LaDonna Aiken

Service Learning Course(s):

• Corporate Video Production (BCMN 4322)
• Introduction to Broadcasting (BCMN 2360)
• Multimedia Production (BCMN 2370)
• Television Production (BCMN 2358

“It provides deeper learning for the student. It really expands their knowledge; it takes those skills and applies them to real world situations.”

LaDonna Aiken is a member of the Broadcast Education Association and has been presenting on service learning since 2016 through the Association’s service learning division. As part of a multimedia service learning project that began in Fall of 2019, Professor Aiken, along with her students were asked with creating food handling and safety training videos for the City of Arlington. The project is expected to take about 3-4 semesters to finish and will be part of an ongoing collaboration with Arlington; it has the potential to become statewide. This comes right after their Summer 2019 project, which involved creating and editing instructional training videos for the Division of Faculty Affairs at UTA.

Some of the community partners she has worked with include the Texas Girls’ Choir, VOICES of Fort Worth, Camp Impact, City of Grand Prairie, City of Arlington, College Park District, College of Liberal Arts, Honors College, Center for Service Learning, Department of Modern Languages, Faculty Affairs, Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Communication.

Professor Aiken advises faculty interested in service learning to just do it. Find out about the program and get involved. She believes that the rewards gained by incorporating service learning far outweigh the complexities of developing a service learning component.