Lifestyle and enhancement class allows students to create and plan wedding

~Students Emily Cline and Lewis Washington will imitate the roles of bride and groom

Southeast honor students Kayla Allen, Gage Walker and Caleb Brittingham were given an assignment by their Lifestyle and Enhancement, UI 345, professor Fred Burgard to plan a mock wedding by the end of the semester.

The second eight weeks of the class heavily focuses on dating and marriage, and Burgard hopes to demonstrate all the necessary steps of planning a successful wedding and marriage by assigning this project.

"I'm pro-marriage, so I thought this would be really good to get the students talking all about marriage and the complications of marriage, and I thought, nothing better than do a wedding," Burgard said.

Allen, Walker and Brittingham are the students responsible for planning the entire wedding and creating the budget, but the rest of the class will be participating as well.

"I've been giving roles to everyone in the class because we're all being graded on it," Allen said. "So we have the bride and groom, ushers, a photographer, groomsmen, bridesmaids, decorators and one guy even volunteered to go to Walmart and buy a cake."

Southeast students Emily Cline and Lewis Washington will play the roles of bride and groom.

"[Burgard] is a real life pastor, so we were joking that if the bride and groom kiss and actually sign everything, that they're actually going to be married," Allen said.

"Yeah, I already asked if I needed to print out annulment papers," Cline said.

The mock wedding will take place in a cabin owned by Shadow Rest Ministries, where Burgard is a pastor.

Before the wedding takes place on April 28, the class has been learning what it takes to build a relationship that could potentially result in a successful marriage. Burgard requested that Allen and Walker go through pre-marital counseling as another honors assignment since they have been dating for four years.

"My wife and I are premarital counselors, so I said to them, 'Why don't you take the assessment that all the other couples take since you've been dating that long', and hopefully they plan to get married, so they went through with it," Burgard said.

Allen said she thought the premarital counseling was fun and beneficial to her relationship with Walker.

"Sometimes the lessons are very serious and I'll walk out of class and be like 'Oh my gosh,' I was just taught a very important life lesson that I need to stick to very strictly, or other days I'll be like 'Wow, that class was so laid back and fun,'" Allen said.

Burgard enjoys teaching the class and gives assignments and projects that affect students on a personal level. Aside from the mock wedding, he often uses hands-on activities throughout the semester to help demonstrate his lessons to the students.

"I feel like [the way he teaches] is very effective though, making it personal. You really grasp the concept and it sticks with you," Allen said.