CEL funds minimally affected for spring
The current economic crisis will not drastically impede the Community Engaged Learning program's various projects the way it is impacting other programs, such as the programming at Prospect Hill, because CEL uses resources from the organizations with which they partner, according to Prof. Mark Auslander (ANTH), the CEL academic director. The University plans to make cuts to account for the projected gap in the fiscal year 2009 and fiscal year 2010 budgets, but because CEL programs collaborate with off-campus organizations, they will not be as affected as other academic programs and campus clubs.
Auslander acknowledged that in the current economic climate, "everyone is scrambling" and working to make do with as little material as they can.
"It is a strength of CEL that we do not just depend on Brandeis, because the organizations with which we partner provide a lot of the resources," said Faith Brigham '10, who was a Community Engaged Fellow for Prof. Laura Goldin's (AMST) "Greening the Ivory Tower" last spring.
Students in the CEL classes, which are interdisciplinary, apply the lessons they learn in the classroom to the local community through different service projects. Projects this past semester included working at the Tenants' Center in the Prospect Hill Terrace housing development to help members with tenants' rights issues and working with a Spanish-speaking Waltham resident.
Auslander said that his objective for CEL next semester in his "Museum and Memory" class is to link the minority communities in Waltham through an outdoor exhibit about the Charles River. Students will create this exhibit by interviewing various Waltham residents including Native Americans, Caribbean immigrants and African Americans about the river, and their interviews will culminate in the outdoor exhibit.
"We anticipate creating a cell phone-based walking tour of the river; walkers will be able to call into a special Brandeis telephone number to access edited audio segments about locales on the river, hearing the actual voices of local community members," Auslander wrote in an e-mail to the Justice.
"The goal of Community Engaged Learning," he said, "is bridge-building, trying to build community and nourish local democracy. I thought that the river, which everyone loves, will be a great way to bring everyone together and link minorities that may have felt excluded to the more established community," Auslander wrote.
Auslander said that his class next semester, "Museum and Public Memory," "can do the project very cheaply, as long we have access to technology like the students' cell phones, which is certainly feasible."
Prof. Laura Goldin (AMST), who teaches "Women, the Environment, and Social Justice," said she is going to try to incorporate hands-on learning into virtually everything in the course syllabus next semester. For example, she said, the class will be reading A Civil Action, the book that chronicles the story of people in Woburn, Mass. who were affected by polluted well water and the case to shut the wells down. Goldin said that the students will visit Woburn and meet with the lawyers that were part of the case, as well as the mothers of the children, as she has done with classes in the past.
Through this hands-on interaction, Goldin said, students in the class will "explore how this case has changed the face of how we deal with this issue."
Goldin also said there will be two community service aspects to the course. Students will be required to spend a minimum of two hours at Waltham Alliance to Create Housing, a nonprofit organization in Waltham that Goldin's "Environmental Law and Policy" class helped start last spring. She said the advocacy center mainly focuses on aiding women who have moved into low-income housing, helping them with issues ranging from the unsanitary conditions of these housing projects to potential immigration liabilities. Students will be trained to deal with these types of issues, and depending on the clients' English-speaking abilities, will either advocate for the tenant or teach them how to advocate for themselves.
In addition to their work at the advocacy center, students will create their own programs based on their own interests pertaining to the environment, social justice or a combination of the two. The idea behind these projects, Goldin said, "is to bring together environmental health and the health of the community as a whole."
In the past, students in this class have taught cooking classes at Waltham Elementary School and have taught the elderly about the implications of global warming.
The CEL courses for this upcoming semester are "Women, the Environment, and Social Justice" (AMST), "Introduction to Computers" (COSI), "Latino History" (HIST), "Museums and Public Memory" (ANTH), "Engaged Anthropology" (ANTH), "Language Acquisition and Development " (LING), and "Spanish Conversation and Grammar" (HISP).
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