Darby Ray

In a Q-and-A, Sun Journal reporter Kathryn Skelton asks Darby Ray, director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, “If you were a student, what project through the Harward Center makes you think, ‘I’d be all over that’”?

Ray’s answer pointed to a partnership with an elementary school about a mile from campus.

“Last semester one of the education classes at Bates met all semester long at Farwell Elementary School. The students and professor didn’t just visit the school once or twice — they actually held their college course at the elementary school, which enabled an amazing reciprocity of knowledge, insight and energy.

“I love that kind of creative exchange.”

• View story in the May 19, 2013, Sun Journal.

Professor of Sociology Emily Kane. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Maine Campus Compact will honor two members of the Bates College community, a member of the sociology faculty and a senior from Brunswick, for their commitment to public involvement.

A consortium of Maine schools dedicated to advancing the civic mission of higher education, MCC will present the Donald Harward Award for Faculty Service-Learning Excellence to Professor of Sociology Emily Kane of Auburn. Kane, who structures much of her coursework around community-engaged research, is one of three faculty members at Maine schools to receive this year’s award.

Kimberly Sullivan ’13. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Kimberly Sullivan, a senior psychology major who co-founded the Tree Street Youth Center, a youth outreach program in Lewiston, is among six students at Maine colleges honored with the Heart and Soul Award, recognizing exemplary civic engagement.

Kane, Sullivan and the other recipients will receive their awards in an April 30 ceremony in the Hall of Flags at the Maine State House, in Augusta.

• Read about Emily Kane’s community-engaged curriculum.
• Read about Kimberly Sullivan and Tree Street Youth Center.

Victoria Lowe ’12, a double major in dance and American cultural studies, discusses her Short Term experience with “Tour, Teach, Perform” and her goal of advancing arts education in the schools.

Mara Tieken, newly appointed as assistant professor of education, researches how rural public schools shape their communities and, in particular, the schools’ influence on racial dynamics. A former public schoolteacher in rural Tennessee, Tieken says she is “continually stunned by how overlooked rural schools are in educational policymaking.”

Bates is especially proximate to that reality. While one in five children in the U.S. lives in a rural area, in Maine that figure is closer to one in two. “You never hear about these children in all of the education debates,” Tieken says, “yet that context powerfully influences the education schools provide. What works in an urban or suburban school might not work in a rural one.”

She adds that rural schools support their communities in ways that may not apply in the cities — not only providing scarce jobs, but promoting community cohesion, providing political power and, she notes, “influencing who is — and who isn’t — a part of the community.”

“The threat of school closure hangs heavy over many rural communities because, many residents fear, closure means the end of their community. We need a better understanding of all of these aspects of rural schooling in order to write policies that promote strong, equitable schools and healthy, inclusive communities.”

For her dissertation at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she also earned her master’s, Tieken conducted and analyzed some 70 interviews exploring the functions of public schools in the rural South. (She received her undergraduate degree in social psychology at Dartmouth.) She is a consultant on rural education and community organizing for the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

This fall, Tieken will teach two 200-level courses, “Race, Cultural Pluralism, and Equality in American Education” and “Perspectives on Education.” She looks forward to exploring ways that rural Maine and its schools are experiencing the influx of new populations, particularly Latino.

“It’s an interesting time to be in Maine, with the new charter school laws and the recent focus on school district consolidation,” she says. “These issues could dramatically reshape rural schooling, and they raise all sorts of questions about community, democratic participation, local control. I’d love to work with students tracking some of these trends.”

Qualities that drew Tieken to Bates include its commitment to social justice, its focus on undergraduate teaching and its size, with only about 1,700 students on campus. She adds, “I felt that I’d be challenged and supported to teach well and do rigorous work — it seemed like the sort of place where I could remain committed to the things that are most important to me.”

“I love the somewhat-rural setting, too,” Tieken says. “The snow? Not so much. But I have snow tires, lots of down and a kitchen cabinet full of grits. I’m ready.”

These potentially tenured faculty members have added to our knowledge about political antagonism toward federal courts, the role of the body in Arab American and African American literature, and the cultural and community functions of rural schools.

They are (follow the links to learn more):
Stephen M. Engel, assistant professor of politics, who comes to Bates from Marquette University;
Therí Pickens, assistant professor of English, who has taught English and world literature at Pitzer College;
and Mara Tieken, assistant professor of education, a former public school teacher who just earned her doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

• A funeral service is Nov. 19 at 10 a.m. at St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church, 186 Bradley Street, Saco.
• The Portland Press Herald devotes a feature obituary to Professor Margarones.

The goal, he said, was to help aspiring teaching gain skills that cannot be learned in a classroom.

As a teacher, “you have to have the attitude for outreach,” he said. “You not only have to have the basics — knowledge of content — but you have to have the personality attribute, and this you can develop. This you can’t teach, you must experience.”

Professor Margarones grew up in Old Orchard Beach, where his Greek-immigrant father was a barber and bowling lanes owner who, in the summer, gave haircuts to Bates President Clifton Daggett Gray and other Bates professors who vacationed at nearby Ocean Park, a Freewill Baptist enclave.

Since more than a few of these professors, including Gray, were classicists and theologians trained in Greek, they also enjoyed speaking with the elder Margarones in his native tongue.

In retirement, Professor Margarones lived in Old Orchard Beach, where he was a passionate and thorough town historian. He  wrote Personality Vignettes of Old Orchard Beach, 1930s and 1940s and People and Place Profiles, 1930s and 1940s. A third history, tentatively titled, The Unsung Personalities, was being written when he died.

Professor Margarones served as an Army Air Corps bombardier in World War II. He earned a doctorate in education from Boston University.

He is survived by his wife, Viola (18 Seaside Ave., Old Orchard Beach, 04064); children Estelle ’88, Joseph, Margot, Katherine, and Melissa ’96; nine grandchildren; and two sisters.

While Bates has offered a three-year option for 40 years, an undergraduate education is hard to speed up, says Hansen. “I think too much in our culture is about doing things faster and simpler and easier. And what we can’t let go of in higher education is that slower is actually better when it comes to learning.”

Hansen joined Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University;  Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University; Robert Zemsky, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a new book on education reform; and Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University and former assistant secretary of education under Lamar Alexander. View story from Newsweek, Oct. 26, 2009.

In an accident at home in September 2007, longtime Bates staffer Sylvia Deschaine sustained head injuries that nearly killed her.

During her long recovery, she was fascinated by MRIs — magnetic resonance imaging scans — showing how the golf ball-sized opening in her skull, sustained falling down a flight of stairs, was healing.

When Deschaine came back to work, as the administrative assistant for the education and psychology departments, she seemed much the same as ever, dry wit and Irish brogue intact. But at heart she felt renewed, viewing others with a new compassion and concern, she says.

In that sense, she says, the accident is “probably one of the best things that has happened to me.”

Grateful for the hospital care she had received, Deschaine wanted somehow to bring the College and the local medical establishment closer together so as to support Bates students aiming for healthcare careers. This was part of her healing too, she says.

She discussed her experiences, especially the MRI, with Nancy Koven, assistant professor of psychology. A clinical neuropsychologist, Koven was already using MRI images of the brain in her research and teaching.

“Sylvia has a patient’s view, and I have a researcher’s view,” says Koven. “When we were in the hallway trying to have the same conversation, it meant different things to each of us.”

As they reconciled those perspectives, Koven realized that her students, too, could benefit from the patient’s view. “It’s a piece I just can’t do in the classroom,” she says. When Deschaine suggested a class visit to an MRI facility, it seemed like just the thing for one Koven course in particular.

The course, “Cognitive Neuroscience,” relates brain structure to function. Koven divides the coursework between anatomy and cognition. Teaching the former involves MRIs of healthy brains; the latter includes pencil-and-paper tests whose numerical scores indicate cognitive capabilities.

The two types of data complement each other for stronger diagnoses, Koven says. But a third kind of information helps, too — a patient’s presenting symptoms, medical history, lifestyle.

And so, one February day, the “Cognitive Neuroscience” class has just finished inspecting the new MRI scanner at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center. The students are now viewing scans in a darkened room next door.

Barbara Mandy, a magnetic resonance imaging technologist, is showing the scans, which resemble X-rays. She pulls up a patient’s brain, scanned this morning. “Uh-oh,” she says. “This gentleman has no idea what’s growing in him.”

The patient — anonymous to the students — came to St. Mary’s complaining of memory and motor-skills problems. Koven asks her students to identify the pathological portion of the patient’s brain and suggest how a tumor, indicated by a dark patch in the image, might affect his mood or behavior — his life.

Which someone does. They’ve learned their lessons well, these strangers, seeing on a screen evidence of the most private kind of trouble for one scared man.

That’s a lesson Sylvia Deschaine gave to the class. “Just like that, we can be gone,” she says. “We’ve got to value each other.”

Sylvia Hurtado, an expert on student educational outcomes and diversity in higher education, visits Bates College to give a talk titled “Preparing College Students for a Diverse Democracy” at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, March 12, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, Alumni Walk.

Part of the Bates psychology department’s “Diversity and Domains of Life” series, the talk is open to the public at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-8297.

Hurtado is professor and director of the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences. Prior to arriving at UCLA, she served as director of the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan.

The magazine Black Issues In Higher Education named Hurtado among the top 15 influential faculty whose work has made an academic impact. She has published numerous articles and books related to her primary interests in student educational outcomes, campus climates, college impact on student development and diversity in higher education.

She has served on numerous editorial boards for journals in education, and on the boards of the American Association of Higher Education (of which she is a past president) and the Higher Learning Commission.

Hurtado has coordinated several national research projects, including a U.S. Department of Education-sponsored initiative on how colleges are preparing students to achieve the cognitive, social and civic skills to participate in a diverse democracy. She is launching a National Institutes of Health project on the preparation of underrepresented students for biomedical and behavioral science research careers.

She has also studied assessment, reform and innovation in undergraduate education on a project through the National Center for Postsecondary Improvement.

Hurtado earned her doctorate in education from UCLA, her master’s from Harvard Graduate School of Education and an A.B. in sociology from Princeton University.