The Animal Empathy Project: Creating Compassion Through Art 

This fully online course is for students who are interested in creating and facilitating a community event. This Capstone partners with the Columbia Slough Watershed Council. Students will plan and facilitate a community event that has already been arranged with the community partner prior to the start of the term. You can expect the event to be during the last 2 weeks of the term (event date and time will be announced in the first week of classes).

Curriculum and Material Development for Heritage/Indigenous Language (INDIGENOUS LANG ACTIVISM) 

The goal of this course is to give students a solid background in historical and societal issues that influence language diversity through hands-on collaboration with current language sustainability efforts. This capstone partners with endangered language communities in the Northwest (tribal language programs in general and the Warm Springs Tribal Language Program, specifically) to work together to support those programs by giving students “on-the-ground” skills to accompany class studies. Capstone students will develop language and/or pedagogical materials that will support the endangered language programs/teachers in their work to offer language classes in their communities. General class instruction will be exclusively online or hybrid and those students who can meet at the PSU campus may be able to participate in a visit to the language communities to increase students’ practical understanding of the language and community issues for their final work. All students who are interested in Indigenous and/or language activism are welcome to this capstone (regardless of any prior familiarity with Indigenous languages or history), and especially those who are interested in supporting our community partner’s fund-raising efforts and curriculum/teaching activities.  Students in this capstone are strongly encouraged, as a class goal, to foster a healthy online community and collaborate with peers through group work. Members from our community partner and other guest speakers will also join online (likely using Zoom), and other online meeting times will be determined by class and community participants’ availability and schedule.

In this course, students have the opportunity to learn the basics of grant writing. A much sought-after skill in many sectors, grant writing helps a variety of nonprofits and government agencies obtain funds for various projects they are interested in pursuing. For this class, our community partner will be JOIN. As they describe on their website, JOIN exists to support the efforts of homeless individuals and families to transition out of homelessness into permanent housing.

Creating Global Citizens

Global citizenship is of utmost importance as our societies are increasingly becoming more connected through media and technology. There is a growing disparity in the American school system that allows only the privileged students to participate in meaningful and engaging cultural learning. Schools that receive funding and support are able to facilitate cultural exchanges in person for students and faculty, while the majority of students in the public system receive little financial support and are left without any type of cultural exchange or enrichment program. This capstone will provide this needed and valuable cultural exchange.

This capstone is designed to provide an opportunity to learn about Spanish culture and society by means of synchronous and asynchronous discussion group forums between American and Spanish middle and high school students.  The communities of students will be from: Portland, Oregon, various schools in Washington state and Zamora, Spain.  These forums will be between paired classes (one USA and one Spanish) of similar grade and language level and will be facilitated and monitored by both teachers of each class.  Each grouping of classes will be assigned 2 capstone students. 

In this fully online course we will practice deepening our existing service in the community. Throughout the course students will learn about and practice the Social Change Model of Leadership. Before class begins students will contact the instructor and develop a service plan with an organization with which they are currently affiliated. In addition, students will form small teams with their classmates. Each team will develop, implement, and evaluate a highly focussed community project.

This hybrid online course is for students who are interested in creating and facilitating a community event. This Capstone partners with Portland Parks & Recreation Adaptive Inclusion Program. Each term, students will plan and facilitate a community event that has already been arranged with the community partner prior to the start of each term. You can expect the in person event to be during the last 2 weeks of the term (event date and time will be announced in the first week of classes, and is a requirement of this course). Students will be challenged to develop skills in: event planning, speaking, listening, building community relationships, and affecting social change. This course will not be addressing fundraising or grant writing as part of event planning.