When one attends the fall College of Humanities and Social Sciences Senior Showcase, there is inspiration in nearly every room of the CHSS Building. Many are filled with Grand Canyon University students who are studying ways to help others.
Here are four examples of senior projects that aim to do just that:
'Let Girls Be Girls'
To four behavior health science majors, a modern-day battle is played out daily on electronic devices.
“Our goal is to fight against the over-sexualization of girls,” said Landry Ternberg, who along with McKenna Corvi, Emma Vasconcellos and Kayla McBroom, created "Let Girls Be Girls: The Decoding Project."
It’s a six-week media literacy and empowerment program for girls ages 10-15, too often exposed online to sexualized and unrealistic beauty standards. Through interactive lessons that teachers are trained on, girls can recognize manipulative media messages, challenge beauty standards and learn strategies for self-confidence and mental health.
“We want to help them understand that’s not real, right?” Ternberg said of the media images.
It helps decode what isn’t real life online and helps return social media to a fun place, but in a learning environment that feels more like a club, where girls aren’t competing against one another.
Although the four are all graduating this week and headed for graduate studies or jobs at nonprofit organizations, they thought the project had merit to become a nonprofit organization someday.
“Pretty much the end goal is we want girls to know they are enough,” Vasconcellos said.
Bridging the neurodiversity gap
Psychology students also got into the act of trying to help teachers with a software program for learners with neurodivergence.
“We did all the research in psychology on the best way to educate those with neurodiversity and help them figure out what works, what might be the best way for them to retain information,” Carter Nickell said. “Those findings were implemented into the design by software engineers in our engineering department.”
The program is run through a raspberry pi, a single-board computer often used for learning programming when confidentiality is key.
His research partner, Lily VanRoekel, will graduate in April and hopes to take her psychology degree into the classroom after earning a teaching certificate.
“I’ve always known there is a gap between neurotypical students and the more neurodiverse, but we do want them integrated into classes and not isolated from peers and not make them feel different or less than,” she said. “Something like this bridges the gap and brings the teacher awareness up a bit without pointing it out and making it obvious to (students’) peers.”
FAFSA-friendly website
Government students were also working on projects designed to help, in this case Latino students, who their research showed had lower percentages enrolled in college than white students.
A barrier to college education that they found in a survey of those in the demographic was financial. One way to overcome that was familiarity with FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which is vital to compete for financial aid, grants and loans.
Though many knew about FAFSA, it was intimidating for them.
“Our website, FAFSA Friend, essentially walks you through the application process and includes all the documents and forms you need,” said Jance Guinn, who was joined on the project by Joseph Gardiner and Daniella Viner. “Our goal was to help students feel more confident and comfortable applying for FAFSA and, that way, we can boost college attendance rates, which we found was a key factor in upward mobility.”
At the heart of the program, which also would include workshops, videos and assistance for bilingual families, is helping those populations move up economically.
“When people don’t go to college – not the case for all, but a lot – they’re getting stuck in this poverty cycle – your parents didn’t go to college so maybe you don’t go to college,” Gardner said. “What we’ve seen is that seems to be a pattern. We just want to work towards giving those people the opportunity to chase after it, go to college.”
Telehealth for rural communities
Gracie Jerome’s research proposal also aims to get more help to children in rural schools, where she said access to mental health is more limited.
Growing up in Show Low, Arizona, she experienced friends who committed suicide.
“I myself really struggled and almost did it myself. My mom used to tell me all the time it’s temporary, but a lot of students can’t see that, a light at the end of the tunnel,” she said.
She saw a counselor who helped her through it and thinks more need access to that help in rural Arizona, where everyone knows one another and there are worries of confidentiality, not to mention limited mental health treatment options.
The social work major advocates for telehealth in the schools as a solution in a research project called "Suicidal Tendencies and Prevention Among Small Town Arizona High School Youth." The project proposes gathering 120 to 150 students in Arizona high schools for a six-week program of study.
She graduates this week and will start her master’s degree at GCU.
“My main goal is to own my own practice one day and to do children and family counseling,” she said.
There is really so much more we can do to help those who struggle, she said.
And that was at the heart of many of the student projects.
GCU senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at [email protected]
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