Jessica Ryan, Scholarly Communications Librarian, highlights an item in ScholarWorks each month.

The end of another exciting academic year! It’s the perfect time to remind our community that while I usually focus on faculty work, we have an amazing community of scholars that includes students.

ScholarWorks is thrilled to announce that we will now have collections of the Concentrations. The first concentration represented is the Community Engagement and Social Change Concentration (CESC) and so for this month’s What Am I Reading in ScholarWorks I’d like to highlight some of that excellent student capstone work.

Natalie Laroche has written a compelling proposal to address textbook affordability at Smith: “Textbook Affordability at Smith College: Affirming Smith’s Commitment to Creating an Inclusive, Equitable and Accessible Educational Community,” (full disclosure: I am an informal advisor to Smith Student PIRG in support of this issue). She writes, “While textbook costs may seem like an unavoidable reality to some, we owe it to ourselves to look beyond the manifestation of this problem for innovative solutions. Given our institutional, and personal, commitments to equity and accessibility in education and at large, we cannot accept the status quo as an unavoidable reality.” Smith students don’t simply engage with the problems facing us all, they engage with the solutions.

To read this work in Smith ScholarWorks, visit: https://scholarworks.smith.edu/other_projects/220/

What is ScholarWorks?

Smith ScholarWorks is Smith’s institutional repository of digital scholarship and research materials created and curated by faculty, students, and staff at Smith College. Browse by collections, disciplines, and authors.