Samuel Huntington Public Service Award

  • The Samuel Huntington Public Service Award provides a $10,000 stipend for a graduating college senior to pursue one year of public service anywhere in the world. The award allows recipients to engage in a meaningful public service activity for one year before proceeding on to graduate school or a career.

    The deadline to apply for the Samuel Huntington Public Service Award is February 15, 2010.  Please click here for more information and to obtain an application.

At A Glance: Engaging Students with the Community

  • The Harward Center for Community Partnerships offers students the opportunity to engage with community partners through:

    Community-Based Learning: Academically connected community-based work that includes courses, research, thesis, and independent study;

    Fellowships/Community Work-Study: Paid employment that includes work with non-profit agencies;

    Volunteerism: Student-led community engagement activities that are not tied to a course and are unpaid. These are one-time, short-term or ongoing activities supported by the Student Volunteer Fellows.

Kudos

  • A plan by three Bates College students to offer Tanzanian street children a survival alternative to a pervasive sex-for-food trade has won a $10,000 award from the 100 Projects for Peace program.

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Faculty Profile

  • In April 2007, Lee Abrahamsen was one of three Maine college educators to receive the consortium's Donald Harward Faculty Award for Service-Learning Excellence (named for Bates President Emeritus Harward).

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National Recognition

  • The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recently selected Bates College for its new Community Engagement Classification, created to recognize colleges and universities that have institutionalized community engagement in their endeavors.

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Research & Scholarship

 

There is extensive opportunity for Bates students to engage in research that addresses larger societal issues.  Often this work is done in the context of a course, an independent study, a senior thesis or a summer program through the College.

Highlights of 2006-2007 non-thesis research include:

  • Sociology 205; Research Methods for Sociology
    The Sociology Department incorporates community-based research methods in the methods course required of all majors.  The course focuses on research design, data collection, and data analysis for a variety of methods, including survey research, content analysis, comparative research, field observation and qualitative interviewing. All of these methods are explored through their application to a community-based research project in the Lewiston/Auburn community. During Winter 2008, the focus is the status of youth in the community and how residents view youth empowerment. Building on a community dialogue process that took place in the Fall of 2008 that focused on how to make the community a better place for local youth, students in the course do a content analysis of how youth are represented in the local papers, administer a survey to adult residents about their impressions of youth, implement qualitative surveys to youth and adults who are participating in the community dialogues, and observe youth and adults interacting in the community. Results will be presented to the community dialogue groups and the larger Lewiston/Auburn community.
  • Education/Psychology 262;  Action Research
    Students learn about community-based research methods by participating in a variety of projects in the Lewiston/Auburn community. During Winter 2008 Bates students are developing, implementing and interpreting data that result from an aspirations survey administered to local high school students; developing an intervention for Somali parents designed to increase involvement in their children’s schooling; evaluating data from a community dialogue project focused on youth empowerment; and participating in observing focus groups with boys and young men around issues of academic engagement.