By Dane Gibson
Students descend on the cafeteria from all corners of campus to participate – and the posters, displays, presentations and performances they bring with them always wow the crowds.
The 2016 Vancouver Island University Create Conference offers an opportunity to showcase and celebrate the major projects and research in which students are engaged. On March 30, the fourth annual event promises to be the biggest celebration yet.
“We wanted to create a space where we could publicly honour and celebrate the incredible work being done by our students. That’s where the Create Conference got its start. What we’ve found is the positive effects of the event are felt more widely than we anticipated,” said Trevor Davis, VIU’s associate vice-president of scholarship and community engagement.
The conference has grown to represent almost all faculties and areas of study at VIU. Davis said in the past, an unexpected benefit was seeing how inspired the VIU High School, first- and second-year students were by the depth and breadth of research being done at the higher levels.
“We saw a tremendous exchange of information between the presenters and the students who came out to enjoy the conference. By seeing what the third- and fourth-year undergraduates were working on, the younger students could easily visualize what they could accomplish and they were excited by the possibilities,” said Davis.
For First Nations Studies professor Laura Cranmer, the Create Conference is a highlight of the term. Her indigenous identities and languages course requires students to design a poster for the conference. The students partner up to co-author a 15-page term paper on an aspect of indigenous language revitalization. Once complete, the students then collaborate on a poster design to visually represent their research conclusions.
“My students are so excited when they complete their term papers. When we get to the poster assignment, they are full of ideas. After the hard work of completing their term paper is done, they get to express their ideas visually and have fun,” said Cranmer.
The types of presentations the students do vary with their community engagement work – everything from preparing a community profile to conducting interviews with guests at homeless shelters in Nanaimo.
For more information, or to register, please visit www.viu.ca/research/create/.
Dane Gibson is a writer with VIU’s communications department.