By: Caroline Livingston
Did you know that ASU Prep Digital offers an in person program? It’s called the ASU
Experience. Students get a chance to spend certain days out of their school week on the
Arizona State University campuses. During this time, you get to interact with various professors,
peers and the school around them. Most recently, I have been able to be a part of the ASU Poly
Experience and get to go to the ASU Polytechnic Campus on Fridays, and I can not wait to
share everything with you!
Each Friday, about 20 other students and I all meet with a teacher on the Polytechnic college
campus. This class is treated like an elective, so it has its own curriculum. Most recently, we
concluded Unit 1: Making Connections. We worked to learn more about how various connections we
have made in our lives so far will influence who we are in the future. For example, our driving
question was, “How does making connections with myself, my history/family, my peers, and my
community/place help to inform or influence how I will contribute to society in the future?”
Throughout the course of a few weeks, we had many guest speakers who came in to talk about
various parts of this project. We had Dr. Wendy Williams discuss multimodal narratives. During
this class, we got to make a list of important people, or moments in our lives and then learn how
we can turn those stories into different mediums. We explored short story writing, poetry, and
even comic drawing. Everything that we had created in class turned into an outline for our final
presentation which we shared in front of the class and our teachers.
Now, we are starting Unit 2: The World Around Us. This time, we have the driving question of
“How does the legacy of ancestors impact the people we have become and influence our future
selves?” One of our first guest speakers in this unit was talking about Dia De Los Muertos, or
the Day of the Dead. We will soon get the chance to create our own ofrendas, offerings to
people in our family who have passed.
Additionally, we get chances to go on tours throughout the school day. Recently we have been
able to tour the Garden Commons at ASU. During this time, we got to go around the campus and learn about the
different edible plants and how we can become more involved in the nature of our communities.
Later, we got to visit the TRIO building, housing a program that offers support to college
students, so that they are able to get the education that they deserve.
Through this program, we get the wonderful opportunity to interact with our peers, teachers,
professors and Doctors on a real campus. I will be able to take away amazing connections and
experiences to college and be able to make more influenced and educated connections. During
this class, I have learned more about myself and the world around me, shaping my new outlook
on life.
