Empowering Student Voices: Expanding Inclusion and Faculty Engagement with Student Collections

Our presentation discusses initiatives we’ve launched that are aimed at expanding student inclusion in the Argo Scholar Commons, our institutional repository. We started by working with our Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) to develop curated collections of graduate and undergraduate research our students present in OUR’s Spring and Summer Research Symposia. Currently, we are actively adding discipline-specific collections that feature capstone work by both graduate and undergraduate students. This initiative has had some surprising effects on faculty engagement in the ASC and has heightened our own understanding of the impact of the research work that our students do. By making students a priority, we can help foster interdisciplinary collaboration and encourage student and faculty engagement with institutional research initiatives. And while the end result of all these labors is the growth of the ASC, along the way we are helping our students gain professional exposure, build their academic portfolios, and actively contribute to the university’s research community.