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College News
The expansion of Community 101 across four years is now encompassed in Project EQUIP, a new program funded in part by the Oishei Foundation. Students will contribute to Buffalo’s social and economic renewal.
ishei Foundation provides $400,000 grant in support of Project EQUIP
By Shawn Arrajj ’10 MC
Joe Flateau photo
SUMMER 2010 l 4
On Wednesday, February 17, the face of Medaille College’s undergraduate program at the Buffalo campus changed profoundly. On this day it was announced that The John R. Oishei Foundation will provide the school with a $400,000 grant over three years to support Project EQUIP, an integrated learning sequence that embeds community-based, experiential learning with academic studies to help undergraduate students develop the skills they need in the 21st century. The grant enables the College to expand the program beyond the Community 101 projects in which current freshmen are involved. “What we hope to do is continue to make those projects more challenging, give students more opportunities to get out into the community and be involved, and really provide the faculty and staff at the college with the kind of professional development that will help them to integrate this community-based learning into their courses,” says Dr. Brad Hollingshead, associate dean for foundational learning and assessment. According to Dr. Hollingshead, Project EQUIP (Explore, Question, Understand, Involve, Produce),
was developed from lessons learned through Medaille’s learning community initiatives. It is a four-year learning sequence that will become the new learning structure for all incoming students. “Some of the money is going to continue to enhance the first-year experience, but the bulk of that money is going to build out the sequence in the sophomore, junior and senior years,” he says. “This is really an effort to take the next logical step in improving the undergraduate experience.” Medaille submitted a proposal to The Oishei Foundation on November 19, 2009, which was approved on February 2, 2010. In the letter accepting Medaille’s proposal, the directors of the foundation noted that they were “impressed with the commitment that Medaille College is making not only to its students but to the wider community though this deeply engaging and collaborative model.” According to Dr. Hollingshead, assessments of the existing learning communities at Medaille found that students involved demonstrated improvements in terms of persistence and success. “The students who participated in learning communities earned about a half a grade higher in terms of overall GPA compared to when they were not participating,” he says.