For most Bates students American Indian history is about people "out there" who lived "back then." One of the great pleasures of teaching History s28 (Wabanaki History in Maine) is that it turns both of those assumptions upside-down. Wabanakis, whose name translates as "People of the Dawnland," is a collective name for the Penobscots, Passamaquoddies, Mi'kmaqs (or Micmacs), and Maliseets who live in northern New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Students are almost always surprised to learn that Maine has American Indian inhabitants, and they are even more surprised to learn that Wabanakis continue to play a prominent role in our state.

This past Short Term, with help from grants from the Harward Center, I co-taught the class with Maria Girouard, a Penobscot historian and community organizer who is the former head of the Penobscot Nation's Department of Cultural and Historic Preservation. Our class of nineteen students focused on the ways that Wabanakis have made their lives here for the last 12,000 years. Despite the vast chronological sweep of the class, almost every topic included extensive discussions about contemporary issues, and they were almost always informed by Maria's current work in Wabanaki environmental and human rights. For instance, Penobscots have depended on Maine's environment for millennia, but their survival in Maine is now threatened by a legal dispute over whether they or the state have control over the Penobscot River that is the heart of their reservation. Even supposedly simple questions of family life have painful histories: Maine recently convened a truth and reconciliation commission dealing with state policies that until recently ignored federal law and frequently placed Wabanaki children in non-Indian homes for foster care and adoption.

We spent the fourth week of the Short Term visiting the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy communities and speaking with community scholars and leaders. The student presentations, some of which are listed below, captured some of the ways that Wabanakis draw on their past to build a better future. As in previous years when I have taught the class, this was the most meaningful week. Despite what most students might think about people "out there" and "back then," it was impossible for the nineteen in the class to ignore that Wabanakis and their history are very much "here" and "now."

This awareness informed their final projects, which all had to present some part of Wabanaki history with others outside the class. The results were impressive. Several students visited local schools to teach short history lessons; two created podcasts that drew on some element of their experiences (and you can listen to them here); others created posters on topics ranging from basketmaking to pollution on Wabanakis' rivers (which are available here). One student even gave a presentation to the Harward Center about the dangers of philanthropy when philanthropists do not work closely with the communities they seek to help. Five weeks provided students only an introduction, but we hope this kind of student work promotes conversations and about these topics for a long time to come.

Podcasts can be found here. 

Posters can be viewed here.   

The goals of the first year seminar at Bates are to improve writing and critical thinking skills, amongst others. As an instructor, I also thought it was incredibly important to inform my students about their new home of Lewiston and integrate them into the community. With this in mind, I reached out to the Harward Center in July to brainstorm ideas about community engaged learning that would be meaningful within my course topic, which was food. Holly Lasagna suggested that I partner with the Nutrition Center of Maine and its Lots to Gardens program. Throughout the course of the summer while I was developing my new syllabus, I was in touch with the Nutrition Center's Operation's Manager, Ms. Mia Pross.   By the end of summer, Mia, Holly and I had focused our efforts and generated a list of opportunities for students to engage in during the semester. Additionally, Holly made me aware of a 2013 Lewiston Community Food Assessment, a publication compiled by the Good Food Council of Lewiston-Auburn with help from the Harward Center and Bates faculty and students. Given that this text was available, I was able to address many of the major topics of my course (production and distribution, consumption, and hunger) at a local scale in addition to national and international scales (where most of the academic writing is based).

To begin the semester, Holly and Mia came to my class and introduced themselves, their organizations, and talked with the class in generalities and specifics about what community-engaged learning involves. To schedule their learning off-campus, Mia created a google doc that the (16) students could use for sign-ups. They were expected to complete three learning opportunities. In total, students participated in approximately 126 hours of community-engaged learning (CEL), with activities ranging from food pantry unloading and food distribution, to open garden times, participation in the community cooking night, and set-up of the indoor farmer's market. Additionally, they visited and journaled about the outdoor and indoor farmer's market and cooked a healthy and locally sourced meal as a class with 10 community members at the October Community Cooking night (see attached photo).

Overall, students gained an interest and an understanding of Lewiston through this course. In my opinion, they are well prepared to be involved in their community moving forward and are aware of the hunger and nutrition challenges and opportunities that exist within our community. For example, several students became aware of the fact that the emergency food pantry at the Nutrition Center had already reached its budget as of late October. As a result, six students in the class donated food to the pantry and plan to commit their time and efforts moving forward. This community-engaged learning experience was not only important to student learning and engagement, but with the partnership of the Harward Center and the Nutrition Center, it also contributed in excellent ways to the academic rigor of the course.   

Last year, during the College's five-week short term, 14 students and I spent three weeks in Malawi, working in collaboration with a Maine-based nonprofit, Go! Malawi. The course, called Development in Malawi, offered students an opportunity to examine development in Malawi at the individual and societal levels. Susan Geismar, a Mainer who works with the organization, and Griffin Banda, the on-site director, met us at the airport in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. From there, we drove to rural Ntchisi, where we spent two weeks at Go! Malawi's site atop a mountain, next to one of the few rainforests in southern Africa. Our final week in Malawi was spent at Cool Runnings in Salima, on the shores of Lake Malawi. At each site, we engaged in activities that deepened our knowledge of Malawi and in reflections that complicated our understandings of our place in the world.

Before we departed from Maine, we spent a week on campus learning rudimentary Chichewa, developing language-rich activities to use with children in an after-school program at the rural site, interrogating the discourse of saving Africa popularized by celebrities and journalists, and discussing the lens of Western-based universalism that has done so much harm in Africa. Coming as they did from different class years, different majors, and different ways of thinking about community engagement (from charity to social justice), the students decided they needed a mission statement to guide our work together. They crafted one collectively that emphasized relationships of reciprocity and work that fit with local initiatives. Living our mission was a daily and exhilarating challenge.

During our three weeks in Malawi, we did learn about development at the individual and societal levels. From the moment we arrived in Ntchisi, we were surrounded by children. We witnessed the extraordinary level of child and sibling caregiving that Malawian children experience; we visited schools operated both publicly and privately; some students experienced family life through homestays. At the rural site, we toured farms and spoke to farmers trying to transition from tobacco to coffee. We spoke to women running a support group for HIV-positive people. At the lake, some students painted hospital rooms, while others visited a hospice where they saw a different, more joyous way of easing death than they have seen in the United States. On our last day, we were able to participate in an activity that felt especially reciprocal: we played a local soccer team that had received a challenge: play and beat an American team, for the prize of new uniforms, balls, and FIFA rules. We obliged, losing the match 5-3, after putting in a strong effort.

I am grateful to the Harward Center for awarding me a grant that helped reduce the cost to students of this extra-cost course. No student had to drop out for financial reasons. I am grateful, too, to Ellen Alcorn, for spending the week on campus with us as we crafted language-rich activities to use with children. We put them to use within nanoseconds of disembarking from the van in Ntchisi.

Service and charity are two widely practiced activities among Bates Students, and many students come to Bates with hopes of promoting social justice through such activities. Aditi Vaidya ('00), Sarah Standiford ('97), and I co-instructed a 2014 short term course entitled Social Change Organizing and Advocacy, in which we explored social change work through the lens of power, oppression, and direct action organizing. Rather than limit our tools for social change work to gifts and volunteerism, we examined how the process of organizing power among those people most affected by oppression is a central component to their liberation and the realization of an equitable society.

So that the students could dig into tangible examples of this work, the course included presentations by other practitioners and Bates alumni who have led successful efforts in labor organizing, queer activism, voting rights, gender equity, environmental safety, racial justice, urban redevelopment, and solidarity economics. Each day students were exposed to in-depth case studies of successful social change projects in which each presenter had performed a direct leadership role. Coupled with each case study was a training in a specific skill necessary to implementing successful direct action campaigns. Our guests included Jenna Vendil ('06), Kate Brennan ('01), Matt Schlobohm ('00), Ryan Conrad ('05), Ethan Miller ('00), Amy Halsted ('00), and Ben Chin ('07).

In parallel to these contemporary first-person accounts of direct action organizing, we also examined successful direct action campaigns earlier in US history. We viewed on-the-ground documentary footage of 1960's civil rights sit-ins and compared them with the the die-ins performed by AIDS activists in the 1980's and 90's. We studied the early campaigns to bring about women's suffrage and connected the historical practice of voter disenfranchisement to modern methods of excluding oppressed groups from influencing the legislative process.

Throughout the course, students also worked in groups to develop their own social change campaigns around those issues that inspired them: food justice, public education, affordable housing, and ending sexual violence on the college campus. I believe this experimental short term was a transformative one for many of the participants. It was certainly a moving experience for me, and I am very much looking forward to instructing the course again this coming short term 2015.

In spring of 2014, a group of Bates College faculty and staff began meeting to develop a new General Education Concentration (GEC) related to community and civic engagement. We are pleased to report that the new concentration, Knowledge, Action and the Public Good, was recently approved by the college's Curriculum and Calendar Committee. Its description captures the purpose and range: "This concentration is designed to recognize and cultivate two elements of the college's mission, informed civic action and responsible stewardship of the wider world. The concentration focuses on coursework and other learning experiences related to civic and community engagement at the local, state, regional, national and global levels, as well as exploration of the reciprocal co-creation of knowledge and its role in promoting the public good."

Faculty members from all corners of the college worked together with the staff of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships to come up with the new GEC. Drawing on the college's mission and the array of community engagement happening in our courses across the curriculum, as well as the range of richly reflective co-curricular activity already sponsored by the Harward Center, the concentration aims to help students deepen their understanding of engagement and reciprocity through the connections they will be encouraged to draw across experiences within a variety of departments, programs, and activities.

Students in the concentration will take courses tagged as "Community Engaged Learning" and other approved courses in at least three different departments or programs for a total of four courses. Opportunities for reflection and connection will be offered along the way, with a senior year reflection required as a culminating activity. We are delighted to have this new concentration available as one more avenue to advance community engaged work and recognize its importance to Bates students, faculty, staff, and community partners.