Real change from student input and Professional Development offerings

In an Introduction to Sociology assignment to find examples of symbolic interactionism, one student commented on the ubiquitous pink from a baby shower recently attended.  The discussion transitioned to the history of pink and blue as gendered colors as well as additional examples from today's world.  Another student raised her hand and said "like on the webpage right behind you."  Behind me on the overhead projector was the Talon login page and a picture of boys wearing Kirkwood blue and girls in pink.

To model the personal change projects for the last fifth of the semester, I decided to e-mail several folks at Kirkwood to see if there were alternative pictures.  After sharing the choices with my students and finding it difficult to find images that were truly representative of the diversity of the student body, another student said "why not use the Kirkwood eagle."  Brilliant idea.  Marketing came up with a new login page featuring the eagle, which fits nicely with both 'Eaglenet' and 'Talon' and still allows for pictures of representative students, activities, and campus facilities on the regular Kirkwood.edu homepage.

Lovely.

Also lovely was approval for Marti from The Tapestry to speak to faculty and staff during professional development days in November.  We are excited by the possibility of greater faculty involvement (from across the trades, music department, etc.) as well as student volunteerism.

Last 'lovely' from today was a student in LGBT Studies who said, following a set of questions about gender roles, "my head is spinning...is it supposed to be."  Yes.  Yes, it is.  :)