Timothy Ponce, Ph.D

Starting as an adjunct lecturer, Dr. Ponce became interested in service learning because it gives students the hands-on experience that he wished he knew about earlier. His content area is technical writing and professional design, so experiential learning is common in his field.

Dr. Ponce reflects that experiential learning is vital in technical professional writing because students need preparation before they go into the field and put their knowledge into practice. He created an undergraduate grant writing course and instead of creating fictional non-profit scenarios, he incorporated service learning to help a real non-profit write a real grant. He faced the challenge of getting his students to feel comfortable in professional settings for technical writing.

By joining the faculty fellows program, he felt assured in going through with service learning in his course and the impact it would leave on students. Dr. Ponce reveals that it was really enriching to see and connect with other people in very diverse disciplines who were wanting to do the same things he was doing and cared about the same things he cared about as far as pedagogy and effective course design.

For faculty hesitant on incorporating service learning, Dr. Ponce advises to do it for the sake of the students because we want to equip them with experiences that they will need to be competitive in a job market.