Make an Exhibition: First-Generation College Student Experiences was a First-Year seminar that allowed first-generation students to explore exhibition environments as narrative and communal spaces while also empowering them to create a culminating exhibition around their own first-generation college student experiences at UC Davis. The primary reasoning behind this objective was to encourage these students to gain more confidence in using their narrative voices through the medium of exhibition design. Every week, students engaged in exploratory activities in a three-dimensional space, allowing them to brainstorm exhibition ideas by building diagrams and models, hosting in-class discussions, and completing other assignments that encouraged meaningful dialogue and artistic expression. The motivation behind each of these assignments was the idea of Story. More specifically, such activities sought to answer several questions: What stories would students like to share? What designs best tell these stories? The course cultivated design principles relating to information and effective communication, ethics, responsibility, honor, acceptance, respect, and empathy through nature-centered design techniques. The student’s final exhibition “Reflections & Connections” in the UC Davis Arboretum captured their powerful narratives and reflected the student body’s care, strength, creativity, and diversity.
Make an Exhibition
