Matching student presentations to the nature of service-learning work

Each semester, our Spanish service-learning students engage in meaningful community-based projects, yet the typical end-of-the-semester oral presentation is the opposite: boring and delivered to a passive audience. Without extensive training, most PowerPoint presentations simply recreate the pitfalls of oral presentations with students reading each slide's text. Instead, we have found that a poster session modeled on the professional conference format allows students to present their projects in succinct yet eye-catching posters that necessitate active dialogue with their audience.