely be interested in those strangers’ stories.
“At the end of each semester, students are always surprised at how many strangers are willing to talk to them, even telling them deeply personal stories,” she said.
It may sound like a cliché, Carter said, but her students told her that they learned not to judge people based on their outward appearances.
“This project, I think, uncovers the ways they still are judgmental or make assumptions about people — which is human nature and a tough habit to break,” she added.
Other Benefits
Carter noted that research shows that first-year students who feel welcomed and valued by their college community will return to campus for their second year and will, most likely, finish college within four to six years.
“So, as much as this project was about helping first-year students get to know their campus community and learn about the people around them, this project is also about supporting their academic and professional success,” she said.
“It’s critical for first-year students to know how to get out of their comfort zones — whether that’s seeking out tutoring help, counseling services, professors’ office hours, and so on,” she said. “Teaching them how to approach and respond to atypical, new, or awkward situations is an important avenue in their paths to academic and professional success . . . and adulthood.”
Carter said she has made two presentations about the project and is in the process of writing an article about it. She noted that several friends who are faculty members elsewhere “have been inspired to start their own ‘Humans of’ pages at their own campuses.”
She said she hopes that becomes a nationwide trend.
“These kinds of projects are invaluable on a multitude of levels,” she said, “whether it’s teaching students about social media, about rhetoric and persuasion, about design, about diversity, or about regionalism and linguistic differences. The list could go on-and-on.”