MIDDLEBURY – How do you tap into the energy of Middlebury College’s most motivated students – the ones who, on top of their regular classes, initiate non-graded projects like the organic garden and the Sunday Night Group – to create an environment that compels each and every student to similarly take the lead?
To find the answer, the college has hired Elizabeth Robinson.
As the director of the Project on Creativity and Innovation in the Liberal Arts, a new initiative encouraging all Middlebury students to expand their education beyond the classroom, Robinson’s first task is to identify where and how students are currently initiating creative endeavors.
What exactly drove students a couple of years ago to transform a school bus engine to run on vegetable oil and drive it across the country advocating bio-fuels? Was it something in the political science department that inspired Derek Schlickeisen and Mario Ariza to create an online legislative scorecard called the Young American’s Fund?
Once Robinson knows where this kind of risk-taking originates, she can then direct extra funding and administrative support to augment those projects and to find a way to inspire similar projects in students who aren’t as eager to leap “outside the box”.
“Some students do it naturally,” Robinson said, citing the natural leaders who planted the first seeds of the organic garden and the concerned students who gathered one Sunday Night to create SNG, the most active environmental group on campus. “We want to find those students that are a little more reluctant and support them however they need to be supported and give them a little nudge.”
The former program director for DigitalBridges2.0, a college organization offering students entrepreneurial and consulting opportunities with local start-up companies, Robinson is interested in projects that students create on their own, breaking down the walls of traditional academics.
DigitalBridges, which is now in its seventh year, is only a piece of what the Project on Creativity wants to enhance, she said.
With DigitalBridges, we were doing amazing things for students, we were involving alumni, and we were also doing such wonderful things for economic development in the state of Vermont,” she said. “The combination was as good as it gets.”
But still, it was an economics professor, Michael Claudon, not a student, who developed that program.
A TEMPLATE FOR SUCCESS
Robinson sites the 100 Kathryn Wasserman Davis Project for Peace, a national competition held by philanthropist Davis, as an example of the kind of student initiatives she hopes to encourage. This week, three groups of Middlebury students were each named as recipients of a $10,000 Wasserman Davis prize to pursue their Projects for Peace.
Sophomores Aylie Baker, Leah Bevis, Vijay Chowdhari and Chris O’Connell will capture and share radio narratives of children in Uganda; senior Daphne Lasky has designed a “Workshop for the Old City of Jerusalem.” In which she will encourage people living in the divided city to test their idealism against political and physical realities; and freshman Hamza Arshed Usmani and Shujaat Ali Khan, in collaboration with Seeds of Peace, an international organization offering programs to empower young leaders from regions of conflict, will hold religious tolerance workshops and host cross-border interactions for young people in Pakistan.
Two other Middlebury projects were rejected by the national contest, but college President Ronald Liebowitz, feeling they were just as remarkable as the other three, has decided to fund them himself, using $20,000 from the Presidential Office Fund.
These projects will take junior Jennifer Leigh Williams and freshman Conetrise Holt and Justin Spurley to New Orleans, where they will engage local youth in collaborative are projects that express visions of civic peace; and they will take senior Caitrin Abshere to Thailand to explore whether micro-credit loans to the country’s impoverished agricultural communities threaten the peace in those communities by causing environmental degradation.
“This is about taking advantage of that four-year window and doing something that is a little scary,” Robinson said.
But at a college where simply keeping up with a course load is scary enough, this can be a difficult concept for some students to grasp.
“For many students, it seems as though they have so much to do and they’re so busy,” Robinson said. “They’re trying to get on to that next thing when they graduate, sometimes graduate school, which means they’re checking the boxes. And they don’t even think about the fact that they have these opportunities.”
The Project on Creativity was initially sponsored and funded by a 1975 Middlebury College graduate, Rory Riggs, who wanted to supplement students’ classroom learning with opportunities to “act on their creativity, to make the process of innovation second nature.” He said in a press release.
Robinson, a Middlebury Alumna herself, said the projects she initiated on her own before graduating in 1984 were an integral part of her education. Interested in teaching and nonprofits, she organized a semester teaching at an American army base school in Germany and designed a work-study project at the United Way in Burlington.
“Middlebury is the prefect place to be able to do these creative things and make mistakes and have that be OK,” she said. “Students are going to look back, and if they haven’t done these kinds of things, they’re going to realize later that hey should have. It prepares them for what’s going to happen when they get out of this place.”
By Megan James - Addison Independent - April 5, 2007