4 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(11/10/16 4:32pm)
Speaking to a packed crowd at Mead Chapel last week, Shaun King, a prominent Black Lives Matter activist and senior justice writer for the New York Daily News, urged students “to make a life-long commitment to justice.”
King said people have an exaggerated view of how progressive they truly are and need to do the hard work to address racism. He encouraged them to see the Black Lives Matter movement in a broad historical context.
“There was the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement and then today,” he said.
The crowd gave King a standing ovation, and after the speech, many students lined up to ask questions. Charles Rainey ’19 asked a question that was met with cheers and applause. Rainey wondered how to pursue activism on a progressive campus where there is a difference between rhetoric and understanding of racism. King answered by sharing a personal story.
“In 2008, I was pastor of a church in Atlanta,” King said. “We had a great board and a lot of board meetings. One day, our best volunteer, she made our church run, she told me that I speak over the women in the board meetings.”
“I felt the need to be defensive,” King continued, “but I trusted her and this made me realize everyone has an exaggerated view of how progressive they truly are. All of us bring our own privilege and biases to the table. But the problem is, we do not address our own biases. Instead, the hard work of addressing racism has been left up to the wrong people. It should not be left up to African Americans to fix racism because it is not African Americans who are enforcing racist practices.”
Rainey said that King’s answer made him think more about some aspects of how to galvanize support for social justice.
“It made me think about how we mobilize,” he said. “Although unity among people of the color is important, we have been missing a huge part of the puzzle according to Shaun King and that is mobilizing white people.”
Stella Boye-Doe ’19 said the talk was a necessary one for the College. “A lot of the time, black students are marginalized with other students of color and it seems as if Middlebury feels like because it has that color already, it doesn’t need to support students once they get into college,” she said. “It is important that Middlebury retain black student populations and makes them feel like they are a part of the community at Middlebury.”
Mead Chapel filled early with students, faculty, staff and town residents; many had to stand in the aisles and in the back of the chapel. The College had a contentious year last year and held three town hall meetings to discuss issues like cultural appropriation, political correctness and inclusivity on campus. Rainey said these conversations are important, but he said he is still waiting for policy changes that will have a stronger effect on campus life.
“I haven’t seen any policy from the administration and student government and we are almost a semester in,” he said. “I want to see administration getting involved and creating an African American studies program on campus, and enrolling more black people and sending recruiters to certain areas where those marginalized groups are found and trying to get them to come to our school.”
Miguel Fernández, professor of Spanish and chief diversity officer of the College, said that encouraging conversation and teaching inclusive pedagogy is the key to a more inclusive campus.
“Having a person like Shaun King, Kimberlé Crenshaw or Ta-Nehisi Coates on campus is such a big event that it will generate a lot of conversation,” he said. “Even students who don’t attend the talk, will hear about it and those that do attend the talk will find out what it is like to be the Other. But this also has to be in the curriculum.”
Fernández says the College needs an inclusive pedagogy that will go beyond the false binary that either underrepresented students need to take on the burden of educating others or that it is the responsibility of other students to learn about underrepresented groups themselves.
“We should be teaching this in classrooms, there should be guidance,” he said.
King’s visit comes at a time when questions of diversity and inclusion have shaken college campuses, including Middlebury College’s. He began his talk by acknowledging the large crowd that had come to hear him speak.
“It is pretty much like this everywhere I speak and it isn’t because of me, it is because of the time,” he said. “People are seeking justice, especially students.”
King said people are seeking justice because they can feel the country is at a critical historical turning point. He showed the audience several videos depicting police brutality and violence at Trump political rallies across the country.
“Today, we are in a steady decline,” he said. “Sometimes human beings are really great and sometimes they are Donald Trump.”
During the talk, King also discussed at length the endorsement of Hillary Clinton by editors of The Atlantic magazine. The magazine has endorsed only two other candidates in its 159-year existence, both in times of national crisis: Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and Lyndon Johnson in 1964, a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
“What was powerful about this was not the endorsement, but their observation that they believed that we are now in one of those times,” he said. “That there was the civil war, there was the civil rights movement, and then there was three weeks ago.”
The Atlantic’s endorsement, the rise in police brutality and the volatile and problematic Trump campaign are all “symptomatic of being in the dip,” King said. “People misinterpret steady improvement of technology with steady improvement of humanity. But if human beings were steadily getting better, how do we explain the Transatlantic Slave Trade, or the Rwandan genocide or the 102 unarmed men, women and children that were shot and killed by police last year?”
Still, King ended the evening on a hopeful note.
“The good news is, any previous time we were in a dip, we always found our way out,” he said. “Human beings found their way out. Your efforts, as young students will lead us out of the dip.”
(03/03/16 2:42am)
Middlebury Women Leaders is a new club on campus founded and run by Jialong Wu ’17.5 and Mariah Levin ’17.5. The club works to empower women and equip them with skills to promote their professional and personal development. Their first workshop, on conflict resolution, will be held on Thursday, March 3, at 4:30 p.m. in McCardell Bicentennial Hall 210. President Laurie L. Patton will host the workshop.
Wu and Levin said they started Middlebury Women Leaders because they wanted to create a space where women could learn to navigate situations in which they were in the minority. They wanted to provide women at the College with the skills they would normally not get in a liberal arts context.
Levin said that existing clubs, such as Feminist Action at Middlebury and the Chellis House, do a “great job” of addressing female inequality and feminist issues. “There’s been no special attention, as far as I know, to leadership skill development. We are just here to fill in the gap,” she said.
Wu and Levin were inspired by life experiences to create this club for the College.
“Last summer, I was working as an investment banking intern and often times, the male interns got more attention even though we were doing the same work,” Wu said. “Usually they got praised and I got ignored.”
Levin attributed her interest in female leadership to a women’s leadership training event she attended in high school.
“I was with a lot of high-powered CEOs,” she said. “I snuck my way in, basically, and they were all talking about these really real inequalities that they saw around them even at their really high-powered positions. Because these were people in high positions, I knew that this was something I could experience, too.”
Although Wu and Levin said that the College does a good job of encouraging female leadership, Wu has noticed specific things in Middlebury classrooms that have revealed the relevance of Middlebury Women Leaders.
“Women students, when they ask questions, will first say ‘You know I am not so sure’ or ‘I am sorry if this isn’t relevant’ or ‘I apologize’ and then they ask the question, whereas men don’t have that problem,” Wu said. “These kinds of things result in people thinking that men should know more than women because they are more confident. So, we want to change that. We want to change how we think about ourselves and how other people think about us.”
The club will hold workshops hosted by women leaders in order to create spaces where Middlebury students can learn tangible skills to use in everyday life.
“Basically all of our events are activity-based where you can get your hands dirty with the subject matter, and I think workshops really lend themselves to that,” Levin said. “The objective is to teach students skills they can apply later.”
“You may walk away with one or two skills that you feel solid about that you may want to apply,” Levin said. “I have taken a couple of workshops and I use skills all the time and I refine them and I have more questions and it is this cool circular process: learning and applying then learning and applying.”
These skills include discussion mediation, negotiation and public speaking. The first workshop, hosted by the College’s president, will focus on conflict resolution skills. President Patton has had national and international training in conflict resolution, especially interfaith conflict resolution. She has led workshops at both Emory University and Duke University and has trained students and department chairs in personal and professional conflict resolution.
“I also think conflict management is a fabulous field in which we can be creative about our solutions. When you are managing or mediating a conflict, you have to think about all the options, not just the ones on the table. And you have to reframe issues so that people can see their way out of the conflict into a livable solution,” Patton said.
Patton decided to get involved with Middlebury Women Leaders to help women find their voice.
“I remember my first presentation in a class my sophomore year in college. It was all graduate students, and I was completely terrified. And it was only after my professor wrote a long, thoughtful response to the things I had argued that I realized that she had literally heard my voice, and heard the points I was trying to make,” she said.
“There’s nothing like that kind of bringing people into their own voices. It’s magical. I am deeply privileged to be able to be in a position to help others with that. I don’t think that women make better leaders than men. But I do think that we are missing out on some fantastic leaders if we let traditional gender conditioning get in our way and don’t take active steps to overcome it. That is true for everyone: women, men, gay, straight, trans, cis and non-cis folks. We all need to find that voice.”
Middlebury Women Leaders will sponsor a variety of hosts for their workshops and each workshop will explore a different category of female leadership.
Rana Abdelhamid ’15, president of Women Initiative for Self-Empowerment (WISE), will also lead a workshop for Middlebury Women Leaders. WISE works to empower young Muslim women through through self-defense classes and leadership training. Abdelhamid will speak about her experience working with WISE and how to empower women through entrepreneurship programming.
Carolyn Finney, assistant professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, will also host a workshop. She will speak on African-American leadership in outdoor activities.
Wu and Levin encourage all students at the College to attend Middlebury Women Leaders workshops, especially those students who wish to strengthen their leadership skills.
“Women have a lot to offer,” Wu said, “and we want people to see this.”
More information on MWL and future workshops can be found online at go/girl.
(02/18/16 1:47am)
On Thursday, Feb. 18th, recent graduate Forest Jarvis ’15 will discuss his research in environmental policy and natural disasters as a Fulbright scholar in the Philippines. Jarvis is one of the growing number of graduates to apply for a fellowship with the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, which funds college graduates and young professionals to study abroad for one year.
Jarvis, who is presenting his research at 12:30 p.m. in the Robert A. Jones ’59 Conference Room, developed an interest in environmental policy while at the College. During his junior year, Jarvis received the Mellon Research Grant and traveled to Bolivia to research environmental policy, where his interests deepened.
“By the time I got to senior year, I realized that I wanted to go into development economics, especially relating to disaster risk management,” Jarvis said.
Jarvis decided to apply for a Fulbright in the Philippines to continue his research after graduating from the College.
“I chose to go to the Philippines because it’s a country I’ve always wanted to visit, and more importantly because it’s unfortunately a really good place to go if you want natural disasters,” he said.
Jarvis is currently working on a project that is searching for the connection between land tenure and vulnerability to natural disasters.
“I’m carrying out surveys in Sorsogon, one of the poorest provinces in the Philippines, to create a household-level disaster vulnerability index, and then compare vulnerability with land tenure and livelihoods.”
Jarvis himself is susceptible to the natural disasters he is researching.
“I also managed to get caught in the middle of a huge typhoon, Typhoon Nona, so my research is looking at preparation and recovery from disasters as they happen.”
Jarvis applied for the Fulbright Study/Research Grant in which a student designs and executes a research project for a specific country, but many Middlebury students also apply to the Fulbright’s ETA (English Teaching Assistant) program.
As the Fulbright website states, the ETA programs place students in schools “overseas to supplement local English language instruction and to provide a native speaker presence in the classrooms.”
Mary Robinson ’14 applied for the ETA program in Poland and was placed in Rzeszów, a small city in the southeast of the country. Robinson applied to the Fulbright to gain teaching experience — she hopes to be a professor one day — but also to get the experience of living abroad. “I considered the Peace Corps and various other grants and fellowships, but ultimately decided on Fulbright because I would get experience teaching and would get to choose which country to apply to.”
Lisa Gates, Associate Dean for Fellowships and Research, says that she has seen the Fulbright become a more popular option for Middlebury graduates.
“I have seen a significant increase in applicant numbers. I have also seen a slight increase in number of ETA applications, so that we are closer to 50/50 in application types,” Gates said.
According to the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the Department of State, the Fulbright program awards approximately 2,000 grants for U.S. undergraduates each year. In the 2014-2015 academic year, Fulbright awarded 12 Middlebury students with grants from the 42 applicants. The grantees receive funding from the U.S. State Department to cover travel costs, room and board and incidental costs. In some countries, grants can be used to fund research or language study. The program is immersive and supportive. Since its founding in 1946, approximately 310,000 “Fulbrighters” have participated in the program. Each students is drawn to the Fulbright for different reasons.
Joseph Flaherty ’15 applied to Fulbright’s ETA program so he could deepen his understanding of Turkey’s culture and history after having studied abroad in Istanbul during the spring of his junior year.
“The Fulbright seemed like a great opportunity to represent the U.S. abroad in a positive way and also to learn more about Turkey and to deepen my interest in the country and the history.”
Flaherty is currently working in Sakarya University, where he has been since late September. He teaches English to university students while simultaneously working on side projects.
“Fulbright encourages students to engage in their communities. So, I have been working on research for my articles.”
Flaherty is interested in journalism and is researching the affects 1999 Earthquake in Sakarya as well as the Ruins of Ani, a medieval Armenian city in the Kars Province. He is hoping to have his articles published while he continues his 10-month journey in Turkey.
Zeke Caceres ’15, also an ETA grantee, spends his time when he is not teaching, volunteering for an NGO in Agadir, Morocco. Caceres works on the NGO’s social media campaign. Caceres was a language enthusiast in high school and at the College and decided to apply to the Fulbright to not only continue practicing his Arabic, but also develop a greater understanding of the complexities of the Middle East.
“I believe in cross-cultural exchange and sharing the diversity of the U.S.,” Caceres said. “I have learned a lot about the U.S.’s diplomatic relations with Morocco during my time here and about the Middle East in general.”
Although each student is completing different projects in different parts of the world, they have all reported feeling welcome in their respective countries and a sense of accomplishment that the work they are doing is meaningful.
Steven Dunmire ’13 is currently working as a 6th grade English teacher in the Boston Public School System. He completed his Fulbright in Villa Hermonsa, Mexico the year after he graduated from the College and speaks highly of his experience.
“I gained so many life experiences,” he said. “I learned Spanish skills, like translating on the fly, and how to rely on myself emotionally and psychologically. I felt so accomplished when I created a functional and viable lesson for my students.”
Dunmire, like most of the College’s Fulbright grantees, loved their Fulbright experience.
“I loved Mexico. I never felt unsafe. It is a beautiful country with an amazing history and I am so happy I got to spend a year of my life living there,” he said.
(01/28/16 12:55am)
On a tall chalkboard wall of one of the completed compost bins, a young North Haven Community School student wrote “Compost haps [sic] the earth.” The community gathered around the bins to admire the work of 10 Middlebury students whose sustainable design build is making waves in the architecture world. In December, their community compost bin project was awarded with the highest honor of the Vermont chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).
“A fine example of community engagement marked by good design and careful attention to the craft of building. The entire process was collaborative and participatory, and the result is beautiful,” remarked the jury on the Vermont AIA board on the project.
These students traveled to Bear Island in Maine last summer to build three compost bins for the North Haven Community School. The College partnered with McLeod Kredell Architects, Marvel Architects, and Island Design Assembly (IDA) for this project. John McLeod of McLeod Kredell Architects is a visiting professor of architecture at the College.
Each year, IDA brings together a team of students, architects and educators for one intensive week to design, build and install a project for an island community in Penobscot Bay, Maine.
IDA works, as their website states, “to bring students and architects together for one week to design, build and install a project for an island community in Penobscot Bay, Maine.” IDA believes in a “self-sufficient and inter-dependent life” and for this reason, holds projects “intentionally on a rugged island an hour’s boat-ride from the mainland, with no running water or utilities, because it strips life down to the essentials.”
IDA works closely with the local community to complete projects designed to enhance the local surroundings. For IDA’s 2015 project, the community requested three compost bins for the North Haven Community School. IDA had a total of eight days and $2,250 to complete the project. The goal was to not only create functional compost bins, but also “easy to use and kid friendly” bins, Kelsey Follansbee ’16.5 said.
When the team arrived on the island, their first step was to visit the site where the bins were to be built. Once they knew where the bins were going to be, they could focus on creating something “functional, but also potentially beautifully sculptural as well,” Morgan Raith ’16.5 said.
Most materials were locally sourced and students worked with community members to transport materials to the island using local lobster fisherman.
The team spent a couple days drawing designs by hand and then formulating construction documents. They even designed benches to encircle the bins so the “compost area could be used as an educational space,” Raith said. The team painted the outside of the three bins with chalkboard paint so the area was “playful and multi-faceted,” Follansbee said.
The 10 Middlebury participants, Emma Picardi ’17.5, Oliver Oglesby ’18, Morgan Burke ’17, Emma Bliska ’18, Raith, Zane Anthony ’16.5, Eliza Margolin ’15.5, Follansbee, Ed Acosta ’18, and Spencer Egan ’15.5, were drawn to the project for different reasons. Raith, an Environmental Science and Architecture double major, “Had had previous experience with a few of the students on the trip and heard great things about the trip.” Follansbee “wanted construction experience.”
Although their motives for joining the project differed, the group shared a sense of accomplishment after their project was complete and they could watch the community enjoy their hard work. Acosta said his favorite part of the trip was “helping the local community” and “creating nice and quick change.”
“I loved the principles of the project: sustainability, community, small-scale, big picture impact,” Raith said.