Citizen 110

Taking a citizen 110 class is required for all students at Longwood, and for honors students, taking an honors section is required. Although we are all required to take citizen 110 they are all very different classes based on the options we were able to select from. My class was on social entrepreneurship and being a global citizen, this was to teach us not about facts for a test but to learn about making connections and finding solutions to real-world problems and implementing them.

This class was my favorite class first semester and gave me something great to wake up to. The class materials consisted of a small amount of reading then discussing what we read in class. The different part comes with the readings though, instead of reading a textbook, we read things like MIT’s newsletter for new innovations and then talked about our favorites and some applications we thought they may have. The mindset of the class was to not only to create well-rounded citizens but ones that can think of outside the box solutions, do research, contact others for help, grow a web of connections, and implement all of the previous into realizing the solutions to make the world a better place. All of our final projects were made from a large brainstorm that was boiled down into 3 groups, mine being the standardization of testing in schools. For ours, we did research and a poster but for others, one group created a specially filled a “get well” box for students and the second group they made a social media campaign to help the Chesapeake bay against pollution and had a large scale representation at the student center using trash collected from students and putting it throughout Upchurch*. These kinds of projects for the final actually helped our own research because we were trying to say that standardizing everything does not give an accurate representation of what students are capable of and this showed that sentiment perfectly.

*Note, they did have approval and had it out of the walkways to prevent hazards and had an easy cleanup method using tarps.