EDUCATION THROUGH EXPERIENCE AT OXFORD

WITH ITS EMPHASIS ON CHALLENGING STUDENTS TO SOLVE REAL-WORLD PROBLEMS,

the Student Flourishing initiative builds on robust experiential learning and research opportunities across Emory. At Oxford College—with its distinctive focus on liberal arts education, leadership, and service—students are offered an array of confidence- and career-building experiences right from the beginning of their college careers.

For example, this past spring, Sarah Higinbotham, assistant professor of English, took a group of Oxford students to a graduation at Burruss State Prison, where for fifteen years she has taught humanities courses to incarcerated students through her nonprofit Common Good Atlanta. After the prison visit, two of her students, Dyson Stallworth and Niels Armbruster—along with then Emory PhD candidate Sadie Warren and students from Morehouse and Kennesaw State—researched, wrote, and presented a policy brief on the floor of the Georgia State Legislature about the positive effects of college courses in prisons.

“When students have to think about their work intellectually—in this case reading social critiques of mass incarceration and reform movements in justice—while seeing what it actually looks like in practice, they understand the rest of their time in college that what they’re learning has the transformative power to fix prob- lems,” Higinbotham says. “The fact that there is crossover between Oxford students and incarcerated students, Oxford students and state senators, demonstrates the power of proximity.”

In another example, Oxford Assistant Professor of Linguistics Jack Hardy took seven students on the road to Northern Arizona University so they could present their research—a rare opportunity for most undergraduates—at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics Conference. For these students, it was a first look at the world of professional academia, networking and conferences.

“I think it’s great for undergrads to be at something like this—not at an undergrad conference, but at a professional conference of working academics,” Hardy says. “They were able to meet the actual people who wrote what they had read and then were able to approach them and network and make connections.”

Daniel Christian