Rhetoric, Media, and Civic Life: Commons Campaign: UNL Academic Building's Bathroom Review

UNL Academic Building's Bathroom Review

Group: Edden Abraham, Amanda Ewerth, Mitch Bruner, Emily Puls

There are many things in society which people are trying to raise awareness about in order to fix them. You see it everywhere; on TV, on facebook, even on billboards. Whether it’s the ASPCA ads on TV, or the current discussion on discrimination in our culture, people often support causes which are bigger than themselves. What happens with this is that we forget the smaller, and seemingly insignificant things which are ultimately still important. We decided instead of doing what was popular or commonly done to raise awareness for a specific cause, we instead chose to focus on something which is foundational to society. Afterall, what value would you put on a room that you spend on average a year and a half in for the duration of your lifetime? There is a need to have bathrooms be more sanitary and accessible, especially when we have public bathroom that we share. Regardless of who you are, whether a student or faculty member, we are all human with a basic necessity for bathrooms. Even though this is an important matter, it is not one that is on the forefront of our everyday minds. We focus on the monetary issues in our lives not the smaller necessities.

One of the many constraints is the monetary budget allocated for bathrooms and the labeled importance of it. We hope that in this campaign it will open a discussion topic to students and will encourage individuals to strive to make a change. We hope this will shed light to how the bathrooms are actually present it in reality. The proof will bring attention to the condition of bathrooms on campus, it will show the need for bathroom improvements.

As a group we have to create the questions we base our evaluation on, and to properly evaluate the condition that the bathrooms are in. Each person is going to interpret the conditions of the bathroom differently. We will be treating this as more of a research project than activism. We will be using a Spreadsheet to insert our analysis of the bathrooms gathered from different locations. The research will also be in an ethnography form, because we are involving ourselves by exploring the different bathrooms. We will be putting up posters of the top three best and worst bathrooms on campus and then having a link to a website that informs our peers of the information we have recorded. This will also be a section where they can comment if they agree or disagree and some fun facts on information that we gathered about bathrooms.

We had brief meetings after class in order to communicate our thoughts and progress in relation to the Commons Campaign. As individuals we planned on evaluating either before or during spring break. We also planned on researching facts about bathrooms’ sanitation, accessibility, and quality in large. The roles and duties within this group will vary for each individual member. Mitch’s goal, was to collect data for every male bathroom for our selected buildings on campus. In addition to Mitch’s task of evaluating all male bathrooms, he was to create the website where we will store all our information. Edden and Amanda’s duties includes collecting data for the delegated female bathrooms, finding sanitary facts on bathrooms, and writing the majority of the final paper. Lastly, Emily will be in charge of creating and updating the spreadsheet as well as collecting data from delegated female bathrooms.

Our use of rhetorical canons in this campaign included invention, style, arrangement memory, and delivery. Firstly, we wanted our project to be a basic necessity. So we created a project that would evaluate bathrooms and we could collect research on. Invention and Style went hand-in-hand in how we shared our findings. We decided to create a website that had our data stored and our research displayed. We came to the conclusion that we wanted to display posters for the three best and worst bathrooms on campus. We thought this was the best way to promote our website and the easiest way to share with our peers. Memory seemed to come best into play as we created the evaluation criteria for the bathrooms. We did this because we all had our own interpretations and opinions of the bathrooms’ quality.

We delegated how to arrange tasks and who was assigned each role. We strived to have structure to remain as our center focus. We also tried to play each member’s strengths in deciding what tasks to assign. We created a spreadsheet to have our data remain in one area, and to make it easy to interpret. When it came time to share our data with our peers, we discussed as a group the most proficient way to share it. We came to the conclusion that we would create a website that displayed our data as well as the facts that we researched. In addition to the website, we made posters for the top three best and worst bathrooms on campus. This technique was with the intention of sharing with our peers the ranking of those specific bathrooms as well as a link to our website for more information.

The timeline of this project was to do the majority of the bathroom evaluations to be done before or during spring break. But to have evaluations completely finished by April 12th at the latest. The time it took for Emily, Edden, and Amanda to inspect the bathrooms was a total of six hours, with each of us spending two hours each. Mitch, being the only male in our group, spent a total of six hours inspecting the bathrooms himself. After all of the evaluations of the bathrooms, the work hours going into spread sheets and other data neared five hours. We decided as a group that we would set a deadline for inserting the data into the spreadsheet and the research facts by April 15th. In meeting our previous deadlines, we wanted to have our posters and website completed by April 20th. Overall, we have had four group meetings to discuss roles, rules, expectations, and our approach to the project; our meetings took a total of 6 hours. Overall we spent a total of twenty hours to finish this project. In doing so, we learned way more about bathrooms than we ever wanted to.

Top 3 Best Bathrooms:

1. Brace Hall

2. Hamilton Hall

3. Othmer Hall

Worst Bathrooms: College of Business Admisnistration (CBA)

Website with information: www.unlbathrooms.weebly.com

Posters in Bathrooms: