Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher offers the keynote address at the education symposium on April 8.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ education department hosts a symposium comprising student presentations followed by a keynote address beginning at 3 p.m. Wednesday, April 8, on the second floor of Commons, 136 Central Ave.

The event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact cmoran@bates.edu.

The keynote speaker is Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, who will present an address titled Understanding Religiosity Across Scales: Muslim Youth, Education and Identity in a Transitional World. She speaks at 5:30 p.m. in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

The symposium begin with presentations by students from the education department. Many of the students will be presenting research they have conducted as a part of the interdisciplinary course African Perspectives on Justice, Human Rights and Renewal.

This collaborative course is taught by a team of professors and guest speakers, and examines the discourses surrounding a range of contemporary issues in Africa from race and gender to environment and culture.

Ghaffar-Kucher earned her doctorate in international education development from Teachers College, Columbia University, and she is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on the educational experiences of immigrant youth in the U.S. and on education policies in predominantly Muslim countries.

Ghaffar-Kucher’s work has received many accolades: Her writings on Afghan refugees made the reading list for the Clinton Global Initiative in 2009, and she has been recognized several times by the Council on Anthropology and Education.

Brenna Callahan ’15 inspires a love of reading in young Montello School students with Project Story Boost.

Brenna Callahan works with a rising fifth grader at Montello School. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Name: Brenna Callahan

Hometown: Milton, Mass.

Major: Interdisciplinary studies, with a focus on education

Internship sponsor: Harward Center Summer Community Work-Study Fellowship.

1. What is Project Story Boost?

Basically, it’s an early literacy intervention program. We work one-on-one with kindergarteners, first- and second-graders in a comfortable environment. We want to replicate a nighttime reading session with parents, a setting where the kids can feel relaxed and develop a love of literacy with a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student — develop that relationship and read some great books. I started working at Montello in 2013.

2. School’s out, what do you do for the project during the summer?

During the school year, as a Student Volunteer Fellow I recruited and trained ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student volunteers, and worked one-on-one with Montello students. This summer I’ve been working with a summer class unrelated to Project Story Boost, but also looking at Project Story Boost’s evaluation program, redesigning and refining it to make sure we’re getting the information we want.

3. Tell me about that information.

We’re entering the data we collected over the entire school year after every single student session. After a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student reads with a Montello student, the volunteer fills out a form that tracks the Montello student’s behavior, which book they were reading, how responsive they were and what kinds of questions they asked.

This summer we’re inputting all the data to see if there any trends based on the level of book the pupil read. Then we’re going to take a step back and look at the evaluation forms to see if there are different questions we want to ask to solicit new information.

4. What specific details did you focus on?

We’re trying to see if there are changes over time — if a child’s behavior is different at the beginning of a semester than at the end, if they’re understanding more of the story at the end of the semester than at the beginning. We’re looking for concrete changes that show that the program’s making a difference.

5. What do you like about this work?

I love working in the schools, it’s my favorite environment to work with kids. I’m a very structured person, and schools give me that structure. I’ve never worked with such young kids before, that was something new for me — I love it. I love getting to see Montello students experience the same books that I loved reading as a child.

6. Do they have ?

They do! There are some good ones in there, like .

7. How does Project Story Boost relate to your studies at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ or your career plans?

I know I want to go into education, but I don’t know exactly how I want to do it yet. I don’t know if I want to do curriculum development, if I want to write books, work one-on-one with students or work in the classroom. Getting into the Lewiston schools has been a great opportunity to explore the different career paths I may want to pursue. I’ve gotten to try a variety of things, which has been really eye-opening. I’ve been very lucky to have these opportunities.

8. Any thoughts on how your liberal arts education impacted your experience?

One thing that I’ve loved about my ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ experience is that I’m an interdisciplinary major. I’ve been able to combine classes in education, sociology, psychology and politics, see the connections and see how it plays out in the real world.

9. Do you have any concluding thoughts you’d like to share?

Lewiston is the reason I came to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. Through the Harward Center and through Project Story Boost I’ve been able to take advantage of that, to live in this community and be a part of it in a way I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. It’s my favorite part of going to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

I’m really excited to be here for the summer, and to be a part of the community 12 months out of the year, to work with these kids and develop meaningful relationships. They’ve grown, and that’s really fun to see.

Alex Bolden ’15 of Cleveland, Ohio, prepares a group of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ artists for the annual student Sankofa performance on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

The college’s 2013 MLK Day observance, with the theme “Debt and Inequality: The Relevance of King’s Forgotten Economic Message,” is Sunday, Jan. 20, and Monday, Jan. 21.

An analyst from the National Security Archive and scholars from Duke and New York universities take part in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College symposium Latin American Revolutions in afternoon and evening sessions on Wednesday and Thursday, March 9 and 10.

Hosted by the Latin American studies faculty, with support from the Mellon Innovation Fund, the symposium is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-8295.

Sibylle Fischer, associate professor and chair of the Spanish and Portuguese department at New York University, offers the lecture Haiti and the Revolutions in Spanish America at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday, March 9, in Room 204, Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave.

At 7:30 p.m. that day, Jocelyn Olcott, associate professor of history at Duke University, gives a talk titled Soldiers, Suffragists and Sex Radicals: Women, Gender and the Mexican Revolution, also in Carnegie 204.

Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive who directs the archive’s Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects, presents the lecture The Cuban Revolution: 50 Years of Bedeviling U.S. Foreign Policy at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, March 10, in the Keck Classroom (G52) in Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

Concluding the symposium is a roundtable discussion with the three guest speakers on the theme Latin America’s Many Revolutions at 7:30 p.m. that day, also in the Keck Classroom.

Fischer’s scholarship covers, among other areas, Caribbean and Latin American literatures in Spanish, Portuguese and French; 19th-century culture and politics; the intersections of literature, dictatorship and philosophy; and the Black Atlantic.

Olcott researches the feminist history of modern Mexico. Her first book, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Duke University Press, 2005) explores questions of gender and citizenship in the 1930s. She is also a co-editor of “Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico” (Duke University Press, 2006).

Olcott is working on two book-length projects: a history of the 1975 UN International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City, under contract with Oxford University Press; and a biography of the activist and folksinger Concha Michel. She is also developing a long-term project on the labor, political and conceptual history of motherhood in 20th-century Mexico.

The National Security Archive is an independent, nongovernmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University. Kornbluh was co-director of the Iran-Contra documentation project and director of the archive’s project on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. Through the 1990s, he taught at Columbia University as an adjunct assistant professor of international and public affairs.

He is the author, editor or co-editor of several National Security Archive books, including Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (The New Press, 1998) and The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (The New Press, 2004), which the Los Angeles Times selected as a “best book of the year.”

Kornbluh’s articles have been published in Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and many other journals and newspapers. He has appeared on national broadcasts including 60 Minutes, The Charlie Rose Show, Nightline, All Things Considered and Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He has also worked on and appeared in numerous documentary films, including the Oscar-winning Panama Deception.

The National Science Foundation has awarded $619,000 to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College and two other Maine schools to continue a long-term study of the relationship among climate, the environment and human activity in the Shetland Islands, northeast of Scotland.

The three-year grant supports the Shetland Islands Climate and Settlement Project, an international multidisciplinary exploration of a period and place in history where “the sands of time” became more than just a cliche. The project is examining climate changes, dramatic transformations of northern coastal environments and ways that people have adapted to these crises — and sometimes contributed to them.
With ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ the lead recipient, the University of Maine and the University of Southern Maine are collaborators in the grant.

Encroaching sand

Late in the 17th century, a slow-motion nightmare struck a farming settlement on Mainland, the largest island in the Shetland archipelago. Over a period of years, sand blown from a nearby beach — possibly driven by storms of historic force during the so-called Little Ice Age, a period of a colder climate — buried farms in a township called Broo.

What happened there three centuries ago remains relevant today, says Gerald Bigelow, a visiting professor of history at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and the leader of the research, especially because many of the world’s coastlines are likely to experience significant impacts from ongoing climate change.

“We’re very interested in the role that climate change may have played in this disaster,” he says. “Probably it was a combination of factors that led to it, but it’s possible that human land use made that area more vulnerable to climate-related events.”

Focused on an archaeological dig at a former farm that may have belonged to one of the island’s richest families before the sand came, an international team of experts and students hopes to better understand the circumstances that drove the residents of Broo out of their homes. Today the site is a vast sheep pasture, with a thin layer of grass and topsoil over sand that’s more than six feet deep in places.

“It looks pretty grim when you see that people built little stairs to climb out of their dwelling” as the sand deepened around it, says Bigelow.

Coming from four U.S. and four U.K. schools, the team includes archaeologists, historians, geoscientists, biologists and experts in spatial analysis. With no comprehensive historical narratives to turn to, they are looking instead to a wide diversity of sources — from documentary records to the analysis of lakebed core samples that can reveal climate history — to piece together the story of this battle between sand and farmers.

Bigelow explains that a key purpose of the project is to serve as a case study in the archaeology of disasters. “What’s exciting about this project is being able to see these scenarios of real stress — and then human adaptation to that stress over fairly short periods of time.

“You get a better understanding of the role those experiences play in the way people plan for the future.”

Collaboration, inward and outward

The project reflects ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ deep commitment to collaboration, both across disciplinary boundaries and with other institutions. With Bigelow, who also teaches at USM, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ contingent consists of a biologist, William Ambrose; two geologists, Beverly Johnson and Michael Retelle; and historian Michael Jones.

In addition to the Maine universities, the other schools taking part in the overall research are CUNY Brooklyn College in the United States, and the University of Stirling, University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow and University of Bradford in the United Kingdom.

The project affords a wealth of experience to the students involved. “This type of multidisciplinary work is what it takes to understand the complex interactions between societies and their environments,” Bigelow says.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students will travel to Broo in 2011 and 2012 during the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Short Term, an immersive five-week spring semester in which students focus on a single course. In addition to undergrads and graduate students from participating institutions, primary school students on Shetland have already been involved in the work, and Bigelow hopes to bring in Maine pupils.

What mental health issues affect child refugees? How can physicians in Maine treat diseases typically found in Africa? What cultural barriers come between refugees from Africa and their American healthcare providers?

These are among topics at issue Oct. 15-17 as ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College hosts African Refugee Health: Best Practices, a regional conference also sponsored by, and presenting from, St. Mary’s Health System and the Central Maine Medical Family in Lewiston, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Following a poster presentation of public health research, conference registration begins at 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 15, on the ground floor of the college’s Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk). The keynote presentations (see below) and a are open to the public at no cost, but advance tickets are required.

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Attendance fees for the conference workshops vary, but undergraduate students and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty may attend at no cost and scholarships are available for African attendees. To register for the paid presentations, to obtain tickets for free events or to learn more, visit or contact Brenda Pelletier at this bpelleti@bates.edu.

Offering keynote presentations at 6:30 p.m. Friday are Dr. Patricia Walker, medical director at HealthPartners Center for International Health in Minnesota and co-editor of the pioneering textbook Immigrant Medicine; and Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, which handles refugee health at the federal level.

Closing the conference with a keynote address at 11 a.m. Sunday is Dr. Richard Mollica, director of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma and author of Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World.

The public events take place in the Olin Arts Center at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, 75 Russell St. Presenting research in health, public health and medicine, the poster session precedes the conference at 4 p.m. on the 15th in Perry Atrium, Pettengill Hall.

Conference background

The conference’s nearly three dozen presenters include healthcare workers from across the country and beyond; faculty in diverse disciplines from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and other colleges; and interpreters, social workers, counselors and other experts in breaching cultural factors that impede refugee access to healthcare. (See bios of conference presenters.)

The roster is “unique in that we’ve tapped the expertise of the population we are trying to serve by recruiting African healthcare providers and refugees” as presenters, explains Dr. Alice Haines, a conference organizer. A primary care physician in Lewiston, Haines has worked with African patients here and at a refugee camp in Daadab, Kenya, that hosts hundreds of thousands of mostly Somali refugees.

She adds, “We’re pleased to partner with CDC for this event, and hope it will provide tools to help clinicians and public health professionals better serve refugees in their communities.”

The conference also stands out because it will provide both clinical and public health perspectives on the issue of refugee healthcare. “The physicians alone, the nurses alone, the anthropologists and public-health people alone can’t do this,” says ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ psychology professor Kathryn Low, another conference organizer.

“It takes everybody to solve the problem” of providing healthcare to people who are poor, may not speak or read English and who remain unaccustomed to Western medicine and society.

Haines and Low put the event together with Walker, an internationally recognized expert on refugee and immigrant healthcare. The three “wanted to add to the understanding of the distinctive medical and mental health needs of African refugees,” says Haines, “and celebrate the knowledge and effort amassed in Maine, particularly in Lewiston and Auburn,” over years of African settlement in the state.

The mechanisms of healthcare for immigrants and refugees “have had to be invented as we go along,” she says. “I think this community has done pretty well at welcoming them.”

Public health in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ curriculum

Low is the coordinator of the college’s new general-education concentration in public health, which ranges across the disciplines from anthropology and biology to politics and women and gender studies. Reflecting the college’s ethos of community engagement, the concentration is distinctive for an institution of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ size and, with its emphasis on local engagement, unique among the college’s peers in New England.

Public health as taught at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ “has a very strong social justice piece,” Low says. “People shouldn’t face obstacles to getting care.”

The Maine Community Foundation and the Office of Minority Health at the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention are also providing support for the conference.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, we know that we must cultivate future scientists from a wide range of backgrounds in order to flourish in a diverse and complex world in which science and technology play a pivotal role.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Summer Scholars Program is an accelerated introduction to the sciences and mathematics at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. Open to 10 entering first-year students who demonstrate an interest in these areas, the six-week program seeks to build a community of scholars from among a diverse group of incoming first-years, including first-generation college students and students from groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences and mathematics. Watch a short video about the 2010 program.

Two ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College seniors were chosen by the Council on Undergraduate Research to present work in Washington, D.C., during the organization’s annual event, in April.

Both interdisciplinary studies majors, the students are Mariam Alam of Greenwich, Conn., and Natalie Brown of Baltimore, Md. They were among 75 undergraduates from more than 50 colleges and universities selected to take part in the council’s two-day gathering, which honors the participants’ achievements and serves to remind Congress of the importance of funding for undergraduate research.

Alam, whose major focuses on public health, presented research conducted with Maine’s Somali immigrant community that tested the effectiveness of pictograms for conveying medical information to non-English speakers.

Majoring in the politics of education, Brown presented work that examines the best methods for creating equal access to quality education, with an emphasis on fostering voice and political agency in students. (For abstracts of the students’ work, do a browser search on their names here.)

More than 300 students submitted abstracts of their work for consideration by the CUR. “It’s rare enough for a college to get one student selected in a year,” said Pamela Baker, professor of biology and director of faculty research and scholarship at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. “To get two is extraordinary.”

One other Maine institution, the University of New England, was represented at the gathering.

The Posters on the Hill program included a poster session and meetings with members of Congress or their staff. Both students praised the evening poster session, which gave them a chance to explain their research in depth.

“I got the chance to speak with someone from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is relevant to my research, as well as a cartographer who had great insight on the perception of imagery and a representative from the Association of American Colleges and Universities,” Alam says.

She adds, “It was exciting to see what undergraduates at other schools have been researching and to talk to them about the research process.”

Brown agrees. “I had people chatting with me for half an hour about my topic and how it related to what they were doing at their jobs.”

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students met with congressional staff from both Maine and their home states, and Brown also met face-to-face with Maine congressman Michael Michaud.

CUR’s ultimate goal for the gathering is to show the flag for undergraduate research as Congress makes funding decisions.

“It’s important that students meet with the senators and reps,” Brown says, “because they’ll get to see what the next generation is thinking about and looking at, and why.”

The Council on Undergraduate Research, founded in 1978, is a national organization supporting and promoting high-quality research and scholarship collaborations between faculty and undergraduates. The council is a grassroots organization, funded by dues paid by colleges and comprehensive universities.

The ceremony beginning ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ 144th academic year on Sept. 9 took place on a choice afternoon, sunny and mild, and explored in depth the concept of choice — no small issue for 470 first-year students confronted with new freedom to make their own choices. (.)

“This is just the beginning of a long lifetime of making choices,” college President Elaine Tuttle Hansen said. Quoting Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling, she said, “It is our choices that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

She pointed out to the new students that a traditional residential undergraduate college like ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is an accommodating arena for learning to make good choices — affording “the time, the space and the resources to explore lots of options,” as well as some buffering against the consequences of bad decisions.

If our choices show who we truly are, Hansen suggested, the new students might aspire to become “liberated consumers.” In contrast to the rampant infantilized consumption described by political theorist Benjamin Barber in the book , Hansen depicted the liberated consumer as one “who does not think he is free of the necessity of consuming — she is maybe even someone who likes to shop — but does not succumb to the pressure to consume mindlessly.”

She continued, “As individuals, it’s necessary and quite seductive to be focused on our personal consumption and our private choices. But as a society we know we must somehow make better collective, public, social choices about what and how we consume.”

“Somehow,” but how? Hansen offered: valuing complexity, participation, commitment, real human relationships and deep focus on the challenges at hand.

Hansen’s theme harmonized with the college’s efforts, intensified this decade, to come closer to environmental sustainability, exemplified by this summer’s charge to the new students to advocate for curtailing climate change. But Hansen ultimately steered back to an idea that could be as relevant to residential life as to global responsibility.

She brought up the famous psychology test called the Marshmallow Experiment, in which young children are given the choice of having one sweet treat right away or having two if they can wait a while for it.

Referencing an article about the experiment in the , Hansen explained that kids who can wait tend to be more successful as adults than the immediate gratifiers. The same self-control that enables them to wait for the treat, it turns out, translates into myriad practices and habits that cultivate adult success.

Noting that disciplined decision-making is as important to institutions as to individuals, Hansen segued to the topic in store for the featured convocation speakers: brief updates on the latest phase of the collaborative ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ planning process that began two years ago.

Each speaker was involved with a team developing recommendations for the college in a particular area. Leslie Hill, associate professor of politics and special assistant to the president for diversity initiatives, spoke first. Her team developed recommendations for the college on the theme of Learning at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Reminding listeners that “learning is what ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is all about,” Hill wove together imperatives to deepen ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ intellectual community; use its tangible and intellectual resources wisely; and embrace diversity as something that needs to be enhanced at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and something that will enhance ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ commitment to excellence drives its commitment to diversity, Hill explained. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ can’t attain excellence without embracing the disparate qualities and contributions of all who come here to teach and to learn. “As importantly,” Hill said, “preparing all students for leadership and service in a multicultural, rapidly changing, and highly competitive world is our job.”

Matthew Côté, associate professor of chemistry and associate dean of the faculty, summarized the findings of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics in the Liberal Arts team. Of the team’s 11 recommendations, he highlighted two: the prioritization of a new facility where math and the sciences could be taught under one roof, and the redoubling of efforts to secure funding for student-faculty research.

Côté also mentioned four pedagogical projects now under way as a result of the team’s work: an integrated math and science course sequence, an effort to broaden computing experience and resources throughout those disciplines, a grant-funded process (undertaken jointly with Bowdoin College) to explore the teaching of quantitative reasoning and a project to improve communication within the science and math division.

Kirk D. Read, associate professor of French, co-chaired the team investigating The Arts in the College and the Community. Read’s humorous and expansive talk used his own experiences in theater as an undergraduate to illustrate the value of the visual and performing arts in the liberal arts context.

The late-afternoon ceremony also included addresses by Dean of the Faculty Jill Reich; Daniel Gimbel ’10, president of the college’s student government; and William Blaine-Wallace, multifaith chaplain.