I recently met up with Better UTAH founder Josh Kanter at Westminster College as he gave a presentation on advocacy, interest groups and the Alliance for a Better UTAH. The presentation was given in the political science component of a Learning Community. Learning communities are composed of incoming freshmen and are usually planned around a central topic. Before coming to Better UTAH, I taught the public speaking component of two learning communities at Purdue. Both learning communities focused on engineering, one (it was my favorite) specifically explored issues surrounding green engineering. Learning communities are a great innovation in higher education. At Westminster, students in a learning community take two to three classes together. The specific class we attended, Intro to American Government, is taught by Professor Michael Zarkin (a great host, btw). The students brought up good questions regarding voter registration and voter rights, and Josh did a great job explaining what it is we do here at Better UTAH.
I managed to snag this picture near the beginning of the presentation.