February 26, 2015 | SharkAdmin Javier Morales, NVC grant writer, will present his research, “Parental Involvement Factors that Impact School Readiness among Pre-School Children of Migrant Farm Workers at the opening session of Texas A&M San Antonio's symposium on “U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. His presentation is Feb. 28 and will take place at Texas A&M San Antonio's Market Square campus downtown. Migdalia Garcia, NVC Community Engagement coordinator, was recently a speaker at a Civic Engagement Conference co-sponsored by NVC: Service on the Rise: Civic Leadership Conference 2015. Migdalia along with Jennifer Bendele, director of Service-Learning & Volunteerism at OLLU, co-presented a session: “Reflect on This”. This session was designed to help student leaders move beyond just the organizational logistics of the volunteer service project. This interactive session presented models and ideas for “preflection” and reflection with volunteers. The session provided an opportunity for attendees to explore how to help volunteers add meaning to their service projects through the reflection process by looking at the “What? So What? Now What?” This conference was a partnership of the San Antonio Intercollegiate Collaborative–an organization comprised of all the universities and most of the colleges in San Antonio as well as TLU. Each college was allowed to send 10 students and NVC sent the maximum as did Palo Alto College. Lynne T. Dean, director of NVC Community Development, represented NVC at the Assistance League of San Antonio Philanthropic Open House held recently at their offices. The League provides transfer scholarships to students which are promoted on the NVC website. In addition to scholarships, the organization supports six programs in partnership with community agencies, schools and other groups. The programs touched the lives of more than 64,000 members of the San Antonio community last year alone. Most of the beneficiaries of the philanthropic work of the League are children. Laura Metzger, NVC English faculty member, presented at the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts Conference in Houston on Jan. 24. Laura's presentation was called “Out With the Old and In With the New: Using Social Media and PechaKucha to Develop Critical Thinking.” Laura has students create social justice blogs and PechaKucha presentations in her composition and literature courses. PechaKucha 20×20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images. Dawna Upshaw, SDEV faculty member, attended the conference along with Laura and shared how she has adapted this project in some of her SDEV classes to help students create career blogs.
