Sense of Place Toolkit

The Sense of Place Symposium on Connection is a fantastic opportunity for many aspects of the Chico State campus and community to come together to learn from one another! Many people come together to help make this event possible, including faculty, teaching associates, student staff, and a variety of programs and groups from the campus and surrounding community. This section of the toolkit will introduce you to some of the documents and procedures that the student-led event coordinator team uses to organize and manage this project.

Our SOP Civic Expo is a tabling event that occurs during a portion of SOP, in which we invite clubs and organizations from the campus and Chico community to introduce the many opportunities and resources they offer to our students in an effort to further their connection with Chico and its community. 

The Course Related Materials section will help you understand how we incorporate Public Sphere Pedagogy (PSP) in our participating FYE-Supported Courses. This section is critical to understanding the course-event connection and should be a starting point as you consider PSP for your own institution. It is importantthat faculty understand what a PSP event entails and the benefits of PSP events for students, as having them on board makes preparation for the event a lot easier.   

The SOP student-staff work to tackle the Logistics of the event by utilizing spreadsheets, documents, and surveys to organize the many elements and participants for the event. There are a lot of moving parts as we prepare to host hundreds of stakeholders, so it is important that there are consistent methods of communication and organization to ensure a smooth event day. 

• Course Related Materials

  Public Sphere Pedagogy (PSP) aims to shine a light on students’ work and their important ideas by sharing them with the surrounding campus and community. Bringing students and members of the community together to share ideas allows the students to see themselves as "real" college students who are capable of having meaningful and productive conversations at the college level, as well as “real” members of the wider Chico community who want to participate and contribute. Our event also operates as a safe place for students to practice and gain confidence in their networking and public speaking skills, which will help them in their academic journey. We hope that all of these aspects of our event help students develop a stronger sense of belonging to Chico State and its community. 

  Students in FYE-Supported Courses should be exposed to the Sense of Place event as soon as possible to ensure they understand what they are signing up for. Students should not be surprised about having to participate in the event as part of the class, and if possible, the class should have an attribute on the course schedule at your institution identifying it as an FYE-Supported Course with a required PSP event. In the early weeks of the semester, faculty should include information regarding the event and its assignment in the course syllabus, calendar, and any other preparatory materials. 

  Below are examples of how a faculty member could go about incorporating the public sphere pedagogy into their curriculum to help prepare their students for the Sense of Place Symposium. 

  • CMST 132 Course Syllabus
  • UNIV 101 Course Syllabus
• Logistics
  Before getting into tools designed for planning the event, it is critical that you look at the participating courses and the assignments that are leading up to Sense of Place to adjust the event structure to best meet the needs of the students participating. For example, a small group communications class may need sessions that are designed for student groups to give a presentation, but a journalism class is not designed to prepare students for a 20-minute long group presentation. If both courses are participating in the event, then you need to make some decisions about how each session will function. Below are the details of the sessions currently run at our Sense of Place events:
  
  

  • Presentation Session Timelines
  • Conversation Session Timelines
  • Where possible, we organize student groups to include groups from different courses to encourage discussion across courses and assignments.

  On the Sense of Place Team, we utilize an Event Timeline to help us stay on track with the things that need to be done. The timeline lists each week of the semester and the tasks that should be begun, worked on, or completed within each week. This document helps the student team stay on track with tasks and helps ensure that everything gets completed for a successful SOP. 

  Prior to the event, we have participating students, respondents, clubs/organizations, and moderators sign up for sessions using a spreadsheet that we call the Master Itinerary (Google Sheet). Each participant has a different section of the spreadsheet, and different participants are given access to the spreadsheet at different times. 

  After the Master Itinerary is completed, the sharing permissions are changed to view-only for all participants (usually the week of the event). At that point, any changes to the schedule have to be approved by the SOP team and the Master Itinerary serves as a resource for participants. 

  After the event, we send out Thank You Emails to the Moderators, Respondents, and Clubs/Orgs who participated in our event with an attached End of Event Survey for them to fill out. This will allow us to obtain feedback on how the event went from a variety of perspectives and help us continue to improve the event. 

  Additionally, we collect data from the participating students via a FYE-Supported Courses Survey. Since we already collect survey data at the end of the semester about the students' experience in an FYE-Supported Course, we added questions about students’ experience as a participant in Sense of Place.

• Moderators & Consultants

  The Moderator is an FYE staff member who is in charge of the facilitation of each session. They use materials found in the Moderator Box which has a Moderator Checklist that acts as a guideline on how they will conduct themselves throughout their tasks. Moderators are student staff that have been recruited through the use of Outreach Emails and are informed of their responsibilities via videos and informational workshops. 

  The Respondent is tasked with giving feedback to the presenters via theRespondent Feedback Formwhich is provided on the day of the event. A respondent is a well-informed member of the community who is present due to their level of experience on particular topics. Respondents are located after students have been assigned topics so that they may be paired with a presentation that they are knowledgeable on. Respondents are recruited through the use of Outreach Emails and given a Respondent Folder on the day of the event which contains materials such as nametags and a Respondent Checklist. 

  Clubs and Organizations are present during the Civic Expo tabling portion of the event. The purpose behind their participation is to showcase the available resources and opportunities to participating students. The recruitment process includes a Club/Org Interest Form as well as in person recruitment efforts.
• Promotion

  The purpose in designing marketing materials is to encourage stakeholders to not only attend, but to actively participate in the event. Marketing materials are critical for advertising an event, and can also be used to grow the FYE Program. This helps encourage new faculty and/or community members to attend the event, which could lead to increased participation from these stakeholders at future events or the possibility of a new relationship between FYE and another department on campus. 

   Marketing materials include:

  • • Promotion on our Website
    • Promotional Videos
    • Informational Classroom Presentations 
    • Flyers