Professional Development

Sophomore Year- HON SOCL 320

In the Spring of 2021, I took an honors version of the Sociology of Education course. Because it was an honors course, my professor wanted my class to do a research project to present during the Symposium and Research day at Longwood. Since it was a Sociology of Education course, we decided to do our research centered around teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the course, we decided on the parameters of who we would interview, as well as conduct our own interviews via Zoom. We also had to transcribe our interviews in order to maintain confidentiality for our respondents, and worked in groups to examine our findings. Then, we combined our findings into a PowerPoint presentation and recorded ourselves discussing our findings to share for research day. Below is the complete video of our research findings.

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Senior Year – HON CTZN 410

For my Citizen 410 class, I decided to take Professor Dolence’s HON Lancer Launchpad. In this class, we were tasked with coming up with a problem that exists in our worlds and a physical solution to solve it. My partner, Rachel Iman, and I both love Halloween, but realized its restrictions it has on individuals in our lives – her sister has some severe food allergies, and my brother with autism has difficulty with accessibility with Trick or Treating. To combat this problem, we decided we would create an app to make the event of Trick or Treating more safe and accessible for all children. Below is our business video explaining our app – Trick or Track.

In order to test how the app would work, we decided that we were going to hold a simulation of the app. To do this, we decided to collaborate with the College Panhellenic Council’s 9 sororities here at Longwood to hold a Trick or Treating event for members of the Longwood and Farmville community. We created a flyer and sent it out to professors and members of the Longwood community, as well as posted it on the Farmville Facebook page to reach a wide audience. At the event, each sorority was provided a table in the space to decorate as they pleased, as well as provided each with a different type of candy, which was labeled on a mock version of the “Home page”. Overall, we had about 10 Trick or Treaters show up in the hour that we held our simulation, and each of them were able to successfully use the mock versions of our app to have a safe and accessible experience. We also got confirmation from the head of Fraternity and Sorority Life that she would like to make this a recurring, yearly event.

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Senior Year – SPED 451

For my final undergraduate Special Education course, I took an Intro To Autism Spectrum Disorder class with Dr. Khan, who’s specialty is ASD. I was excited for this course because I have a sibling with ASD and I wanted to expand my knowledge on it. For the course, we were tasked with researching an evidence-based program and see its impact on students with ASD, and present a poster at research day. My group decided to focus on activity schedules, which are visuals to help students with the completion of tasks. We researched 3 peer-reviewed studies about activity schedules and the results showed the astounding benefit it has on students with ASD, especially when the program is started at elementary-school aged students. My group concluded that activity schedules are beneficial to students with ASD and plan on implementing them in our future classrooms. Below is a photo of my group and I at research day, as well as a virtual version of our poster.