Citation Award Honoree Judy Huret (second right) and husband Bob Huret (right) announced the first round of Advancing Leaders Fellows: Ellen Dizzia (left), Max Perel-Slater (second left), Sarah Tucker (center left), Sefakor Komabu Pomeyie (center front) and Sneha Shrestha (center right).

SIT congratulates the five winners of World Learning’s first Advancing Leaders Fellowship award. Launched earlier this year, the fellowship supports alumni from all World Learning programs—including SIT Graduate Institute—as they implement innovative projects around the world to address significant social challenges.

Among the fellowship winners are two SIT Graduate Institute alumni:

• Sefakor Komabu-Pomayie, MA in Sustainable Development. Project: Accessible Schools (Ghana); enlightening and empowering people with and without disabilities through the media.
• Ellen Dizzia, MA in International Education. Project: Equal Opportunities in English Education (Chile); providing motivation, tools, and support for English-language learning in Chile through intercultural exchange.

Fellowships were also awarded to three SIT Study Abroad alumni. A full listing of the winners along with an overview of their projects is below.

Established with seed money from Judy Huret, former World Learning vice chair and trustee, and her husband Bob, the alumni were awarded $10,000 each to implement an original social innovation project. Winners were selected following proposal presentations to a panel of judges and 200 guests at World Learning’s inaugural Social Innovation Summit in San Francisco on June 5.

Recognized for their pioneering ideas, talent, and vision, the fellows will now enter a three-month phase devoted to leadership development and training in social innovation, followed by a six-month period in which they will implement their projects. The projects address a variety of challenging social issues in communities around the world by applying novel and sustainable approaches through new design, methodology, and/or technology.

World Learning will provide support, guidance, and training throughout the project phases, and the fellows will periodically provide blog entries and photos from the field throughout the course of their projects.

World Learning Advancing Leaders Fellowship winners:

• Sefakor Komabu-Pomayie. Project: Accessible Schools (Ghana); enlightening and empowering people with and without disabilities through the media.
• Max Perel-Slater. Project: Maji Safi: Rural Centers of Disease Prevention (Tanzania); empowering rural women and communities in Tanzania to prevent disease.
• Sarah Tucker. Project: Chasing Two Rabbits at Once (Cameroon); providing mother-tongue mobile learning alternatives for Cameroon’s indigenous forest communities.
• Ellen Dizzia. Project: Equal Opportunities in English Education (Chile); providing motivation, tools, and support for English-language learning in Chile through intercultural exchange.
• Sneha Shrestha. Project: Kathmandu Children’s Art Museum (Nepal); providing a creative space for art and culture among the youth of Kathmandu.

Click here to learn more about the World Learning Advancing Leaders Fellowship.

SIT Graduate Institute commencement ceremony, June 1, 2013. Photo by Jeff Woodward.

Congratulations to SIT Graduate Institute’s class of 2013. Our newest cohort of graduates was recognized at a commencement ceremony on Saturday, June 1 on SIT’s Brattleboro, VT campus.

President and CEO Adam Weinberg, Vermont Campus Dean Daniel Cantor Yalowitz, Professor Susan Barduhn and Associate Professor Karen Blanchard presented the graduates with their diplomas at the ceremony, honoring more than 220 graduates who earned master’s degrees or certificates in programs ranging from conflict transformation to international education in the past year.

Keynote speaker Dottie Morris. Photo by Jeff Woodward.

Dottie Morris, chief officer of diversity and multiculturalism at Keene State College, delivered the keynote address. An SIT alumna who previously served as associate dean for student learning at SIT Graduate Institute, Morris referenced the words of Martin Luther King Jr. in her speech. She emphasized his promotion of nonviolent confrontation of social ills as a means to improve life for all people.

“The dream he spoke of was rooted in actions to change social policy and practices,” Morris said.

She urged the graduates to use the skills and knowledge they gained at SIT to follow in King’s footsteps and enact positive social change around the world.

SIT is proud to honor this group of leaders poised to put their skills and passion for education and social change into practice at home and abroad.

Rachel Vaughn is a student in the Master of Arts in International Education program at SIT Graduate Institute. This January she completed an independent study titled “Community Based Study Abroad: Lessons from Pune and Jaipur”. This research was presented at Steinhardt NYU’s International Education conference in New York City on April 12,2013.

As I sat in the smoky, humid airport in Kuwait, waiting for a connecting flight to Mumbai, I wondered what I was doing on this trip. I was surrounded by large families and couples with small children, with a smattering of Americans mixed in. A kindly retired doctor had told me that she thought I was brave for traveling to India by myself. I didn’t feel particularly courageous that night, sitting in the airport terminal at 4:30 AM. In fact, I just felt sleep-deprived, disoriented, and ready to be with my friends in Bombay.

A street scene on FC Road in Pune, Maharashtra, India.

Before I came to study international education at SIT Graduate Institute, I was working for a study abroad program in India as a resident advisor. Throughout my time there, I was struck by the dramatic change between my own experience studying abroad and that of the US students with whom I interacted. During my semester abroad, I had been forced outside my comfort zone constantly. As part of my coursework, I completed an internship with a microfinance NGO, where I took the public bus into villages in order to learn from women’s self-help groups. Away from everything familiar, I learned to connect with people across the barriers of language and culture.

Years later, when I returned to the same microfinance NGO on a field trip in my capacity as a resident advisor, I noticed that the character of the interactions with the villagers changed in the presence of a larger group of students. The individual students became grouped into “the Americans”; the women from the self-help groups and their stories were homogenized. These students didn’t have the chance to visit remote rural areas on their own or have the individual interactions that made my study abroad program so meaningful.

As a resident advisor, I wrestled with the question of how to provide students with meaningful community interactions while on a large program. I questioned whether visiting communities in large groups took away these visits’ interactive potential, or worse, turned the visits into poverty tourism. I wondered if there were better ways to offer community-based study abroad than the ones I had seen.

Finally, I decided to stop wondering and start asking. That’s how I ended up doing an independent study this past January.

A scene from the Old City in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India.

In my fall semester at SIT Graduate Institute, I mapped out a plan that would take me to Pune and Jaipur. My research question was, to what extent do American study abroad programs provide their students with opportunities for intercultural interaction with the local community in their place of study?

Since I want to specialize in study abroad in South Asia, I hoped that my January sojourn would provide a way for me to explore these questions that were specific to my personal and professional goals.

But at times in the field, I doubted whether my questions would be answered at all. There were days when my contacts were not around, were too busy to talk to me, or simply did not understand what my research was about. Transcribing interviews, it turned out, is more time consuming than it would seem. My meticulous timeline of submissions, drafted in December, turned out to be a work of short fiction. Along the way, I learned to be creative with my questions, flexible with my time, and patient with myself.

Despite the challenges I encountered during the study, the joy of great interviews made the whole journey worthwhile. In a memorable afternoon, Rama ji, the homestay coordinator at SIT Study Abroad’s Jaipur program, showed me how to make pakoras and told me about how she started to work for the program. (The story involved a polo match, a Rajasthani prince, and a last-minute student in need of a homestay family).

Rama ji planted the seed of a new way of thinking about intercultural interaction between American students and local communities. At one point in our interview, she described the connection between herself and the students as “one soul meeting another.” This human connection is what gives study abroad its power to transform lives, to open up ourselves to something new.

As I compared the two study abroad programs from Pune and Jaipur, I observed that each program provided their students with an “entry-point” into local communities. In Jaipur, it was through a host family program that placed students individually with families who treat them like their sons or daughters. In Pune, it was with local buddies from the host college who acted as friends, classmates, and guides for their American peers. Both opportunities allowed students to deeply interact with community members during their time abroad.

Rachel during her independent study period in India this past January, 2013.

While the form varies according to program provider and region, I learned that the essential component of successful community interaction is the opportunity to connect on an individual basis.

In my research, I observed and described the various elements of program design that provides openings for community interaction and learning. What remains to be studied is how, when, and why students take advantage of these openings or go beyond them to create new opportunities on their own.

The Donald B. Watt Library is proud to announce the one millionth download from DigitalCollections@SIT, our institutional online repository of digital works! Launched in June of 2008, DigitalCollections@SIT contains the full text of more than 5,400 papers written by SIT Study Abroad and SIT Graduate Institute students. The site reached this milestone in less than five years.

The one millionth download was Zainab Khalid’s “Rise of the Veil: Islamic Modernity and the Hui Woman,” which has been available on DigitalCollections@SIT since 2011. Khalid wrote this paper while a participant in the China: Language, Cultures, and Ethnic Minorities program.

Lu Yuan, academic director of the China program, said she was “delighted that Zainab’s ISP report has been useful to other SIT students.” She added, “The SIT digital collections website is especially important for our program, as it allows our students here in Kunming to access many works that are unavailable locally, including the ISPs of other SIT students all over the world. It is considered by our students to be a portable library with rich resources and the most relevant collections for their studies.”

The SIT Study Abroad portion of the collection holds students’ Independent Study Projects (ISPs), Community Service Projects (CSPs), Independent Studies in Journalism (ISJ), and the African Diaspora Collection. The SIT Graduate Institute portion of the collection includes the Capstone Collection, research papers written by SIT Graduate Institute students; the Independent Professional Project (IPP) papers written by summer MA in TESOL students; the Sandanona Conference site for MA in TESOL participants; and the Training Design for Experiential Learning (TDEL) projects. Also available are faculty pages through the SelectedWorks site and the SIT Occasional Papers.

Because of the great diversity in research interests conducted by SIT Graduate Institute and SIT Study Abroad students, DigitalCollections@SIT papers are downloaded and read for research purposes by scholars within the SIT community as well as outside it. Among the many topics in our collection are land reform, medicine, textiles, gender issues, and many more. DigitalCollections@SIT allows a broad audience access to those research papers and influences researchers in a number of fields. To date, there have been 1,005,912 full text downloads from DigitalCollections@SIT, of which more than 441,000 have been downloaded in the last year.

Please visit digitalcollections.sit.edu to explore our more than 5,400 works. To learn more about DigitalCollections@sit, please contact the library by phone at 802 258-3354 or by email at library@sit.edu.

Each year, students in SIT’s MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program organize a professional conference known as “Sandanona.” The Sandanona Conference is the culmination of the on-campus phase of the TESOL program. During the conference, students prepare and conduct a professional presentation that explores in depth a chosen area in the field of second-language teaching and learning.

All events associated with the conference are free and open to the public, and will take place on SIT’s Vermont campus May 20-22, 2013.

The conference will feature two plenary speakers:

• Scott Thornbury, an internationally recognized academic and teacher trainer in the field of English language teaching
• Sedia Dennis, professor of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) at Marlboro College in Vermont and Tacoma Community College in Washington State

During the conference, SIT will be renaming one of its existing buildings. Known for the past thirty-plus years as the Undergraduate Building, the building will be given the new name of Sandanona Graduate Center. The dedication ceremony will be hosted by Alvino Fantini, Professor Emeritus at SIT Graduate Institute.

In the Abenaki language, Sandanona is interpreted to mean “great white light,” and the term was the original name for SIT’s Vermont campus.

For more information and to attend any of the conference’s events, please contact Joslin Roderick at joslin.roderick@sit.edu.

At the end of the project, we asked the students to describe their photographs, and their time at SIT, and we turned their photographs and stories into short videos.

Camille Dos Santos, a Fulbright Scholar and Portuguese teacher, discussed the colors of fall in Vermont and noted how they differ from the colors in her native Brazil.

When SIT Graduate Institute student Alice Urban began looking for a practicum, she told her advisor, SIT professor and journalist Christian Parenti, she was looking for three things.

“I told him I’d like for it to be a meaningful experience, I want to learn things that I couldn’t learn in an office or in a classroom, and I want to have an adventure.”

Prior to enrolling at SIT, Urban worked for her college newspaper and interned at a local newspaper in Massachusetts.

Parenti, who knew about Urban’s interest in journalism, replied “I know the woman and the organization for you.”

The woman is Mary Stucky, the academic director of SIT Study Abroad’s Morocco: Field Studies in Journalism and New Media program. The organization is Round Earth Media, the nonprofit Stucky co-founded that pairs veteran journalists with aspiring reporters to produce stories from around the world.

In January, Urban, who is enrolled in SIT Graduate Institute’s Master of Arts in Sustainable Development program based in Washington, DC, traveled to Morocco to do research, needs-assessment, and promotional work for Round Earth Media.

In addition to her work supporting Round Earth Media’s mission, she had the opportunity to investigate and write stories of interest to her, under the tutelage of veteran journalists in Morocco. In April, she contributed reporting to a story by Aida Alami about women’s rights in Morocco that appeared in the Global Edition of The New York Times.

Though Urban’s focus remains on international development, she maintains a significant interest in journalism. She was surprised to learn that many of the development theories she had been studying at SIT were being applied by Round Earth Media.

“The way that Round Earth Media works is to pair American journalists or journalism students with journalists or journalism students from the host country where they’re reporting,” said Urban.  ”I think that true partnership adds a great integrity, understanding, and cooperation to producing a quality piece of journalism,” said Urban.

“Partnerships are so important in the development work that we covered in class, and then to see that at play in a different field was an interesting connection.”

As Urban wraps up her practicum in Morocco, she is looking forward to reconnecting with her SIT classmates and sharing the lessons they have learned while away from the classroom.

“It’s going to be interesting to go back to class in the summer and have people be bringing in such a huge breadth of new information, new experiences, and new knowledge from an already really diverse cohort of students.”

The forum will take place at the Stephen and Nita Lowey International Center from 7–9 p.m. It features a discussion with two renewable energy experts from Europe – Dirk Vansintjan, co-founder of REScoop.be, the Belgian federation for renewable energy cooperatives, and manager of Ecopower, a renewable energy cooperative in Belgium; and Andreas Wieg, manager of the New Cooperatives Working Group of the German Cooperative Association. It is co-sponsored by Home Energy Advocates, the Sustainable Energy Outreach Network, and SIT Graduate Institute.

The forum is part of a week-long series of events sponsored by the German Green Party’s Heinrich Böll Foundation called “Race-to-the Top,” which aims to share practical insights into the ways a low carbon energy transition can create local and cooperative business opportunities.

For more information, contact Tad Montgomery at TadMontgomery@HomeEnergyAdvocates.com or 802 251.0502.

SIT Graduate Institute would like to announce that it will be extending its application deadline for all summer and fall 2013 programs. This deadline extension applies to all Master of Arts degree programs, including our full-time and low-residency programs, as well as the CONTACT Summer Peacebuilding Program.

For detailed information on our master’s degree programs, visit the links below:

• Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation
• Sustainable Development
• International Education
• Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages
• Self-designed degree in Intercultural Service, Leadership, and Management

Applicants may begin a new online application or continue an existing application.

If you have questions or would like more information on how to apply, please contact our admissions office for details at admissions@sit.edu, 800 336-1616 (toll free in the US), or 802 258-3510 (outside the US).

Campus News

Open Houses
SIT Graduate Institute will be hosting two upcoming open houses in Vermont and Washington, DC. For more information or to register for an open house, click here.

• April 25, 2013 (Washington, DC Center)
• May 3, 2013 (Vermont campus)

SIT Faculty to Give Plenary Speech at IATEFL Conference
 Dr. Susan Barduhn, chair of SIT’s Low-Residency MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program, will be one of five plenary speakers at the 47th Annual International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) Conference and Exhibition from April 8 to 13, 2013 in Liverpool, UK. With over 4,000 members, IATEFL is one of the most thriving communities of ELT teachers in the world; its mission is to “link, develop and support English Language Teaching professionals” worldwide.

At the end of the project, we asked the students to describe their photographs, and their time at SIT, and we turned their photographs and stories into short videos.

Katelyn Krygowski, a photographer and teacher studying in the Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program, and her classmates focused their camera on the classrooms at SIT. Krygowski also described what inspires her work as a teacher, and the creative lessons that she brings into the classroom to inspire her students.