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Welcome to our e-newsletter
Minds in Motion
"I had forgotten the combination of exhilaration and exhaustion that accompanies the first week of Free Minds classes," project director Vivé Griffith posted on Facebook one year ago today.
She could have written that yesterday. It's easy to forget how much work goes into setting up a new class -- and how rewarding it is to be back in the classroom with a new group of smart, committed students and professors. We're so excited to share the educational journey ahead.
In this month's newsletter, we introduce our students, faculty, and new project partner. Also, don't forget to check out the Final Word with Mike Rose.
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Meet the Class of 2012
 After an unprecedented recruitment season that brought in over 100 applications -- more than twice the number we received last year -- we are thrilled to welcome the class of 2012. These 24 adult students come to the classroom from very different places but with common goal of bettering their lives through education. This year, Free Minds enrolled 22 women and 2 men whose ages span four decades. The class includes city and state employees, students from El Paso, Chicago, and Ecuador, a yoga instructor, a self-published author, mothers and fathers, and two residents at Foundation Communities' M Station apartments, the brand-new affordable housing facility where we are lucky to hold classes this year. The students and their children all met for the first time on Monday, August 15 for the Free Minds orientation at M Station, where we started the process of getting students registered at Austin Community College. The following Monday, August 22, the students and faculty gathered to begin the semester with a reading from educator and author Mike Rose . This opened up an honest and reflective conversation about the various factors that prevent people from pursuing an education -- single parenthood, work, lack of support, lack of community, racism, domestic violence. By the end of the class, there was a strong sense of community in the room, as students honored each other's pasts and looked forward together to a fresh start in the classroom. |
| Free Minds Partners with Open Door Preschools
Free Minds has joined forces with Open Door Preschools, an innovative early education program that will provide childcare onsite at M Station for children ages 0-5. In past years, Free Minds students with very young children had to find baby-sitters on class nights. This year, they can bring their kids to class! We are excited to continue improving the services we offer to students, as well as to partner with other programs that are committed to inclusive education.
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Special Thanks
As the new school year begins, we want to acknowledge the support of our major partners and funders who make this program possible: The University of Texas at Austin's Division of Diversity and Community Engagement Austin Community College Foundation Communities and The TG Public Benefit Grant Program The Mitte Foundation If you are interested in volunteering with or supporting Free Minds, you can find more information on our website. |
  
Minds in Motion
Archive
July 2011 Grant news, a record applicant pool, and a tour de UT. Plus, Vive gives the Final Word. June 2011 Big funding news, a last call for applications, and a recent graduate's plans. May 2011 Congratulations to the Free Minds class of 2011! |
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Faculty Selected for 2011-12
This year, we welcome two returning professors and three new faculty to the Free Minds classroom. The instructors from the University of Texas and Austin Community College will be team-teaching a yearlong course in literature, history, creative writing, theater, and other subjects in the humanities, beginning August 22.
Neil Foley, Professor of History and American Studies at UT, will teach American History.
Vivé Griffith, Free Minds Project Director and Assistant Professor at ACC, will once again teach creative writing and poetry.
Patty Hatcher, Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Religion, and Humanities at ACC, will bring a mix of humanities to the classroom, including philosophy and classics.
Domino Renee Perez, Associate Professor at UT in the Department of English, will return to teach the literature unit.
Laine Perez, a graduate student at UT in the Department of English, will be our writing consultant this year.
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The Final Word
Mike Rose, Teacher and Learner 
Every year, Free Minds students read a selection from Lives on the Boundary, Mike Rose's book about students who have been left behind in the U.S. school system. We use this as a jumping-off point to introduce ourselves to the class through our intellectual biographies, keeping in mind the following questions: Who am I as a thinker? A learner? What did I once believe about education? What do I believe today? Mike Rose is currently a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. The following excerpt from Lives on the Boundary, printed with Rose's permission, shares a view on higher education that is central to the work we do at Free Minds: We live, in America, with so many platitudes about motivation and self-reliance and individualism -- and myths spun from them, like those of Horatio Alger -- that we find it hard to accept the fact that they are serious nonsense. To live your early life on the streets of South L.A. -- or Homewood or Spanish Harlem or Chicago's South Side or any one of hundreds of other depressed communities -- and to journey up through the top levels of the American educational system will call for support and guidance at many many points along the way. You'll need people to guide you into conversations that seem foreign and threatening. You'll need models, lots of them, to show you how to get at what you don't know. You'll need people to help you center yourself in your own developing ideas. you'll need people to watch out for you. There is much talk these days about the value of a classical humanistic education, a call for an immersion in the humanities, a return to the great books. These appeals raise lots of suspicions, for such curricula have traditionally served to exclude working-class people from the classroom. It doesn't, of necessity, have to be that way. The teachers that fate... sent my way worked at making the humanities truly human. |
A program of the UT Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, in partnership with the UT Humanities Institute, Austin Community College, and Foundation Communities, Free Minds offers a two-semester college course in the humanities for Central Texas adults who want to fulfill their intellectual potential and begin a new chapter in their lives.
Free Minds Project
Community Engagement Center
1009 East 11th Street, #218
Austin TX 78702
Project Director: Vivé Griffith Project Assistant/AmeriCorps VISTA: Hana Silverstein
Ph: 512-232-6093 F: 512-236-1729
www.utexas.edu/diversity/ddce/freeminds |
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