Write a research paper about my experience serving the friends of Drew Forest, with a focus on the midterms essay.

Write a research paper about my experience serving the friends of Drew Forest, with a focus on the midterms essay.
The purpose of the midterm essay and presentation is to reflect on your own service work, share your experiences with others, make connections between public health/environmental studies theory (literature) and practice (actions, service learning), and to strengthen communications skills, including: formal writing, development of arguments with supporting evidence (research), and visual and oral presentations. To accomplish these objectives, this rubric outlines the characteristics of a successful essay and presentation, and describes how your essay and presentation will be assessed.
Essay:
The structure of the essay should include a title, introductory paragraph with a thesis statement and preview, a body that consists of paragraphs that make arguments supported by evidence, and a conclusion that reviews the main purpose of the essay and summarizes the key take away points from the body.
The midterm essay should be 1,250 words, which is roughly 5 pages double spaced, plus a page with the bibliography. The bibliography is not included in the word count. You may choose the font, page margins, spacing (single, 1.5, or double), and number of columns (one or two). However, all papers should include a title, your name, page numbers and bibliography.
Content:
The first paragraph should be the introduction, describing briefly your service work and how it relates to ideas in the course (thesis), and how the coming paragraphs will provide more detail about your experience in practice and theory (preview).
Examples of thesis statements:
Through service work, my appreciation for the environmental justice advocacy approach has grown.
I perceive a rift between scholarly theories and the everyday realities of volunteering for a non-governmental organization: this essay reveals how service work practices raise a number of challenges to contemporary literature in both public health and environmental sciences.
For me, community learning offers a case study of ways to move forward on promoting and achieving environmental health objectives.
Examples of preview statement:
This essay explores the connection between my work with the Sustainable Madison Advisory Committee (SMAC) and arguments made by scholars about the role of advocacy in enhancing democratic practice.
In this essay, I first examine perspectives from Holslin (2018), Miller (2018) and Stroud (2018) on how global, US, and local systems and practices produce inequity. I then describe how scholarly viewpoints on public participation relate to my own engagement with the activists supporting affordable housing in my community.
I begin by describing my participation in organizing and attending service work activities. Next, I explore the connection between advocacy and effective public health outcomes (McKibben 2018; Sarathy 2018), and I conclude with a survey of literature on public participation in the health communications literature.
—
The body of the essay should provide more details about the service work you have done and/or the service work that you hope to complete in the course. There is flexibility in how you communicate about your work and how you connect your work to the course readings and discussion. You could introduce key theories and definitions and then explore how those theories relate to your service work practice, or you could describe your service work first and relate your work to theories from class. You could have several sub-headings describing different types of work (attending MLK service work activities, promoting health communications online), and in each subsection connect theory and practice. However, it is necessary to connect your service learning to the environmental health/public health literature. I would expect that most essays would engage the definition of environmental justice, public health, democracy or civic engagement, such as those used by the APHA, or the text.
For the midterm essay, it is important to cite at least two separate chapters from The Nature of Hope, and Project 562. In addition to these sources, you will need to collect a minimum of three additional sources. One of these sources should relate to your work: it should be an organization’s website. One source should be from peer-reviewed literature. Peer-reviewed literature has undergone peer-review, and includes books, or journal articles that are referenced in citation indexes, such as PubMed, Web of Science, or JSTOR. The last source should be one example from a newspaper, digital news source, or documentary. Altogether, I expect a minimum of six sources: two separate chapters from The Nature of Hope (2018), Wilbur (2023), the organizational website most closely related to your service work, one peer-reviewed source, and one news source.
The purpose of the external sources is to demonstrate the connection between public health/environmental studies theory and practice. These sources should be used to provide supporting evidence connected to your service learning.
For example, your service work may describe time spent distributing or organizing food in a food pantry. In addition to descriptions of your work, you need to connect this to the literature. One way is through our own text readings, such as the Greenberg and Schneider text that describes upstream factors that influence public health, as well as the importance of the Social Determinants of Health.
But, in addition to the text, you may have read an article in the American Journal of Public Health, where researchers found that food banks help people with diabetes make healthier dietary choices. They discovered that “Because diabetes is more prevalent among vulnerable populations, the researchers said food banks are critical in helping people get better, healthier food” (The Nation’s Health, 2018). Through research and peer-reviewed resources, you can develop a more complex and effective argument about the relationship between your service work and the wider community.
The last paragraph should recap your arguments and end with a well thought out last sentence that includes what you believe is a key take-away message from your essay.
Figures:
In addition to your text and citations, you should plan to include one or more pieces of visual information, such as photos, maps, charts or tables. Photos, maps or charts that you do include should have a feature in a meaningful way in your essay, and they should be referenced using a figure caption title and number (e.g. refer to the figure in the text as Figure 1, and include a caption under the figure with that includes both the figure number and title). An example is shown below in Figure 1, showing one of the study areas explored on Drew University’s Environmental Justice Spring Break Program in the Appalachian Mountains. To do this in Word, right click on the image and select “Add Caption,” then complete the title. Visual information that you did not personally create should be cited in the caption and in the bibliography. I strongly prefer figures that you create yourself – your own photos, charts, maps, etc. You are welcome to use materials from any of the reading responses or class exercises – you can include them in your essay. I would love to see tables and maps that you have created. If this photo is your own, you will not need a citation for it – but, if the map, chart, table or photo uses any material from a website or academic resource, you will need to cite it as well.
Figure 1. Drew University Spring Break Environmental Justice Project in the Appalachian Mountains (photo courtesy of Summer Harrison)
Bibliography:
Microsoft Word contains a reference formatting system. I recommend using this system (or Zotero). While you are writing in Word, select the references tab, and choose the Harvard style. Click insert citation to “Add New Source.” Add author, title, journal name and other critical information. Also, click the “Show All Bibliographic Fields” at the bottom of the dialog box, then scroll down through the fields to be sure to include the URL, or website, where I can find the original article. When citing supporting information, it is necessary to include both in-text citations and a full citation in the bibliography.

Last Completed Projects