After graduating from UMD in 2011, I taught English to middle and high school students in Provence, France. While I had studied in France my junior year, the experience of living and working abroad was vastly different. There were no pre-planned excursions, built-in friends, guaranteed housing, or people to handle all my paperwork for me.

Without prior experience, I learned through trial and error how to plan student activities--some of which engaged them (they loved talking about American stereotypes), and some of which bored them (they weren't so interested in our version of football, surprisingly). Working with French teachers was certainly an interesting experience. I was hit with major culture shock on my first Friday at one school, when, at 12 p.m. sharp, teachers poured into the lounge and started pouring drinks.

In my free time, I planned trips with friends, which were all the more memorable because they never went according to those plans. I hitchhiked for the first time when getting on the wrong bus put me in danger of missing a flight to Sardinia. I'll never forget running through the airport - 30 minutes after the gate should have closed - and onto the tarmac to join my friends. They were already boarding the plane, wondering where I'd been (of course, I'd left my phone at home). My second hitchhiking experience came two days later, when we needed food and had learned that the town nearest our campground was shut down until summer.

I believe these experiences helped me land a position in the Master's in Professional Writing Program, where I now have plenty of stories to share. 

Jill Shastany

Class of 2011

The Inside/Out program, a collaborative program between UMass Dartmouth's Crime and Justice program and Bristol County House of Corrections, offers students the opportunity to rediscover the power of education. The program joins fifteen UMass Dartmouth students with fifteen prisoners for a semester long course called Justice & Society. According to previous students, this three-credit course is "the best class they take in college."

The 200-level core course, taught every fall semester by Professor Susan Krumholz, infiltrates the prison walls and creates a one-of-a-kind classroom. Krumholz requires her students to do ordinary course work--read the textbooks, write papers, and produce a ten-page, end-of-semester paper. These assignments are an expected, natural component of the course. But the course also produces some unexpected benefits. 

The Inside/Out program challenges the students to look at their experiences and others' experiences through a different lens, a different perspective. The outside students, UMass Dartmouth's crime and justice majors, reflect on and transform their personal beliefs. "Some students go in wanting to be prosecutors, but they come out wanting to be public defenders," Krumholz said. "In this class, they learn how to think and care."  

In his book Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, UMass Dartmouth English Professor Lucas Mann utilizes his childhood baseball obsession as a way to connect to the small town of Clinton, Iowa. His story explores one season of the Clinton Lumberkings, the town's low-level minor league baseball team. Mann hopes that the narrative does more than just reveal a baseball season. "I hope that it gets at larger, lasting issues in the lives of the players, the fans, and the town itself," he said.

Baseball, America's favorite pastime, has a way of connecting people, places, and things. As a child, Mann obsessed over baseball.  He collected baseball cards, memorized stats, played little league, and even was captain of his high school team. But most importantly, baseball opened up an avenue for him to connect with his father. "The game played a huge role in my relationship with my father," he said. "Even now, we talk about baseball all the time." And the book critics have been talking too. According to Adam Langer, Boston Globe correspondent, "...in his first trip to the plate, [Mann] knocks it out of the park."