You can tour our town, meet our neighbors through Project Oxford
Project Oxford professor
Project Oxford can transport you to the halls of Talawanda High School, the alleys of Oxford Lanes or the back alleys of Uptown.
It can acquaint you with Oxford community members ranging from a Muslim student disc jockey to long-time bar owners.
It can let you hear directly from folks as varied as a long-time member of the Women’s Club to one of the male mainstays of the farming community.
All of this is thanks to 17 Miami University seniors who dared to venture outside "the bubble."
"The bubble" is frequently used as a metaphor to explain the isolation of many Miami University students from the larger world – and from the town of Oxford in which most of them live.
But the idea behind a Miami graduation requirement called a senior capstone class is to get students to weave together all they’ve learned in four (or more) years by getting involved with the community – and with each other.
When the Project Oxford team started meeting in January to define its semester-long senior project, as their professor I had defined only a few "musts":
o They must figure out where they are in or on the Miami "bubble" – and move outside it.
o In the course of reporting two or three substantial stories, they must talk to the citizens of Oxford and discover their concerns, This meant they had to find, meet and speak to more than the "usual suspects" we see in the majority of student-written stories: the city manager, the police chief, the police spokesman.
o They must try to complete an hour-long oral history interview – a personal encounter far from a new reporter’s idea of talking to someone just "to get a quote" – and they must try to develop a writing style appropriate to the new types of stories they are doing.
o They must work in teams – as most will when they leave Miami for the world of work – and they must define and "own" their own work and resulting Web pages.
In all these respects, I believe this class of students has met my goals. I hope you enjoy reading their stories.
Please e-mail me with any concerns or reactions at hetricjl@muohio.edu or call me at 529.5271. I’d like to know what you think of Project Oxford.