BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

Getto’s students build experience while serving community

Dr. Guiseppe Getto, associate professor of English, is the 2021 recipient of the University Service-Learning Teaching Excellence Award.

“Service-learning is a reflective form of teaching,” Getto said. “I was taught that the hyphen is important. So it’s not just service, and it’s not just learning, but it’s a combined approach. The idea is that the service feeds into the learning, and the learning enables you to serve a community group.”

Getto’s area of expertise is engagement through technology; he works with entities inside and outside the university to produce content and to help them make use of digital technology. English 3880, a business writing class, is a perfect fit for involving students in the process.

“I do a needs assessment with the community partner before the class starts … and then I invite them into class to talk about their needs,” he said. “And then the students work with the community partner to write for them and revise it.

“It can be any form of writing that the nonprofit needs — a blog, a newsletter, static website content, social media content.”

The students get firsthand experience with doing market research, learning to identify and write for a specific audience.

“The biggest feedback I get from students is it’s real life,” Getto said. “There’s a real audience that they’re writing for.”

When he started having students work with nonprofits rather than creating fictional situations, engagement skyrocketed, he said.

“They know that it’s a fictional situation when we do that,” he said. “They’ll take it seriously because they’re students, and hopefully they value that, but when there’s a concrete audience, suddenly it’s like, ‘Wow, this is a nonprofit that helps kids with cancer and their families. We need to help them!’

“That kind of magical feeling is what got me addicted, because it’s just so much easier to engage students in a real-world scenario.”

On the flip side, it helps nonprofits, which don’t have the resources or staff to produce the content they need.

Riley’s Army has been a longtime partner. Getto’s students evaluated the website and provided feedback. They researched the websites of other nonprofits to help Riley’s Army make its site more effective. For example, the previous page lacked a prominent donation button, Getto said.

His students have also provided website feedback for Daughters of Worth, a local organization aimed at educating, equipping and empowering girls to become women of influence in their communities.

“Throughout the past five years, Dr. Getto has partnered with Daughters of Worth to provide website development training, support and specifically ‘adopting’ our organization through his service-learning classes,” said Liz Liles, founder and CEO of Daughters of Worth. “These experiences have not only allowed us to receive the insight and clarity needed to better advocate for the girls of our communities through our social media and website presence, but to also align us with phenomenal student leaders who have truly impacted our organization and the participants of our programs.”

Getto said with service-learning, the reward system is built in, but receiving the award and hearing from community partners that his work is making a difference means a lot to him.

“Teaching is impactful for students, but to have that added impact on the community, it’s just very satisfying to be recognized for that,” he said.