Project Benefits

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!

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.

Still not convinced? Consider the following resources.