Harward Logo
Winter 2011 - Vol 3, Issue 2
In This Issue
Help Support Our Bonner Leader Program!
Report from Imagining America: on Humility, Reflection, and Site
More Than A Rap Sheet: The Real Stories of Incarcerated Women
Addressing the Issue of Gendered Violence in the Local African Refugee Community
What Are Our Community Partners Saying?
Student Spotlight: Jessica Igoe '11
Join Our Mailing List!
Quick Links
The Civic Forum 2010-2011 Audio and Video Files

Winter 2011 Public Works in Progress Series

Bates 'swing deans' featured in Chronicle of Higher Education

Fun, music, treats in store at Harward Center's sixth Community Celebration
Letter from the Interim Director
Georgia NigroDear Friends,

As the temperature in Lewiston plummets to double digits below zero, I am grateful that the Harward Center keeps my dance card full.  Have we ever danced this fall!  We sponsored three talks about dance in our Public Works in Progress series.  Carol Dilley awed us with a piece she choreographed in a colonial prison turned museum in Australia.  Laura Faure showed footage from an amazing group of Axismulti-abled dancers at the Bates Dance Festival.  And Nancy Salmon talked about Bates dancers teaching dance to children in local schools.  With help from a curriculum shared by Nancy, senior thesis student Cara Gomberg created a dance program for girls who attend the after-school program in the Teen Room at the Lewiston Public Library.  Local friends can see the girls perform at our annual Community Celebration at the Lewiston Public Library on February 4th from 5:30-7:30 PM.  We hope you can come!

We also danced with words and stories this fall.  This past week, Jenny Stasio (Class of 2007) brought "More Than a Rap Sheet" to the Chase Hall Gallery.  See the story in this newsletter for more about this exhibit.  Earlier in the fall, Jess Adelman (Class of 2009) came back to campus with hardbound copies of a book of stories she had created in her senior year with five Somali families who settled in Lewiston.  Visitors to the Harward Center have been captivated by the tales and drawings in the book.  Story telling was also a component of "D4D on the Road" last Saturday, an event sponsored by Project Pericles that we'll describe in greater detail in the next newsletter.  Facilitator Mandara Meyers, from The Center for Progressive Leadership, talked about using stories to recapture the power of public narratives to convey hope and instigate action.

Finally, we learned some new dance steps this fall.  Our Bonner Leaders are experimenting with e-portfolios to record their growth and development in the program.  And our fearless operations director, Kristen Cloutier, has given the Harward Center a presence in the Digital Commons, an online institutional repository.

Busy though we may be, we would love to hear from you or, better yet, see you at our Community Celebration.  Stay warm and send us your news, your stories, and your thoughts about our work.

Best wishes,
Georgia Nigro
Interim Director
Help Support Our Bonner Leader Program!
Submitted by Ellen Alcorn, Assistant Director, Community-Based Learning Program and Director, Bonner Leader Program
Bonner1Our Bonner Leader Program got off to a strong start this semester, with a Saturday service day in which students labeled and boxed food at the Good Shepherd Food Bank, and did painting at Safe Voices, a non-profit organization that supports abused women. This semester, Bonners are working in many different capacities in the community, such as running a winter farmer's market; overseeing a science education program for elementary children at the Lewiston Public Library; developing a support program for adults with disabilities; and tutoring and mentoring in after-school homework help programs. Additionally, Bonners are participating in workshops on a range of topics, including grant-writing, budgeting, and an introduction to Somali language and culture.

For more information about the Bonner Leader Program at Bates, please click here to view a short video (note that you will be redirected to the Bates College channel on Vimeo).

As we prepare to recruit a new class of Bonners, Bates is actively seeking funds for this program. If you have questions or would like to support Bonner, please contact Ellen Alcorn at the Harward Center at [email protected] or 207-786-8235 or Matt Hanson in the Office of Advancement at [email protected] or 207-755-5988.
Report from Imagining America: on Humility, Reflection, and Site
Submitted by Laura Balladur, Visiting Assistant Professor of French
IA CoverA website filled with oral histories, biographies, thousands of photographs, over a hundred student essays, documents fleshing out the stories and histories of Washington State's civil rights' leaders and union workers; a play about Asian Americans immigrants that developed out of oral histories of Seattle's Asian Americans population and the departments of History, Sociology, Drama, and American Ethnic Studies; a bridge, once ironically almost a fence bordering one of the city's disenfranchised neighborhoods, now visited by every freshmen and transformed into a symbol linking the university to its community. Whether it's the not-for-profit Near West Side Initiative led by Syracuse University, or the University of Washington's year-long course offered through the department of American Ethnic Studies, or its Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History archive, or so many other projects, this year's Imagining America conference once again illustrated the creative potential for publicly engaged programs that develop out of partnerships between colleges and their communities.

The various conference plenary talks and workshops also emphasized the difficulty in developing such cross-sectional programs. From the scholar becoming community broker and finding community partners, to program development and implementation, to engagement and negotiation with community partners, to student reflection, to even greater institutional practices that either foster or hinder such publicly engaged programs, the conference also highlighted the social, intellectual, and institutional obstacles in creating such programs. As a first-time Imagining America attendee, I came away with three central themes leading many projects: developing personal and institutional humility, locating the site of the publicly engaged project, and reflecting on the meaning of student reflection.

Humility: As publicly engaged scholars, we need to navigate between our pet project, our department's curriculum, and the community partner. Public engagement is not a one-way street from the institution to the community; public engagement creates community partnerships, and as such, requires humility on the part of the scholar, the department, the institution. UW's Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History started out, not with an institutional vision imposed on various community partners, but with materials community partners brought to the institution. It demanded humility from the institution, as it negotiated between its interests and the partner's interests.

Reflection: Just as we need to negotiate between curriculum demands and community partner interests, students too need to negotiate between experiencing and questioning, between doing and thinking.  This highlights the role of student critical reflection, but also its danger. Reflection can often become formulaic ("before the course I was blind, but now I see!") and reinforce some class issues already at stake. Reflection should not just be a student's personal work to be handed in at the end of the term, but instead it should be a group process, a shared reflection. Reflection should constantly question what we and what our students are doing, as we are doing it. This was most apparent for me with the oral histories developed first during a year-long class at the University of Washington, where shared reflection between students and community partners became the basis for a continued conversation that eventually developed into a play -- written by students, yes, but in which community partners had a voice throughout the whole process.

Site: As we break down the silos within the institution and reach to community partners, such publicly engaged programs necessarily make problematic the location of the university. Should the university maintain its invisible fence so visible and tangible to the greater community? The Near West Side Initiative led by Syracuse University offered an astonishing example of a university taking on shared responsibility for one of the city's neighborhoods, and moving the institution's intellectual space off university grounds and into the community. After buying two warehouses in that neighborhood, creating artist residences, and fostering connections with artist and neighborhood organizations, SU developed various programs bridging the university to the city: from school children studying photography, to after-school literacy programs, to architecture and design students working on sustainability and green design, SU is moving beyond that invisible fence.

In one of the many plenary presentations, American Association of Colleges and Universities Senior Vice-President Caryn McTighe invited us to think of the hermit crab as a metaphor for higher education. Hermit crabs go from one shell to another of varying sizes. They are most vulnerable when they molt, yet it's also during this process that they have the capacity to regenerate limbs. This is what higher education should be all about. We should be breaking out of our silos and out of our shells, and creating more limbs as we reach beyond that invisible fence and allow the community to reach over to us. Students are not separated from the world; they are engaged in the world. Part of our job is to prepare our students to realize that they are in the world, now. Let's be hermit crabs.
More Than a Rap Sheet: The Real Stories of Incarcerated Women
Submitted by Jenny Stasio '07
MoreThanARapSheet
Jenny Stasio '07, who volunteered regularly with the Abused Women's Advocacy Project when she was a student at Bates, has developed an exhibit based on her work with women in the Maine Correctional Center in Windham.  More Than a Rap Sheet: The Real Stories of Incarcerated Women opened last November at the Salt Institute in Portland.  Since then, it has been displayed at the Muskie Institute, the University of Maine at Orono and at Bates.  The project focuses on issues of domestic violence, trauma, and the effects of incarceration.

The exhibit includes words and photographs, representing some of the real stories of women who are incarcerated in Maine.  Family Crisis Services, Cumberland and Sagadahoc Counties' domestic violence agency, conducted a study which found that approximately 95% of incarcerated women were currently in an abusive intimate relationship or had been a victim of one in the past.  Recognizing the connection between female incarceration and domestic abuse, Family Crisis Services began offering support groups for women at Cumberland County Jail and Maine Correctional Institution.  Family Crisis Services is one of only a handful of domestic violence agencies in the country that offer such programs.  In 2007, Family Crisis Services added creative writing groups to their educational groups through their incarcerated women's program.  During these creative writing group sessions, participants not only write, but also read a variety of genres including poetry, short stories, and excerpts from novels.  One poem they read, The Truth About Us by Terri Haven, a social worker who researches prisons, resonated with many of the participants.  The women used this poem as a prompt for the work that is displayed in More Than a Rap Sheet.

All of us have a story.  It's the telling that can set us free.  It's the seeing and hearing that helps us understand the truth.

More Than a Rap Sheet: The Real Stories of Incarcerated Women is on display in the Chase Hall Gallery at Bates through February 3, 2011.  Donations of non-spiral-bound notebooks/composition books are greatly appreciated and can be mailed to or dropped off at the Harward Center (161 Wood Street, Lewiston, ME  04240).
Addressing the Issue of Gendered Violence in the Local African Refugee Community
Submitted by Morgan Kapinos '11
USWMDuring the fall semester of 2010, I had the opportunity to participate in a community-based research project with United Somali Women of Maine (USWM), a very unique organization that works to support the local African refugee community and promote awareness about culturally sensitive issues in the Lewiston-Auburn area. 

USWM had just received a grant to conduct research about prevailing attitudes related to various forms of gender-related violence in the local African refugee community.  Gender-related, or "gendered," violence refers to forms of violence that exist or are exacerbated by inequalities associated with the genders of the victim and victimizer (common examples include dating violence, domestic violence and sexual assault). USWM hopes to use the research conducted to develop a culturally sensitive and effective educational program that addresses this physically and emotionally destructive behavior in their local community.  The themes and goals of their study correlated perfectly with the Sociology seminar, Gender and Family, which I was taking with Professor Emily Kane. 

From the beginning of the semester, Professor Kane was very supportive in helping students in the class find opportunities to get involved in the local community and incorporate our work in our final research project.  Over the course of the semester, I helped the women of USWM interpret the surveys they had worked hard to distribute in the community.  I used the program SPSS to quantitatively interpret the survey data and was able to provide them with a helpful, basic analysis of preliminary findings.  At the end of the semester, I got the rare opportunity to present my findings to a committee of local experts (district attorneys, sexual assault advocates, etc.) that was working with USWM throughout the research process.  The entire experience was very fulfilling and really made me feel like I was doing something positive for a very hardworking, amazing group of women. 

The research that they are doing about gendered violence in the local African refugee community is groundbreaking and is one of the first studies of its kind.  It therefore felt very rewarding to contribute to their efforts and utilize the resources and knowledge that we are fortunate enough to have access to at Bates.  The entire partnership and the work we were able to achieve together was a perfect example of the amazing potential for community-based research at Bates and beyond.  I would highly encourage students to get involved in community-based projects because it was by far one of the most gratifying, influential experiences I have had at Bates.
What Are Our Community Partners Saying?
"The work that I do as coordinator of the after-school homework help program at the Lewiston Public Library would simply not be possible without the support of the Harward Center and all of the wonderful Bates students that they are able to place with us. The Harward Center acts as a bridge between Bates and the broader Lewiston-Auburn community. Part of my job is to build college aspirations among disadvantaged youth in downtown Lewiston, and I can't say enough about the great example that the Bates students set for the younger students. In the span of just a semester, I see bonds of friendship and trust blossom between Bates students and local high school students that extends beyond the classroom. Many Bates students will take time out of their busy schedules to meet with the kids at night and on weekends, far exceeding any Bates requirements."

 - Tony Damiano, Coordinator of the Promoting School Success Program, a project of the Downtown Education Collaborative
Student Spotlight: Jessica Igoe '11

Jessie"Working at the Hillview Afterschool Program the past four years has been one of the most meaningful aspects of my time at Bates College. Hillview is a low-income housing community in Lewiston. The afterschool program provides homework help, as well as games and crafts, twice a week throughout the school year. With anywhere from ten to 30 kids participating at a time, things are bound to get a bit rambunctious. This energy is without a doubt the best part of Hillview - the excitement is contagious and serves as a reminder that learning can and should be fun. Hillview is also unique in that it allows volunteers to form lasting relationships with students. Four years allows you to bear witness to the growth and progress each child makes.  I am incredibly proud of the tough work everyone (student or volunteer) puts in each day. Though they may not realize it, I've learned more about determination and character from these kids than they've learned from me. In my work, I've witnessed students fall off track, some straightening out, and others still struggling to find their way. What I've learned is that every child needs someone to help them realize what's best within herself.  Hillview has given me the opportunity to do just that."

Questions?
Please contact Kristen Cloutier at [email protected] or 207-786-6202
Or visit us online.