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Winter 2014 - Vol 6, Issue 2
In This Issue
Community Listen Lewiston
Tour, Teach, Perform: A Crown Jewel of the Community-Engaged Arts at Bates
Students Exchange Experiences with Asylum Seekers
"Learning To..." at Blake Street Towers
The Sociology of Immigration
Research and the Public Good: This Year's Community-Engaged Research Fellows
Announcing the 2014 Carignan Grant Awardees!
Support our Bonner Leader Program!
Join Our Mailing List!
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Dear Friends,

 

As the days lengthen and the snow melts, I join the rest of the Bates campus in what feels like a collective sigh of relief that the brutal winter is finally over. Even as I bid the cold a not so fond farewell, I know I will miss what has become the highlight of Winter term for me: the Community-Engaged Research Fellows seminar. Every other Wednesday throughout the term, Harward Center Associate Director Holly Lasagna and I had the pleasure of gathering with a small group of smart and motivated students to talk about the distinct joys and challenges of community-engaged research and to be for each other a supportive community of practice. I am always impressed by what Bates students can do by the time they are seniors. They have become complex thinkers, skilled communicators, and generous collaborators, and many of them have also become highly engaged citizens of both campus and community--citizens who use their skills in partnership with others to pursue co-created projects and the common good.   

 

Of course, it is not only our seniors who engage in "informed civic action" (Bates mission statement). This newsletter features the work of students from across the four-year college spectrum, each of whom has taken extraordinary initiative to connect with others across differences for the sake of shared understanding, deep learning, and mutual flourishing. Thank you for your interest in their work.

With all good wishes,

Darby K. Ray 

Director

 

Community Listen Lewiston
Alexandra Morrow '16  

From mid-February through the end of March, I used public radio to expose middle school students to the ways personal-narrative and interviews can help to connect people within communities. I asked students to compile a list of people in the community they were interested in interviewing - particularly people they did not know (but wanted to get to know).

 

In six weeks I watched as the five program participants, all girls between the ages of 12-14, blossomed. With recorders in their hands and smiles on their faces, they asked both prompted and unprompted questions. The longer each student spoke with their interviewees, the more comfortable they became. Each student interviewed two community members: volunteers at St. Mary's; a student at Bates; the retired janitor of Lewiston Middle School; and the manager of a local counseling service. One girl even interviewed her mother and her mother's friend to learn about their experiences in Somalia. She translated the entire interview (no small feat).

 

After completing their interviews, these five students felt energized. They enjoyed having the opportunity to meet new people and the permission to ask questions. Because students recorded these interviews they were able to listen back to the conversations. Students selected the parts of their interviews that they found the most interesting, and from these selections I produced 3-4 minute podcasts, mixed with music.

 

These stories were shared on Thursday, April 3rd at Lewiston Middle School for a private celebration and on Monday, April 7th at Guthries for a public celebration. Students, interviewees, and community members sat and listened to these shared experiences. There was not an empty seat in the house at the Guthrie's celebration. As the listening commenced, the room filled with applause for these girls who did what many do not make the time to do - they listened - they listened to people's stories and got a glimpse into the lives of people that make up the greater Lewiston community.

 

Maybe it's a utopian ideal, but perhaps if we all took a little more time to listen to each other, to hear each other's stories and experiences - like these five students did - we'd realize just how amazing the people are who make up this community.

 

You can listen to selections from students' interviews on Sound Cloud: www.soundcloud.com/communitylisten

 

To learn more about Community Listen visit: www.communitylisten.org.

 

Tour, Teach, Perform: A Crown Jewel of the Community-Engaged Arts at Bates
A crown jewel of the community-engaged arts at Bates is the academic course, Tour, Teach, Perform. Under the supervision of Bates faculty and professional guest artists, Bates students create a performance piece and then take it on tour to local public schools. A new short video offers a fascinating window onto the experience while illustrating the mutually beneficial impact of community-engaged work. The video documents last spring's course, which featured Bates grads Erin Gottwald '98 and Postell Pringle '98 as guest artists who helped students create Welcome to Illeria, a dance performance based on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. In addition to all-school performances at eleven local schools, Bates students taught creative movement workshops to 110 individual classes, sharing art-inspired learning with a total of 4,100 students. 

View the video here!


Students Exchange Experiences with Asylum Seekers 
Carly Peruccio '16

Two Bates students, Tara Humphries '17 and Carly Peruccio '16, were inspired to promote inter-community connections between Bates students and members of the Lewiston community. After months of collaboration with Pierrette Rukundo, a Lewiston resident, Experience Exchange was formed. The organization matches a Bates student with a Lewiston community member who is an asylum-seeker. Many of these residents are French or Portuguese speakers who have come to America from countries including Rwanda, Congo, and Angola.

 

Humphries and Peruccio do not regard participation in the group as volunteer work, as they instead emphasize the principles of cooperation and collaboration. The relationships between Bates students and asylum-seekers are built upon the opportunity for mutual exchange and reciprocity. A Bates student, for example, might share English lessons with his or her match. In return, an asylum-seeker can offer French lessons. These exchanges are not limited to language lessons, however, but also incorporate storytelling, the sharing of skills, or simply conversations.

 

Experience Exchange presents a chance for participants to form reciprocal, meaningful, and sustained relationships and friendships, particularly between individuals who might not have connected otherwise. The group's co-founders view Experience Exchange's greatest benefit to be its opportunity to foster the development of cross-cultural understanding, appreciation, and respect.

 

"Learning To..." at Blake Street Towers
Matt Gee '16, 2014 Student Volunteer Fellow    

The Blake Street Towers Learn-To Series is a new program initiated by Bates students to promote college-community friendships and community building within the Lewiston Housing Authority complex. The idea grew out of a desire to create sustainable programming that the Blake Street residents could continue even when Bates students are away for break and to give residents ownership over a program so they will be committed and excited to see it continue. Instead of emphasizing what the Bates volunteers contribute, the Learn-To Series highlights the knowledge and talents of the Blake Street Towers residents. During this year's pilot program, each Saturday in March a different resident or Bates student gives a lesson about an interest of theirs. This year, lessons have included how to play Scattergories, Left-Center-Right, and how to make Chinese pot stickers. The program has become a great way to create bonds of understanding and affection across differences of age, race, and ability.

 

The Sociology of Immigration
 During the Winter term, students taking "Research Methods for Sociology" with Professor Emily Kane learned about the sociology of immigration and various social science research methods by conducting a community-based research project that culminated in a well-attended, interactive poster session.

The poster session presented results from four different data collection efforts conducted by the students, including: 
  • A content analysis of how immigrants and refugees are represented in the Lewiston Sun Journal newspaper, with a particular focus on how interactions between longer-term residents and New Americans in Maine are represented, as well as how immigration is represented at the local and state level.
  • An online survey of how longer-term residents view New Americans in Maine, and how they view immigration into our local community.
  • Qualitative interviews with both New Americans in Maine and longer-term residents, exploring each group's experiences with the other and their overall view of how welcoming our community is for New Americans.
  • Field observations conducted in a variety of public places around Lewiston and Auburn, focusing on interactions and integration between local residents of various backgrounds.
Bates alumna Sarah Davis, who works with "Welcoming Maine," collaborated with Professor Kane to guide students through the project. "I appreciated the chance to reconnect with my Bates roots through a project that we are all deeply connected to: positive, cross-cultural integration in the Lewiston-Auburn community," said Davis. When asked to reflect on what she learned from the project, sophomore Campbell Hart pointed to data indicating that increased interaction between New and Native Mainers leads to improved positive perceptions of each other. "This seems obvious," continued Hart, "in the sense that when you spend time with a person they are no longer just a statistic--they are a human. . . Still, I left the poster session wondering, 'Okay, so interaction is the solution, but how do we increase that dynamic, how do we find common ground and common space to do this?'" 

As students animatedly discussed their projects with guests from both on and off campus, the learning value of community-engaged work was clear. Reflecting on his experience, sophomore Tommy Graziano acknowledged, "
You can only learn so much in the classroom, but when you are engaging in the lives of real people, you become so much more invested and learn in such a profound way. Personally, community-engaged academic work is vital to my education. I need experience where I am actively searching to collaborate and problem-solve with all types of people because ultimately, that's what I will be doing after Bates." 

Research and the Public Good: This Year's Community-Engaged Research Fellows

In community-engaged research, students undertake the creation of knowledge in collaboration with a community partner for the purpose of addressing a community need. This year's six Community-Engaged Research Fellows worked on projects situated at the intersection of community interests and academic areas including psychology, education, sociology, environmental studies, and French. Fellows gathered every other week with Harward Center staff to discuss the distinctive joys and challenges of community-engaged research, to share knowledge and encouragement with each other, and to move their individual projects forward. The seminar culminated in a dynamic presentation by the Fellows at the annual Mt. David Summit.

 

Students' research projects explored a range of topics. Lizzie Baird of West Chester, PA partnered with the Nutrition Center of Maine to research, develop, and implement a program for their Lots to Gardens Youth Program. Lizzie studied food as a means for creating social change among diverse youth. Also with a local focus was Emily Diepenbrock (Orcas, WA), who developed an outdoor education curriculum to engage local immigrant and refugee youth in making the Androscoggin River a natural part of their "backyard." Gretchen Kaija of Reading, VT took community-engaged research into the international context as she worked with members of a community in Madagascar to study the impact of participation in a crafts collaborative on members' self-efficacy. Gretchen also produced a short video documentary that presented the community's diverse work to a key funding agency in France. For her research project, Hannah Mitchell (Baltimore, MD) created an inventory of online resources in the state of Maine for addressing invasive species. The inventory lays the groundwork for a statewide network of information and organizations dealing with Maine's invasive species. Aisling Ryan, who hails from Millis, MA, examined the motivation of clients in a family treatment drug court in downtown Lewiston, with the goal of creating incentives for greater participant success. Finally, Simone Schriger of Los Angeles, CA studied Chilean university students' attitudes about dating violence in collaboration with the Southern University of Chile. At the conclusion of the program, Simone declared, "This experience was honestly one of the highlights of my Bates experience. I couldn't have asked for better leaders or a better group of peers." The Community-Engaged Research Fellows program is made possible by a generous grant from the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation.

 

Announcing the 2014 Carignan Grant Awardees!
 The James W. and Sally L. Carignan Fund for Community Programs makes awards of up to $2000 each to community non-profits that serve Androscoggin County. The fund is intended to celebrate and carry on the Carignans' commitment to respectful, reciprocal, and mutually beneficial partnerships to improve our communities. Community organizations are invited to propose projects that will foster new or strengthen existing connections between Bates and our community, and then Bates students try their hand at being philanthropists. The students receive training in non-profit organizations, the Lewiston-Auburn community, and the world of grant-writing and -making. As they consider proposals, student reviewers are especially interested in projects that promise meaningful opportunities for Bates students to connect with the organization in ways that deepen the partnership.

This year, students had an especially difficult time choosing the grant winners because there were more excellent proposals than grants to be awarded. Ultimately, these organizations and projects were chosen as Carignan Fund winners:
  • Androscoggin Land Trust for development of a smartphone application that Bates students will help to beta test 
  • ArtVan for work with the Lewiston Middle School Alternative Program 
  • Maine Mathematics Science and Engineering Talent Search for a modular origami project at Auburn Middle School 
  • Lewiston Housing Authority's Hillview Family Development for further development of their youth art program 
  • Maine Women's Policy Center for a photo documentation project of women in Androscoggin County 
  • Outright Lewiston-Auburn for the 2014 Youth Summit
Support our Bonner Leader Program!
Bates is actively seeking funds to support its Bonner Leader Program.  If you have questions, or would like to support the Bonner Leader Program, please contact Ellen Alcorn at the Harward Center at 207-786-8235.

For more information about the Bonner Leader Program at Bates, please check out these videos (note that you will be redirected to the Bates College channel on Vimeo):

Video: The Bonner Leader Program - a passion for community service and civic engagement at Bates
Questions?
Please contact Kristen Cloutier or visit us online.