1. Video: Graduates share thoughts on four years at Bates
2. Multimedia: Athletics Celebration Dinner honors generations of supporters
3. Multimedia: Reunion 2010 celebration
4. President’s baccalaureate address on role of ‘friendship and friendliness’
5. Video: New Bates mission statement approved
6. Higher rates now offered for Bates charitable gift annuities
7. How can the act of writing help college students feel engaged?
8. June blog from Japan
9. Duncan nominated by NESCAC as NCAA Woman of the Year
10. Coaches, student-athletes pitch in on community service projects
11. Bates in the News

The Mount David Summit is an opportunity for Bates students to share recent research, service-learning and creative work. This year, more than 100 research posters represented work in Asian studies, biochemistry, biology, chemistry, Chinese, economics, education, environmental studies, history, mathematics, neuroscience, physics, politics, psychology and public health. The 2009 summit also featured filmmakers who screened work, made in theater department courses, in a course at the Maine Media Workshops, as senior theses and on location in Bolivia; a Bates Modern Dance company performance; and the annual Barlow Off-Campus Study Photography Exhibition.

Festive and informative, the event annually draws a large crowd of students, faculty, staff, parents, and alumni. It provides first-years and sophomores a chance to test their presentation skills in a supportive environment, and gives more advanced students the chance to explain their individual research to a wide audience. Broadly multidisciplinary, the summit shows the depth and expanse of scholarship among Bates students.

Meet some of the students who participated in this year’s event.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’ve been paying attention to education news, you know that boys are falling behind academically. You’ve heard they are lagging in reading and writing, graduating from high school at lower rates than girls, and filling fewer seats in college classrooms.

No doubt you’ve also heard theories about the causes of this phenomenon, from the rise of feminism to the departure of fathers from the home. You’ve also heard ideas about how to reverse it, from same-sex classes to more male teachers.

What you probably haven’t heard is what boys think about it. Until now.More than 540 Maine boys and young men shared their views on schooling in a yearlong research project whose preliminary findings, released at a statewide education conference at Bates last October, are attracting queries from teachers across North America.

The study confirms what researchers suspected — boys’ underachievement parallels a sense of disenfranchisement in their schools — and it offers some surprises. Defying stereotype, for example, boys do care what teachers think of them. When boys have good relationships with their teachers, it has much to do with their love of a class.

“Our boys are saying they want people to connect with them,” says Professor of Psychology Georgia Nigro, Bates’ representative to the Maine Boys Network, the consortium of policy analysts, educators, and youth-service professionals that sponsored the study. “They love it if someone — it doesn’t have to be a male teacher — knows and shares their interests.”

The project is significant not only for adding a vital piece to the national discussion, but also for its ambitious reach: Hundreds of boys offered opinions about the teaching techniques that engage them — or lose them. Nigro, with Maren Vouga ’09 of Louisville, Ky., and Erin Bonney ’09 of Sudbury, Mass., conducted a daunting analysis of the discussions, identifying common themes as well as classroom strategies that some Maine teachers are already putting to use.

“That’s where Georgia took the lead,” says Mark Tappan, a Colby College professor of education who performed the data analysis with Nigro and Stephan Derochers, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Maine–Farmington. “She developed a way to critically examine
the interviews. We were so lucky to have her expertise.”

Their findings appear in the October 2008 report “The Gender Divide in Academic Engagement: Perspectives from Maine Boys and Young Men.”

To read the report go to http://www.boystomen.info/ and scroll down to the report.

Children have been at the center of Nigro’s research at Bates. She has studied children’s memory to develop interview methods that improve preschoolers’ recall and resistance to misinformation. She
also developed a project to raise middle-school girls’ awareness of careers in math and science.

Her concerns about boys date to 1997, when she helped to interpret a survey of Lewiston sixth-graders’ attitudes toward school and their future. (The survey had been designed and implemented by Bates students under the direction of Professor of Political Science Douglas Hodgkin, now retired.)

“I was struck by the gender difference,” Nigro recalls. “Twenty-five percent of male students felt excluded in the classroom, that their opinions weren’t valued.”

When the survey was presented publicly to Lewiston residents, however, their attention went to other findings — understandably, since the national focus at that time was on improving girls’ education and career opportunities. “People thought paying attention to boys would take away from the attention that was being paid, and still needed to be paid, to girls,” Nigro says.

The Maine Boys Network study was her long-awaited opportunity. She and students from her “Action Research” psychology course were among numerous facilitators convening focus groups in elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, and colleges during 2007–08. “The boys were thoroughly engaged,” she reports. “They took it seriously, but they also had fun. They appreciated that someone was asking the questions we were asking.”

Students shared, among other things, their yearnings for a kinesthetic but challenging curriculum; variety and freedom in their assignments; caring, fair teachers; and the same respectful treatment that they thought girls received.

“Sometimes I wanted to go off-script and intervene,” Nigro confesses. “One middle-school boy asked, ‘Why do I have to study science? I want to be a lobsterman.’ I asked him, ‘Don’t you think a lobsterman needs to know what’s happening in the oceans, what’s happening to the fish? That’s science.’ I could have gone on with an entire science lesson, but I stopped myself.”

That exchange was among many poignant moments from gatherings that often stretched to two hours — with students begging for more time. “That boy was getting the message that you’re a nobody if you don’t go on with education,” Nigro reflects. “Yet the somebodies in his life — his father, his uncles, his grandfather — hadn’t gone on in education. It made me see that we have to listen to them and think about how we convey the message that higher education is important.”

“There’s not going to be a single quick fix,” Nigro believes. “It’s not going to be single-sex schools or classrooms. That may work for some boys, but it’s not one size fits all. The teaching the boys want is simply good teaching. It doesn’t have to be tailored to boys. Good teaching embraces a variety of approaches to reach different kids, whatever their needs are. Everyone, boys and girls, benefit.”

From Naima: As the semester ends, it seems appropriate to give you all a quick little recap. This has been a busy couple of months; I guess taking five classes, working three jobs, and wanting to soak up every Bates moment before going abroad might have been a bit much. I went on more sunrise paddles, sang in some more a cappella shows, frequented football games, and attended some wonderful dance parties.

I also went to class. I read Aristotle, explored intoxication, examined the human body, recounted black histories, and recorded literary methods. But now as I write to you, I have finished my four term papers and am beginning my week of tests with little worry. My lack of worry is not because I am excited to sit down for hours with a pencil in hand, pouring my thoughts and revelations from these courses into a blue booklet. Instead, I am drifting between stress and freedom, agony and excitement. Now don’t get me wrong, part of me actually enjoys spending late nights in PGill and the Ronj, inhaling caffeine until I place the last period on the page; but sleep is nice too.

So I am the Girl Talk of the thesis world.  I do mash-ups.  That’s my thing.  I make my living off of taking other people’s work and smushing it together into something on which I put my name (not without giving due credit of course).  But really, I am taking the thought of a 13th century Japanese Zen philosopher and comparing it with a contemporary feminist thinker of technoscience.  That’s like combining “The Hallelujah Chorus” with Missy Elliott.  And, I can groove to it.  Without getting hit in the head or knocked on the ground like the recent Girl Talk show here at Bates.

But the most interesting thing about the comparison of my thesis to mash-up music is that the critiques of both ventures are the same.  Concerning mash-up music, debates have been circulating concerning the question of whether a mash-up song should be considered new or not.  Is a mash-up song authentic?  Is it “real” music?  Or is it simply two previously written songs placed together into something that is less novel than it is a rip-off.  And what does it mean that computers are so fancy these days that any Joe-shmo can take two of his favorite songs and layer them together?  Does that count as authentic?  Or does one need to have a certain knowledge about music, about both the songs, about how sounds and beats and rhythms work together?

I face some of those similar questions in my thesis writing process.  Can what I produce be considered “original” or “new”?  What about authentic?  Am I just taking from others?

Unfortunately, because Girl Talk just needs a record deal and I need not to be torn limb from limb by feminists, I have to make sure my methods in this process are unassailable.  While thinking two songs are awesome and then having the artists approve their use works for Girl Talk I can’t exactly put that same approach into my methods: I think Dogen and Donna Haraway are awesome and their works are published so I’ll make sure to cite them properly.  That won’t fly.  I need to contextualize these authors’ thoughts in their specific historical times.  Which means I’ve read A LOT about 13th century Japan and A LOT about America post-WWII.  And what have I learned so far?  I have learned what makes what I’m doing so difficult and GirlTalk has no idea.

The problem with what I am attempting to do is that I am alive.  Yes, I’ve discussed this with my advisor, this is actually real.  The problem is that I’m alive.  How do I fix that problem and still finish my thesis?  However, this is a problem that all historians supposedly face- we’re alive and the people we’re talking about often aren’t.  So we can’t ask the Coolios for permission to use track 13.  I cant ask Dogen if he’s okay with what I’m doing because he’s dead.  And I can ask Donna Haraway- and maybe I will once I get a more solidified thesis idea but the fact of the matter is- I’m alive and Haraway’s alive and Dogen’s not and we make an odd threesome.

But I’m optimistic.  I’m learning a lot about both thinkers and the times in which they existed.  I also learned that I hate Ronald Regan.  So here I am: the mash-up philosopher who’s making friends and influencing people.  And hating on Ronald Regan.  Only with thesis.

Shhhh,
Steph