USU Sexual Misconduct Prevention Collaboration Wins Excellence Award

A collaboration among Utah State University’s Office of Equity, Sexual Assault and Anti-Violence Information (SAAVI) Office and English department has won a gold excellence award from the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) for its unique approach to promoting sexual misconduct prevention through the work of students in a technical communications course.

NASPA’s annual excellence awards honor work that is transforming higher education through exceptional programs, innovative services and effective administration. USU was honored in the “campus security, crisis management, student conduct and community standards, violence prevention and related” category.

Emmalee Fishburn, a senior prevention specialist in the Office of Equity, has been involved with the project since it began. “It’s great for this partnership to be recognized with an excellence award,” she said. “Being able to work with students on these projects over the past few years has allowed a number of my dream projects to be realized.”

Avery Edenfield, an associate professor of rhetoric and technical communication, approached Fishburn and Felicia Gallegos, an outreach and prevention coordinator with SAAVI, in 2019 about incorporating sexual misconduct prevention into student research and projects in an undergraduate course. This project management course was held each spring between 2020-2022.

In 2021, the project was the subject of a research brief published in Communication Design Quarterly. The article, “Unlikely Allies in Preventing Sexual Misconduct: Student Led Prevention Efforts in a Technical Communication Classroom,” was written by Edenfield, Fishburn, Gallegos and former USU graduate student Hailey Judd after they conducted research that found USU’s academic course collaboration was one of a kind.

“Sexual misconduct prevention work has historically focused on bystander intervention strategies and has been rooted in compliance with federal and university standards,” Gallegos said. “With this collaboration, we’ve had the chance to do more. To go straight to the experts — the students themselves — and have them come up with ideas that were innovative and impactful.”

In the spring 2022 course, students organized a “destigmatizing sex and intimacy panel,” where students could anonymously ask questions to health and relationship professionals. Other projects included auditing the Office of Equity website to suggest improvements, working on a web page that addresses myths about false reporting of sexual assault, and creating a survey that helps students identify how their individual strengths can best help them be an “Upstander.”

Moving forward, this collaboration will expand beyond a single class. Edenfield is now director of USU’s Center for Intersectional Gender Studies & Research, and the group is developing a toolkit to help professors in any discipline find relevant ways to include sexual misconduct prevention in their courses and create community-engaged learning opportunities for students.

“We want to get into classrooms and spaces where these topics aren’t usually discussed,” Gallegos said. “With this expanded model, we have the chance to reach into every academic college and find ways to create materials and tools that will truly connect with students.”

As award recipients, USU’s collaborators will present a poster about their program at the 2023 NASPA annual conference in Boston, receive a NASPA excellence awards gold certificate and be recognized in a collection of winning entries on the NASPA excellence awards website and in the annual conference program.