Bates College has received a $300,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a learning-associates program that in the past has involved experts like author Carolyn Chute and film director István Szabó in work with senior thesis students.

The Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities and Social Sciences begins this fall and will continue for two years. With the addition of a social science component, the new initiative extends the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities that Bates established in 2001.

With more than 90 percent of Bates students completing a senior thesis — a significant research, service, performance or studio project — the Mellon Learning Associates program supports the participation of visiting experts and practitioners whose knowledge and experience can help illuminate new areas of inquiry.

“An important advantage of a small college like Bates is the opportunity for ongoing, in-depth faculty-student collaborations,” explains Jill Reich, dean of the faculty. “But these ideas and projects may expand to questions no longer encapsulated by the expertise on campus. This program allows us to reach out to relevant experts in a flexible and timely manner, driven by the excitement and integrity of the ideas.”

The program also expands the kinds of learning available to Bates students, Reich adds. “For example, learning associates might be practitioners who provide a real-world context for our students’ learning, and help expand that learning by linking theory to applied contexts. Or they might be experts in innovative techniques not yet available in the college setting.”

Like the previous Mellon program, the new initiative will support the participation of learning associates through long- and short-term residencies and distance learning. Author Chute, stage performer Avner Eisenberg and director Szabó (Being Julia) were among participants in the earlier program.

The Mellon Foundation has also supported the Bates environmental studies program through residential fellowships that have brought to campus such experts as nature photographer Will Richard, documentary filmmaker Melissa Paly and Brunswick, Maine, town planner Theo Holtwijk.

The latest Mellon grant continues a partnership that began in 1970, when the New York-based foundation awarded Bates a grant to enlarge the faculty and increase faculty pay. Since then, Mellon has supported Bates efforts to develop its curriculum, undertake collaborative programs with Bowdoin and Colby colleges and interact more closely with the Lewiston-Auburn community.

Novelist Carolyn Chute and the owners of an organic Maine farm are among the specialists working with students in two innovative programs that are engaging the campus with the world outside.

One in the humanities, one in environmental studies, these “learning associates” programs enrich the curriculum with the real-world experience and perspectives of top practitioners in an occupation related to some aspect of the curriculum. “The students’ minds are opened to something beyond the immediate classroom,” says Judith Robbins, the Mellon learning associate in the humanities.

Many of these practitioners are from Maine. Terry and Mark Silber, who run Hedgehog Hill Farm in Sumner, are teaching a seminar on organic farming in the environmental studies program. A well-known Maine novelist, Carolyn Chute worked with students in creative writing and storytelling courses this semester as part of the senior thesis program.

Students found the interaction with Chute eye-opening, says Robbins. Chute, author of the acclaimed The Beans of Egypt, Maine (Ticknor & Fields, 1985), is an outspoken champion of Maine’s rural poor. Robbins says that several students, in evaluating the sessions with Chute, explained how she made them newly aware of Maine’s economic divisions.

One student, self-described as someone from a “middle-class family who had never had the chance to meet real, true working-class people,” realized the “similarities of all types and classes of people.” Another wrote simply that that Chute “opened my eyes to a new way of viewing literature.”

The environmental studies program involves the humanities, the natural sciences and the social sciences. The Silbers’ upper-level seminar explores the practical and ethical aspects of environmentally sustainable farming. The Silbers are the authors of Growing Herbs and Vegetables From Seed to Harvest (Knopf, 1999).

Camille Parrish is the environmental studies learning associate. Through setting up internships and engaging guest faculty like the Silbers, Parrish helps environmental studies majors connect their classroom work with real-world environmental issues as near as the campus and as far away as Thailand. By involving students with such local organizations as the Bates Mill Redevelopment Corporation and the Maine Rural Workers Coalition, Parrish also furthers another primary Bates goal: strengthening ties with the community.

In fact, the learning-associate initiative evolved in 1999 from President Donald Harward’s drive to engage the college with the world outside campus in more concrete and meaningful ways. (Harward retires at the end of June 2002.)

The New York-based Andrew Mellon Foundation awarded two grants last year to support the initiative. A $300,000 grant is supporting the learning-associate component of the environmental studies program, as well as the purchase of equipment. A $450,000 grant is funding the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities, now in its second semester.

In addition to Chute, the humanities program this semester is funding Denis Ledoux, a Francophone Maine memoirist, Lake Affect, a Buffalo-based sound performance quartet, a writing specialist in the Spanish language, poets, pianists and a dance critic.

Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine and Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts, will read from her work-in-progress, The School on Hearts Content Road, at 7:30 p.m. in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. The public is invited to attend at no charge.

In addition to the reading, which she is calling There’s No Love in Paradise, Chute reports she will “talk about stuff.”

In addition to her literary endeavors, Chute is active in the Second Maine Militia, an organization which seeks to redress what it sees as an imbalance in power between “haves” and “have-nots.”

After the publication of several short stories in the early 1980s, Chute attracted widespread attention with the 1985 appearance of The Beans of Egypt, Maine, which drew critical acclaim for its unflinching portrait of poverty in small-town Maine.

Her subsequent novels were Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts (1988) and Merry Men (1994).

Chute was recently named by George magazine as “one of the 20 most important women in American politics.”

She is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Thornton Wilder Fellowship.

Chute’s visit to Bates is sponsored by the college’s Department of English.