A new UI major offers a hands-on experience for passionate students.

By DI STAFF

Some University of Iowa students are striving to apply their studies to help solve social issues facing the community.

The new Engaged Social Innovation major gives UI Honors students an opportunity to choose a project they are passionate about. The projects center on societal problems, and the students in the major find ways to solve them. The nine students who elected to pioneer the three-year program recently presented their output.

David Gould, a UI adjunct lecturer involved with the program who was one of the founders of the major, helps to guide the students in their projects.

“I’ve been interested in this a long time — how does the city become a classroom? We begin to take the things that we’re learning sitting at desks and looking at PowerPoints in lectures,” Gould said. “Why don’t we take that and go do something with it?”

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On Dec. 11, the students presented their findings after the first semester of exploring their projects. Next semester, the students will continue expanding and developing their projects.

The Daily Iowan is profiling the students and their projects.

James Ottavi

Despite being an economics major, James Ottavi defines himself as a “huge science nerd.”

That’s why, for his project, he took on investigating scientific communication and specifically how it could be improved.

Ottavi said the public’s opinion about certain scientific concepts may be drastically different than the opinion of the scientific community, including climate change and world population growth. He attributed this to a distrust between society and the scientific community.

“Society should be on the same page on these issues that are scientific by nature,” Ottavi said. “These issues are very important to us and are necessary for us to grow.”

His first step was investigating how to incorporate both art and science.

“Although science is inherently beautiful, it is meant to be unemotional. It’s meant to be analytical and data-driven, and emotions don’t usually play well into that sphere,” Ottavi said. “However, art is a catalyst for emotion, and I thought combining those two would lead to a more effective communication medium for the public.”

At the end of the semester, he concluded the three areas of his research were interconnected. In order to communicate science better, he concluded, it needs to be conveyed using art, storytelling, and scientific literature together.

— by Katelyn Weisbrod

Helaina Thompson

Only 26 percent of men in the United States practice yoga, and one student is set to change that.

The statistic motivated Helaina Thompson, a yoga teacher and UI student, to focus her project on gender and yoga.

“Multiple studies suggest yoga improves well-being regardless of gender,” Thompson said. “Why, then, is the gender imbalance in yoga so pronounced?”

She began her investigation by attending a local men’s support group called the Fathers Group. Thomson joined the Tuesday meetings, and observed for the first few weeks. The group followed a curriculum called 24/7 dad, organized by the National Fatherhood Initiative to reduce the number of children growing up with distant fathers.

One week, Thompson brought in a photo of LeBron James doing yoga on a beach to the Fathers Group meeting. She explained to them the benefits of practicing yoga. She said the men were curious about yoga, and asked her several questions about how it works.

Thompson’s next step took her to the Campus Recreation & Wellness Center, where she was told only 5 percent of participants in group exercise yoga classes are male. Group exercise coordinators have tried to draw more men in with different methods, but Thompson said most of these have failed.

Thompson had some ideas on how to make men more interested in yoga. One was to convince men yoga is a worthwhile, healthy thing to do, while another was to make yoga fit into people’s schedule, budget, and transportation abilities.

“I realized Iowa City has few options for an accessible, low-cost yoga class and that really bothered me,” Thompson said.

Thompson held a weekly yoga class that people could participate in, in exchange for a $2 donation to Public Space One. She said the class was successful, and even one of the men from the Fathers Group attended.

— by Katelyn Weibrod

Yaqiong Wang

One project aimed at high-school students is aiming to help students achieve their goals over their college careers.

UI senior Yaqiong Wang is with the the Dream Center, a nonprofit that focuses on fathers and youth in Iowa City, as part of its six-year program called “I Belong.”

The project begins the freshman year of high school and ends in a student’s junior year of college. Every year, the student is given a goal, such as learning a foreign language or reaching over 100 community-service hours.

Wang is using positive use development to create an online portfolio that will follow the students throughout their trajectory, recording their academic achievements — but also giving them an outlet to reveal their personal frustrations. This semester, the concept is in its development stages and Wong will roll it out next semester.

“It addresses what teachers know about students based on their grades, but also what they might not know about their students’ personal lives,” Wang said.

Wong said positive use development focuses on the contributors to a student’s positive development and cultivates skills like compassion, creativity, self-control, and perseverance.

“I feel many students are struggling with psychological well-being,” she said. “They don’t know how to control their emotions.”

— by Cindy Garcia