One cold Friday in November, a classroom in Pettengill Hall was a little more crowded than usual: The students in the First-Year Seminar “Truth” got a visit from older �ֲ���ý students who, last spring, had been instrumental in creating the brand-new course.

One by one, the new �ֲ���ý students introduced themselves and told the visitors what they liked best about their First-Year Seminar, whether it was a reading, film, or discussion topic — materials the older students had helped choose for them.

Watching the scene unfold were the two professors, Alexandre Dauge-Roth and Michael Murray, who had dreamt up the course last year, involved students in its creation, and deployed the course as one of the rare team-taught First-Year Seminars at �ֲ���ý.

Professors Alex Dauge-Roth and Michael Murray touch base before class begins (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

A humanist, Dauge-Roth is a professor of French and francophone studies. A social scientist, Murray is the Charles Franklin Phillips Professor of Economics. Both are among the most popular �ֲ���ý professors, each a recent winner of the Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

The professors listened to their students answer the “favorite material” question. One student offered Auschwitz and After, Charlotte Delbo’s memoirs of her time in a Nazi concentration camp.

Another liked comparing restorative and punitive justice. A third really enjoyed Logicomix, a graphic novel about the effort to establish logical foundations in mathematics. (Least favorite? Probably Nietzsche.)

“The main goal is not to solve the question but more to instill a higher sense of methodological awareness within students when they deal with issues of truth.”

The truth is, the new seminar is less about figuring out what “the truth” actually is and more about exploring methods of discerning and crafting truth — from philosophy to quantum mechanics to post-conflict truth and reconciliation commissions to documentary filmmaking.

Faculty and students — participants and planners — discuss the seminar. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“The value for our students is to go and explore different kinds of disciplines that all produce discourse and theories of truth,” Dauge-Roth says. “The main goal is not to solve the question but more to instill a higher sense of methodological awareness within students when they deal with issues of truth.”

The course got its start last winter as Murray mulled the idea of teaching first-year �ֲ���ý students something about truth.

He recalls thinking how the current climate “is one in which notions of truth are under siege in society.” Perhaps it would be useful, right off the bat, for �ֲ���ý’ newest students to be exposed to “a sophisticated sense of questions about truth.”

He felt comfortable exploring a few methodologies. As an economist, Murray clarifies reality by working with data and, he says, “looking at the relationship of trust to the economic success of societies.” He’s also studied how philosophy and the natural sciences uncover truth.

Students discuss their favorite readings from the seminar. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

One day, after a committee meeting, Murray shared his idea with Dauge-Roth. It was chance, but fortuitous. Dauge-Roth studies memory and collective trauma through literature, film, and documentaries, particularly representations of the Rwandan Genocide.

Dauge-Roth, who incorporates philosophy and sociology into his work, approaches truth in a different way from economists or physicists. He told Murray about Delbo’s Auschwitz and After. The first book of her trilogy opens with the line, “Today I am not sure that what I wrote is true. I am certain it is truthful.”

Murray and Dauge-Roth realized their experiences with economics and natural science on the one hand, and literature, film, and sociology on the other, were in this case complementary. They decided to teach the course together.

In developing the course, the two professors cast a wide net, asking people inside and outside of the �ֲ���ý community to suggest course materials. A �ֲ���ý physics professor brought up an article on theoretical physics by Albert Einstein. The author of a book called Lying directed Murray to a book called Truth.

Last spring, with about twice the material they could possibly pack into a semester, Murray and Dauge-Roth invited eight juniors and seniors, several of whom are double majors across academic divisions, to spend Short Term shaping the syllabus as part of the Short Term Innovative Pedagogy and Course (re)Design program.

A group of �ֲ���ý seniors who helped design the First-Year Seminar ”Truth” listen as the new students taking the seminar tell them what they did and didn’t like about the course. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College) (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The students and their professors read through the material in five weeks, trying to balance the wealth of books and films with other First-Year Seminar needs, such as showing new students how to write academic papers and use the library and other campus resources. The Short Term students “helped us bring down to a manageable level the amount of reading and define an order that is intellectually stimulating,” Dauge-Roth says.

As seminar instructors, Murray and Dauge-Roth teach together, each taking on aspects of the course in which they have expertise. Then, as academic advisers, they help the students identify the aspects of the course that interest them and let their interests guide their academic paths at �ֲ���ý.

“We bring in the physical sciences at a level I feel comfortable talking about, and then say to students who got excited about those ideas, ‘You should take some physics courses,’” Murray says.

In the last weeks of the course, having surveyed the philosophical, scientific, and literary underpinnings of various conceptions of truth, the class finally got to fake news. They read an whether President Donald Trump was a liar or simply a postmodern president, and they watched a 2009 TED Talk in which Nigerian author warns against defining people by a single story.

Murray responds to a student during class discussion. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The talk, Murray says, reminded one student of a particular aspect of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which cave dwellers who have been shown the outside world initially wish to return to the cave, where they are more comfortable but unable to perceive other aspects of reality.

It was a gratifying moment in a course meant to teach the youngest �ֲ���ý students to make connections across centuries, borders, and fields of study, something they’re encouraged to do throughout their academic careers.

“That’s very rewarding, when they are able to make those connections that were absolutely impossible or unthinkable at the beginning of the semester,” Dauge-Roth says.

When Gillian Coyne ’19 of New York City started as a language interpreter at meetings between French-speaking asylum seekers and their potential lawyers, she learned to be prepared for anything.

“You have no idea what sort of case you’re getting, what stage of the process they’re in, where they’re from, what their story is,” she says. “You just have to interpret as you go along.”

She is one of a group of �ֲ���ý French and francophone studies students who volunteer to provide a key service to the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, which gives free and low-cost legal services to new Mainers. Many of ILAP’s clients need language interpreters during those meetings, which are often the start of a lengthy process to gain asylum in the United States.

“Language is fundamental to everything that we do here, in terms of being able to communicate with clients and create a welcoming space,” says Alice Kopij, an ILAP staff attorney who runs the Lewiston office of the Portland-based organization.  

ILAP staff attorney Alice Kopij poses with Gillian Coyne ’19  at the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project office.

But “as a small nonprofit agency, it can be hard to afford language services,” she says. �ֲ���ý students “help us save our resources to provide legal services, but we still get high-quality interpreting.”

While �ֲ���ý students have interned or volunteered with ILAP for years, the partnership with French students began in 2015, when Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies Alexandre Dauge-Roth taught a course called “Borders and Disorders in French and Francophone Literature and Film,” which explored migration and identity in the French-speaking world.

For the course’s Purposeful Work infusion component — in which professors are encouraged to make connections between the course material and the real world — Dauge-Roth invited ILAP executive director Susan Roche to tell the class about the organization’s work.

The students learned that people often come to ILAP for help seeking asylum, a status under which an applicant can stay in the U.S. if they fear persecution in their home country.

In Lewiston, many asylum seekers come from francophone countries like Djibouti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. Some speak very little English; others can understand and speak English but need interpreters to help them grasp complex legal concepts and ensure that their own stories are clear.

Dauge-Roth quickly realized that he had students who could step in. Whether they grew up speaking French, took French courses at �ֲ���ý, or studied in French-speaking countries, they had the requisite language skills.

And francophone studies covers a lot more than the French language. With the French colonial legacy encompassing places in North and West Africa, the Caribbean and North America, francophone cultural production “is a lot about multiple identities, migration, displacement, various forms of racial, economic, and gender inequalities and discrimination,” Dauge-Roth says.

“It’s up to you to be able to relay that story and do it justice.”

Dauge-Roth selected students with the language skills and cultural competency to interpret. At the time, ILAP didn’t have an office in Lewiston; staff attorney Meg Moran traveled to the Lewiston Adult Education Center once a week to consult with asylum seekers. (Moran now works at a legal services firm in Boston.)

Gillian Coyne, who started interpreting during her sophomore year, says she quickly picked up the relevant legal terminology in French and English, but she also came to understand her own power as an interpreter.

“As an interpreter, you are being trusted with someone’s story,” she says. “You’re being trusted with someone’s words in a way that is incredibly intimate and profound and leaves the person who is telling you their story in a vulnerable position.

“That leaves you in a position of incredible power, in a position where you really need to pay attention because this person is telling you all of the horrible things they’ve suffered, what they’ve gone through, any persecution. It’s up to you to be able to relay that story and do it justice.”

Gradually, Coyne and some of her classmates began to do more than interpret. During her junior year, Coyne interned with Berman and Simmons, a Maine law firm that works closely with ILAP.

Asylum seekers have to prove that they fear persecution in their home country due to a protected status like religion or political opinion, and that the government of that country can’t protect them — criteria that require a lot of documentation.

Once ILAP has evaluated an asylum seeker’s case, a staff attorney may represent them through the legal process, or they might be referred to a network of pro bono attorneys, including several at Berman and Simmons.  

“Providing translation services makes clients feel welcome and makes clients feel they can express themselves.”

Coyne and her fellow interns would research the conditions in asylum seekers’ home countries and look for French-language social media posts and news reports that could back up an individual’s claim.

In the meantime, ILAP’s presence in Lewiston has grown. In April, the organization opened a full-time office, with Kopij at the helm, expanding the range of legal services and outreach it can provide.

“Providing translation services makes clients feel welcome and makes clients feel they can express themselves,” Kopij says. �ֲ���ý students, she says, “bring professionalism, confidentiality. I can count on them.”

Through the Purposeful Work internship program, Coyne is working as an intern at the new office. She schedules �ֲ���ý interpreters, provides interpretation at community workshops, and does country research and some paralegal tasks.

Coyne says her internships at Berman and Simmons and ILAP have sparked an interest in law school and strengthened her resolve to work with migrants in the francophone world.

“It’s given me so much more direction on the work environment that I want to find myself in, the type of people that I want to work with in a professional environment, and the people that I want to work with on a more global scale,” she says.

�ֲ���ý has announced faculty promotions, including tenure awards and full professorships, effective for the 2017–18 academic year.

“Our newly tenured and promoted faculty are exemplars of the scholar-teacher-mentor ideal,” said Matthew Auer, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. “They are leaders in their disciplines, deeply engaged in our community, and focused on the success of their students with sincerity and purpose.”

Recommended by the faculty’s Committee on Personnel and approved by the �ֲ���ý College Board of Trustees, the promotions have been awarded to faculty members in the fields of education, French and francophone studies, history, neuroscience, politics, and psychology.

Meet the seven newly promoted professors, learn their research fields, and discover why they teach:

Promotions to associate professor with tenure

+Jason Castro

Jason Castro has been promoted to associate professor of neuroscience at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Caroline Shaw

Caroline Shaw has been promoted to associate professor of history at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Mara Tieken

Mara Tieken has been promoted to associate professor of education at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Promotions to full professor

+Áslaug Ásgeirsdóttir

Áslaug Ásgeirsdóttir has been promoted to professor of politics at �ֲ���ý. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

+Helen Boucher

Helen Boucher has been promoted to professor of psychology at �ֲ���ý. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

+Alex Dauge-Roth

Alex Dauge-Roth has been promoted to professor of French and francophone studies at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Karen Melvin

Karen Melvin has been promoted to professor of history at �ֲ���ý. (Ryan Donnell for �ֲ���ý College)

A professional athlete negotiates a contract extension. A hiker negotiates difficult terrain.

Professor of French and Francophone Studies Alexandre Dauge-Roth is known internationally for his research into the narratives of survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. When he uses the word “negotiate,” he means this:

“For the survivor of genocide or another traumatic experience, the meaning and memory of that experience has an ongoing resonance, or rather a haunting dissonance, that requires constant negotiation, which is triggered by the cultural and political demands that define the present from which the traumatic past is re-envisioned.”

For more than a decade, Dauge-Roth and his students have traveled to Rwanda to interview survivors and hear their stories. This indirect act of “bearing witness,” he explains, is nevertheless a “mutually transformative encounter for both survivor and interlocutor” — one that demands an approach to  testimony as a “social and cultural practice of negotiation.”

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and francophone studies, shown during a class. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

On the one hand, he continues, “survivors negotiate the possibility of having their trauma socially recognized and their present-day demands heard.”

The concept of negotiation “highlights the fact that cultural and existential trauma requires an ongoing and demanding effort.”

On the other, “we — the listening community — must negotiate the historical place, cultural resonance, and political meaning we are willing to give to a highly disturbing experience that embodies the transgression of all ethical norms and the collapse of the social bond.”

In the end, the concept of negotiation “highlights the fact that bearing witness to cultural and existential trauma requires an interruption, a demanding effort to listen, and an ongoing creativity. The meanings of experiences of pain and suffering are confined neither to a past experience nor to survivors alone.”

All testimonial encounters between survivors and their interlocutors engage “multiple views, expectations, trajectories, histories, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and all the relationships of power and knowledge that the cultural negotiation of a traumatic past entails within a mutually shared present.”

Academic disciplines often assign particular and surprising meanings to common words. The series “What I Mean When I Say” explores those meanings.

One thing professor Alexandre Dauge-Roth wants his students to take away from his teaching is a better understanding of how their worldview is shaped by their own position, and how understanding the limitations of that position is central to learning how to read and listen without immediately judging the experiences of others.

When students and scholars gain that awareness, they are able to learn with their subjects, instead of learning about them. When that shift occurs, powerful learning and understanding takes place not just in class, but across a person’s life, Dauge-Roth said.

“Sometimes it takes time for students and for me,” he said. “It’s great when, years later, when we are facing an unfamiliar situation, we are able to mobilize or revisit some of the discussions we had together but didn’t fully appreciate at the time.”

NOTE TO READERS: Alexandre Dauge-Roth’s Kroepsch Lecture, The Transformative Power of Literary and Testimonial Encounters, takes place at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 18, in the Keck Classroom (G52) in Pettengill Hall.

Dauge-Roth’s ability to coach students in this way is one reason why �ֲ���ý has awarded him the 2015 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, which was established in 1985 by a gift from Robert Kroepsch ’33. Nominated by students and alumni, recipients are selected by a committee of previous years’ winners.

Dauge-Roth, an associate professor of French and francophone studies, will give his Kroepsch Lecture on the “the transformative power of literary and testimonial encounters.” The lecture takes place at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 18, in the Keck Classroom (G52) in Pettengill Hall.

“What we are learning here is, how do you establish communication or dialogue with people who are telling you their stories when you really cannot fully comprehend what their story is?” Dauge-Roth said. “The exchange of knowledge is not about acquisition but the genuine development of a self-critical understanding of the limits of your own ability to truly hear people with whom you share a common space but cannot identify.”

Dauge-Roth has taken students to Rwanda during Short Term to hear first-person accounts of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and to create collaborative short documentaries with survivors. The fact that he is able to tackle such weighty issues through courses in French and francophone studies is not lost on his current and former students.

“He pushes me to places I didn’t know I could go, academically and emotionally,” said Brenna Callahan ’15 of Milton, Massachusetts. “He makes events from the last century that happened on the other side of the world affect my life on a daily basis … What’s most impressive is that he does all of this while studying and talking about genocide.”

Dauge-Roth was born in Switzerland and came to the United States in 1993 through an exchange program with the University of Michigan, where he earned his doctorate in French literature. He came to �ֲ���ý in 2005 after stints as a visiting professor at both Colby and Bowdoin.

Dauge-Roth said he is drawn to the study of social dynamics and polemical tensions between collective memory and personal trauma because doing so forces him to question and explore his personal role in redefining the cultural and social awareness of experiences and voices that are too often silenced.

‘He pushes me to places I didn’t know I could go’

“The more I began to work on this body of literature, the more I began to question, what is our role as people who have not gone through these experiences?” he said. “What is our ethical and social responsibility in relationship to people who have survived genocide or the AIDS pandemic?”

Winning the 2015 Kroepsch Award is humbling given the great faculty at �ֲ���ý, he said. It’s also validating to be nominated by former students.

“Teaching is a bit of a black box because you don’t know exactly how your teaching is received by students,” he said. Winning the Kroepsch Award reaffirms that “there is a long-term effect between what we talked about, the conversations we had in class and how former students are using the questions we discussed in their daily lives and development.”

In Dauge-Roth’s classroom, “listening, empathy and compassion become crucially academic in a way that is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally and personally awakening,” said Cody Tracey ’15 of Baltimore. “Tenderness and care are two of my most preferred attributes in a mentor or a professor, and I owe a lot of thanks to Alex for that realization.”

April marks the 20th anniversary of this genocide in Rwanda, three months of violence in which Hutu extremists killed as many as 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutus.

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and Francophone studies, is an expert in the literary, cinematic and testimonial representations of the 1994 genocide.

�ֲ���ý students visit the Murabi Genocide Memorial site in 2009 as part of Alex Dauge-Roth’s Short Term course “Learning with Orphans of the Rwandan Genocide.” The sign refers to the French soldiers who created a volleyball pitch amidst mass graves during their occupation in June 1994. More than 50,000 people were massacred at the site.

He was invited to take part in two commemorative events last week organized by Bene-Rwanda, the Rwandan diaspora association in Italy. The events were part of “Kwibuka 20” — “We need to remember” — a commemoration based in the Rwandan capital of Kigali with satellite events around the world.

Dauge-Roth explains the events of 1994 and what is at stake for Rwanda moving forward.

1. What was the immediate impact of the genocide on life in Rwanda?

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, professor of French and Francophone studies.

The genocide killed more than two-thirds of the Tutsi living in Rwanda, close to 20 percent of the entire population and saw another 20 percent flee to the current Republic Democratic of Congo. In July 1994, the country was a field of ruins and chaos: No institutions had been spared. Suspicion and hatred prevailed among the two major segments of the population. Grief and trauma were palpable in everyone. The social cohesion of the country was in pieces, and everything had to be rebuilt from zero.

2. How did Rwanda move on after that?

The first priorities were national security, the rebuilding of the institutions, establishing peace in order to attract investments — and, of course, finding a way to implement justice to try the hundreds of thousands of people suspected to have taken part in the genocide.

The ethnic labels “Tutsi,” “Hutu” and “Twa” were banned from official government documents, and a nationalistic discourse arose to transcend ethnic divisions.

Moving quickly away from a punitive conception of justice to a form of transitional or restorative justice, the Rwandan government established in 2001 the gacaca courts. These courts heard 1.4 million cases in a span of 10 years.

�ֲ���ý students interact with local youth outside a bar in Nyamata during a visit in May 2013. For Dauge-Roth, the photo “signifies the global connectedness of Rwanda, where 60 percent of of the population has a cell phone and every young person has a Facebook page.”

3. How successful have these efforts been?

Needless to say, not everything has been achieved and nothing is perfect in Rwanda today — as is the case in any country, African or not. The current president, Paul Kagame, must step down in three years at the end of his second term. It remains to be seen if Rwanda’s institutions and the social fabric of the country will be strong enough to ensure a peaceful political transition.

Among the challenges are Rwanda’s distribution of wealth and demographic trends: The population has doubled in 20 years, and land and resources are scarce.

In the long term, though, the biggest issue will be to see how the generation born after the genocide — more than 50 percent of the current population — will embrace the newly coined national identity and whether they refuse to revive ethnic categories and hatred for political gain.

4. Tell us about your involvement with the commemoration events in Italy.

My talk in Rome focused on the numerous political and personal challenges survivors face when voicing their experiences. Their testimonies are an attempt to gain social recognition for their past sufferings and present needs.

In addition to a roundtable on the tensions between personal and collective memory in post-genocide Rwanda, I also led a pedagogical workshop in Genoa, where I presented the value of learning with survivors of the genocide against the Tutsi when teaching courses on this genocide and the current national reunification process.

5. What other projects on Rwanda do you have planned?

With French colleagues, I am organizing a three-day international conference and a film cycle in Paris this November themed “Rwanda 1994–2014: Memory Constructs and the Writing of History Twenty Years After the Genocide.”

My current book project, Who Speaks Behind the Archive? Personal and National Reconciliation in Rwanda, focuses on the cinematic and documentary representations of the reconciliation process in Rwanda.

6. Are you planning to teach your travel Short Term “Learning with Orphans of the Genocide in Rwanda” in the near future?

I plan to go back with students in 2016, before Rwanda’s presidential elections in 2017.

In the meantime, I will teach a new version of the course “Documenting the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda” this fall, with a special focus on how the current politics of national reunification and the gacaca transitional justice have shaped representations of the genocide.

An image from the 2009 �ֲ���ý visit to Rwanda for the course “Learning with the Orphans of the Rwanda Genocide.”

In its story about teaching genocide, International Educator features the �ֲ���ý course “Learning with Orphans of the Rwandan Genocide,” taught by Associate Professor of French Alex Dauge-Roth.

Writer Dana Wilkie frames the challenge of teaching genocide this way: “How does a university program…address the power of political regimes and demagogues bent on inciting the sort of hatred that leads one people to commit atrocities against another?”

Dauge-Roth, who conducts ongoing research in Rwanda and directs the nonprofit , offers an answer by first noting that “we all have defenses that allow us to intellectualize” horrific acts like genocide.

“But when there’s more intimate proximity with the human effects of genocide, the way you relate to such events shifts radically,” he says.

In the case of Dauge-Roth’s course, he and students travel to Rwanda, where students partner with orphans of the 1994 genocide to create oral histories and other documentary resources.

Achieving this kind of “intimate proximity” (which is the title of the article), creates “ways to move on and to create connections and dialogues” to prevent future genocide.

• View story about Dauge-Roth’s course in �ֲ���ý Magazine, Fall 2009.

“If I wasn’t teaching this course, I wouldn’t have the time to investigate energy issues on the same level,” says Josh Henry, visiting assistant professor of chemistry at �ֲ���ý.

“It’s a topic that’s been important to me since I was a little kid. But it’s such a vast problem — it encompasses economic, social, political factors, as well as fields like geology, biology, chemistry.”

Henry can pursue his investigations through a new course he designed, “Energy and Sustainability,” thanks to �ֲ���ý’ Short Term. This five-week spring semester differs from the fall and winter terms in that students choose just one intensive course from a . This format is amenable to all kinds of academic experimentation, but one of its most desirable qualities is the precious time it affords for sustained concentration.

For lab work in “Energy and Sustainability,” Henry has had his students create biodiesel fuel and build an electricity-producing windmill that they tested during an overnight visit to the �ֲ���ý-Morse Mountain Conservation Area.

In fact, extended field trips are another bonus of the Short Term format. Henry’s class has also visited a trash-to-energy incinerator in Westbrook, New Hampshire’s Seabrook nuclear power plant and Maine’s first wind farm, in the northern town of Mars Hill.

Like Henry, Lecturer in Biology Sonya Kahlenberg has found in Short Term a chance to teach from a profound interest. She is an expert in primate ecology and behavior whose research has included eight years in Uganda studying chimpanzees. Her Short Term course, “Conserving the Great Apes,” affirms the urgent need to protect chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos — all species endangered by human activity.

Kahlenberg’s course explains these primates’ distinctive biological circumstances — for instance, slow reproductive rates that compound the human threat to their survival — and she involves her students in efforts to protect the great apes.

Her very first lecture laid out specific reasons for saving these animals. For instance, they play important roles in their ecosystems, such as being the only means by which certain plant seeds are dispersed. And, Kahlenberg notes, “there are moral reasons.”

“They’re our closest living relatives . . . and we’re finding glimmers of human-style intelligence in apes,” she says. “The longer we study great apes, the more we’re seeing that they actually have cultures,” in the sense that distinct groups of apes often behave in ways unique to their group.

The list of Short Term courses that reflect exigent issues goes on:

• Alexandre Dauge-Roth, assistant professor of French, brought students to Rwanda to perform an oral history project with orphans of the 1994 genocide.

• Kimberly Simmons, visiting assistant professor of sociology, is teaching the new course “Social Diversity and Social Justice,” whose students learn about diverse cultural identities by performing a social justice action project.

• In “Immigrant Rights Theory and Practice,” another new offering, Visiting Instructor in Politics Leila Kawar asks students to explore the empowerment of immigrants through, among other means, a Maine-based service-learning project.

And then there are the courses that are, in a sense, timeless. One of these marks its 20th anniversary as a Short Term course this year: “Principles and Applications of Accounting,” taught since its inception by Lecturer in Economics Barry Farber.

The course is one of those that sees the world in terms of black and white — or is it black and red, as in ink? That is, there are accepted methods and standards that don’t change and aren’t subject to interpretation or argument, explains Christine Roemer ’10.

Roemer is a psych major and economics minor taking the course for a specific reason: She has a Ladd Internship at an investment bank in Boston this summer, and needs to be able to understand financial statements.

In typical �ֲ���ý fashion, Farber wants his students to grasp the fundamentals before allowing them to take advantage of computerized accounting. “We don’t use computers at all, so it’s really all hand-written,” Roemer explains.

“If I’d taken it during the regular semester, I think I would have felt overwhelmed,” she adds. “It’s nice to be able to dedicate however much time I need to it, without other classes getting in the way.”

– Doug Hubley, Office of Communications and Media Relations

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, an assistant professor of French at �ֲ���ý College, is one of three Maine college professors to receive a 2009 Maine Campus Compact award for infusing public service and civic engagement into their teaching. Dauge-Roth will receive a Donald Harward Faculty Award for Service-Learning Excellence in the Maine Campus Compact’s eighth annual faculty and student awards ceremony April 16  at the Maine State Museum.
Dauge-Roth researches the Rwandan genocide of 1994, exploring personal, literary and film narratives created since Hutu extremists massacred as many as a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu. In the four years since he came to �ֲ���ý, Dauge-Roth has fostered a correspondence between �ֲ���ý students and survivors of the genocide.

During a 2006 trip to Rwanda, he established a network of genocide survivors who have corresponded in French with students in his seminar “Documenting the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda” to document survivors’ stories.

In 2007, Dauge-Roth’s students created the organization “�ֲ���ý Students for Peace in Rwanda,” which received a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace award to support a home for street children in Rwanda. Also in 2007, Dauge-Roth assembled an international conference that brought scholars, human-rights advocates and genocide survivors to �ֲ���ý to discuss the 1994 events.

Of his research into the narratives created by genocide survivors, Dauge-Roth says that “I’m examining how these authors use an aesthetic of haunting. These testimonies and documentaries find ways to haunt the reader and the viewer, so that we cannot go back to our usual business and forget about it.”

He adds, “I hope students will reflect on what it means to listen to a survivor. There’s a lot to learn from them about the ability to struggle and to live on despite horrific loss.”

In May, during �ֲ���ý’ five-week Short Term, Dauge-Roth will take 13 students to Rwanda for three weeks to conduct an oral history project with members of “reconstituted families” — families made up of genocide survivors who lost their siblings and parents. One such orphan is elected as the head of the household and acts like a parental figure for the others.

The MCC’s Harward Award this year recognizes three Maine faculty members who have made public service an integral part of their teaching and have successfully advocated for civic engagement. In addition to Dauge-Roth, they are Christina Bechstein of the Maine College of Art and Nancy Ross of Unity College.

The award was named for Donald W. Harward, who retired as the sixth president of �ֲ���ý College in 2002. Harward championed service-learning and other programs designed to make �ֲ���ý a more active and valuable partner in the community life of Lewiston and Auburn. He is a founding president of Maine Campus Compact and former member of the board of directors of Campus Compact at the national level.

The Maine Campus Compact is a statewide coalition of college and university presidents established to encourage and enhance campus engagement in the community. The student Heart and Soul Award and the Donald Harward Faculty Award are presented annually.

�ֲ���ý commemorates the 14th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda with a screening of a new documentary film by genocide survivor Gilbert Ndahayo at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 14, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

The event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact Assistant Professor of French Alexandre Dauge-Roth, the event’s organizer, at 207-786-6281 or this adaugero@bates.edu.

Ndahayo’s film Behind This Convent explores both the efforts of genocide survivors to find the remains of their loved ones and the implementation of justice in post-genocide Rwanda. A question-and-answer session with Ndahayo follows the screening. The Rev. Bill Blaine-Wallace, �ֲ���ý’ multifaith chaplain, and members of the organization �ֲ���ý Students for Peace in Rwanda will also take part in the event.

Ndahayo, a director and actor, recently completed the hourlong Behind This Convent, which documents his quest to learn how his parents died during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He was only 13 years old when his parents, his young sister and some 200 others were murdered in his home garden during the genocide, in which up to a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were massacred by Hutu extremists.

The film examines the process of justice and reconciliation that still continues in Rwanda more than a decade after the genocide. “I do not want to make a mistake about how I entered into the cinematic world,” Ndahayo told the Rwandan newspaper New Times in February. “Genocide took place in my country and this has created me as I am now.”

He said, “My film career is partly to explore the horizons of storytelling as well as the power of healing that only a filmmaker can discover.”

“Ndahayo provides a unique perspective,” says Dauge-Roth, who invited the Rwandan to participate in the latest of a series of �ֲ���ý events related to the tragedy. In his filmmaking, Ndahayo has had to bring objectivity to a profoundly personal and traumatic event.

“He can speak as both a survivor and a documentary maker who has thought critically about the challenges in conveying this story, especially as he meets the people who killed his family.”

Ndahayo’s filmmaking career began with a 2005 training program. Since then he has directed, produced and acted in a variety of topical film projects including Scars of Silver, My Graduation Day and his first film, the autobiographical Scars of My Days, which was presented at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival to an audience that included former President Bill Clinton and Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

In residency at �ֲ���ý May 14-16, during �ֲ���ý’ five-week Short Term, Ndahayo will also speak to students in Dauge-Roth’s course “Social Pulse, Documentary Impulse.”

“He will discuss the difficulty of making a documentary about a past event for which there is pretty much no filmed archive available,” Dauge-Roth explains. “Also, he’ll discuss how he chose to construct a cinematic representation about the process of national reconciliation in today’s Rwanda — a theme far less documented than the genocide itself.”