Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

The Chicago-based Coleman Foundation has funded three faculty fellowships to expand entrepreneurial education at Lawrence Technological University during the 2011-12 academic year.

“Three Lawrence Tech instructors have been designated a Coleman Fellow and charged with creating learning opportunities that will fulfill the foundation’s mission to foster self-employment education and awareness,” said Don Reimer, project director of the Coleman Faculty Entrepreneurial Fellows Program at Lawrence Tech.

Lawrence Tech’s three 2011-12 Coleman Fellows and their topics are:

• Associate Professor Steven Coy, community engagement through micro-entrepreneurship in the arts.
• Senior Lecturer Holly Helterhoff, social media and entrepreneurship.
• Senior Lecturer Sara Lamers, entrepreneurship, creative writing, and publishing.

Coy is using his Coleman Fellowship to help create a new studio course that will pair students in the College of Architecture and Design with Detroit youth selected through collaboration with FOCUS: Hope, Y-arts and Fresh Eyes. Both the LTU students and the Detroit youth will learn about the principles of entrepreneurship in art and design disciplines. The studio will emphasize group-based interdisciplinary collaboration and model projects after real-world business scenarios.

Coy will serve as a business consultant. Each group will submit a business idea with a business model to be evaluated by a group of independent design and business professionals. Student teams will be awarded a small grant as seed money for their venture capital project.

The groups will decide on a project based around an entrepreneurial opportunity rooted in the many community needs of Detroit. They will also be expected to promote and market their project and find the appropriate venue to deliver their product to market.  An exhibition at the end of the semester will highlight all the projects.

In addition to taking courses at Lawrence Tech, the student teams will work in an industrial space in southwest Detroit equipped with artist studios and various metal, woodworking, and print shops.

Helterhoff is using her Coleman Fellowship to develop the entrepreneurship potential of the course, Social Media, that she helped develop two years ago with Suzanne Levine, a former Coleman Fellow who has since left the faculty.

The course is now required for students majoring in media communication, and Helterhoff wants students to learn how to promote themselves as entrepreneurs across online media platforms. They will be able use the interactive tools of social media to generate a customer base for whatever they choose to create.

According to Helterhoff, the course, Social Media, was created because students using Facebook and other social media often ignore approaches that are successful, strategic, and professionally valuable. Social media lends itself well to projects in personal entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurship, and philanthropic entrepreneurship.

Lamers has used her Coleman grant to integrate a publishing module into her course, Special
Topics in Creative Writing: Themed Poetry and Chapbooks, From Drafting to Polishing and Publishing.

Students receive instruction in the options available for publication, such as independent literary magazines, university-affiliated literary journals, and chapbooks, as well as traditional bound journals and blogs. Students learn aobut the merits of peer-review publishing compared to self-publishing.

Students gain an understanding of the “out of the box” innovation and creative thinking needed to promote one’s writing through blogs, readings, and other means of advertisement. All students prepare and submit select original work for publication. Students will also self-publish a chapbook of poetry for the final project.

Coleman Fellows are recommended by the department chairs and approved by the deans. Each Coleman Fellow receives a grant to develop a new course or a module for an existing course. The course and/or module must focus on venture creation.

More than 20 universities and colleges participate in the Coleman Fellows program, and this is Lawrence Tech’s third year. Previous Coleman Fellows at Lawrence Tech include Karen Evans, Peter Beaugard, Ghassan Azar and Jim Stevens.In addition to attending monthly WebEx meetings to exchange ideas with the Coleman Fellows at other universities, each Coleman Fellow must attend one of two conferences, Self Employment in the Arts (SEA) or the Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization Conference.

Tweet