For the past two weeks, a group of community college students and faculty advisors from South Florida has joined students at a number of select institutions participating in The Washington Center’s 2017 Presidential Inauguration Academic Seminar.
According to a news release from Miami Dade College (MDC), the students had the opportunity to hear guest lectures and participate in small group discussions and budget and policy simulations. Today’s presidential inauguration is a bookend to the two weeks of experiences for the students, which included visits with Capitol Hill policymakers and even participation in a Day of Service activity with Secretary of Education John King on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, says MDC political science and international relations professor Richard Tapia. Tapia served as a faculty adviser for this year’s seminar.
Tapia adds that the experiential education MDC students received in D.C. has helped them have a firsthand account of how the political process “works, and that if they don’t advocate for their interests, they concede it to somebody who is advocating.”
Interestingly enough, the theme for this year’s seminar was “Elevating Political Discourse,” a theme coined even before some of the most contentious and vitriolic portions of the 2016 presidential race took place. The nature of the political discourse was not lost on MDC journalism student Alejandra Zimmermann, who participated in this year’s inauguration academic seminar.
Zimmermann says that one topic of the small group discussions following presentations at The Washington Center was language.
“We talked about how specifically President-elect Trump was using the sort of language that was pretty easy to understand to appeal to a lot of voters,” Zimmermann says.
