Reeve Union, and specifically the Student Leadership and Involvement area at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh currently encompasses the campus programming board, leadership development, student organizations, late night and weekend programming, volunteerism, diversity and inclusion programs, and fraternity and sorority life. The University’s essential learning outcomes are based off of AAC&U’s LEAP outcomes, and the new University Studies Program (general education) is deeply grounded in these outcomes.
The challenge that we face is that we do leadership development in many of our student involvement experiences and programs, most grounded in the Social Change Model, but we have not been as good at packaging these experiences in order to help students see them as more than isolated events and help them to realize what they have learned in the process. We completed an extensive gap analysis with all of our various efforts. After examining what we offer and how it can be improved, we identified 15 of the student leadership competencies that we think our programs and experiences universally help students achieve, or that we should be helping them to achieve. From there, we have:
We mapped the 15 selected student leadership competencies onto the LEAP outcomes so that we could connect our outcomes to students’ classroom experiences and help communicate value to our academic counterparts.
- Used the mapping tool to ensure that we have chosen outcomes that touch on each of the 7 Cs of the Social Change Model.
- Developed an assessment tool, based on the online inventory, which we will use as a pre and post-experience survey with student organization leaders directly advised by a Reeve Union staff member. This data is reported in our annual report.
- We have identified which of our programs and experiences target each competency and will use that in conjunction with the LEAP outcome mapping to market our events and experiences to faculty.
- We are in the development stages of a packaged experience that will help guide students to experiences and events for each competency and a capstone experience to help educate on how to market these experiences post-college.