Eleven first-year Allegheny College students will present posters in the Henderson Campus Center lobby on Wednesday, Nov. 30, from 7:30 to 9 p.m., with the theme of “Meadville’s Military Matters.” The event is free and open to the public.
Associate Professor of English Alexis Hart, who served in the U.S. Navy, is teaching a first-year seminar course to develop students’ speaking and writing skills. She assigned a poster presentation as one of the major assignments for the course, hoping to give students public speaking experience. The assignment directs students to “inform the audience about Meadville’s military and make an argument about why Meadville’s military matters.”
So far, the class has taken trips to Greendale Cemetery, the Baldwin-Reynolds House Museum, and Diamond Park. The students also were scheduled to attend Active Aging’s “Through a Veteran’s Eye” events this week. Class visitors have included Tony Pedone of Lilac Springs, Charlie Schmidt of WCJ Ranch, Rich Krankota of the Crawford County Veterans Services Office, re-enactors from the “Bucktails,” and Pat Emig, who is creating a Northwestern Pennsylvania Museum of Military History. The students’ posters will reflect some of what they’ve learned from these presentations.
Hart attended the University of Rochester on an NROTC four-year scholarship, received her commission in 1993, and served on active duty as a Navy Supply Corps officer until 1999.
According to Hart, in 2011 the PEW Research Center found that “only about one-half of one percent of the U.S. population has been on active military duty at any given time during the past decade of sustained warfare. Some 84 percent of post-9/11 veterans say the public does not understand the problems faced by those in the military or their families.”
“This course is designed to encourage students who have grown up in a country at war to consider the implications of those military actions as well as past military actions on their role as citizens, their relationship to military service members and veterans within the Meadville community and the nation, and the impact of war, service, and veterans on local communities,” Hart said. “This course is also designed to get students off campus and out into the community, to observe the public artifacts and memorials, and to listen to the stories of local military service members and veterans.”