Project Benefits

Benefits of Participating in Voices of Lake County

There are numerous benefits to encouraging your students to participate in the Voices of Lake County project, including:

• The opportunity to share your personal narrative and voice – to be heard by others – can be incredibly empowering, especially for minoritized students who have limited opportunities to tell their stories.

• Expressing themselves creatively enables students to better appreciate and value the stories of their lives, as well as those in their local communities.

• Student projects have a built-in, public audience.

• Students gain experience making decisions about content, the arrangement of information, tone, and structure to best meet the needs of a specific audience.

• Students have the opportunity to participate in the Spring Showcase, where they can share their work with family, friends and community members.

• Students gain experience in self-publicity and marketing.

• They can meet other CLC students and network with faculty, staff and community members.

• It looks great on their resumes or CVs.

• It's fun!

Pedagogical Benefits

There are also many pedagogical benefits to implementing Voices of Lake County projects in the classroom, including:

• Collaborative projects help create peer-centered learning environments, where students work together and learn from one another.

• Students may gain essential skills in storytelling, research, and composing using print or digital media.

• Students may gain experience in 21st century skills such as digital media production, digital photography, audio production, and more.

• Students can learn and practice new technologies for creating digital stories, video, or other interactive, interpretive postcards.

• Through the process of sharing their stories, students improve their public speaking skills.