Education, and Social Change: how and why I came to be at SIT for almost 10 years (and counting)…
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Rebecca Bell is Lead Admissions Counselor for the Programs in Intercultural Service, Leadership and Management |
I was a graduate student in the program in Intercultural Service, Leadership and Management (PIM) at SIT in 1998/99, and often prospective students who come to visit SIT, or people I talk to in the field ask me “why didn’t you ever leave SIT”. The answer to that is twofold. I did leave. I just chose to come back.
After my SIT coursework was done in 1999, I spent a year living and working in Namibia with an organization that runs experiential, field-based study abroad programs for US college students (very similar to SIT’s Study Abroad Programs, except through a different school). This was my Practicum for SIT. I had studied abroad with this organization when I was in undergrad, and I saw this as the perfect opportunity to return to a place and an organization that had changed my life and perspective in untold ways.
The position was a perfect one in terms of my Practicum goals. I had studied a combination of Sustainable Development and International Education when I was at SIT because I am interested in the intersection between education and social justice/social change. Because the program I was working on focused on women and development and the transition from apartheid to democracy, that position in Namibia offered me the opportunity to deepen some of the content of my Sustainable Development courses. The position also offered me the everyday practice of some of my International Education training in terms of the day to day running of a study abroad program and engaging the different learning styles of the participants. I loved that job. At the end of my practicum year, I was trying to decide whether or not to stay on longer in that position in Namibia or to return to SIT and accept a position as a Teaching Assistant (TA) in the PIM program. I chose to return to SIT, for many of the same reasons I had chosen to go to Namibia: I saw this as the perfect opportunity to return to a place and an organization that had changed my life and perspective in untold ways.
I learned a lot as a TA. It is a unique opportunity offered to a few students who have completed the on-campus phase every year. It allows you to further engage with the faculty, deepen your understanding of the course content and the institution. It also allowed me to continue to develop some of those key skills I had learned as a student at SIT: training, facilitation, active listening, feedback, planning and design, working with different learning styles and intercultural communication (to name a few). It was also another very natural match for my interests in the connections of education and social change, since that is what SIT is all about.
During that time as a TA, I wrote my Capstone and finished my degree with SIT. After graduation, I was faced with the common dilemma: what next? That is when I became interested in the work the admissions office at SIT was doing for the graduate programs. It seemed to me that admissions work at SIT would be a good combination of my interests in access to education, education as a tool for social change and training future social change agents. I was right.
Every day in my work here in admissions at SIT I am in contact with you—the prospective student—who wants to make this world a better place. Every day, I talk to people from all over the world, read your essays and learn about some of the amazing work you have been doing, will do in the future, or dream of doing. I learn about your intercultural experiences, from funny stories about travel gone awry to very serious accounts of family and friends who have made incredible sacrifice for what they believe in. I hope that through my work I am making access to SIT’s unique and transformative education more of a reality, and thereby creating a larger and larger network of people who have a firm commitment to making a more just and sustainable word. If this is the case, then I am very happy to be here in the mountains of Vermont, almost 10 years after I initially came here, doing exactly what I set out to do…
Tags: - World Learning, Prog in Intercultural Serv Lead and Mgt, Rebecca Bell, SIT
January 10, 2008 at 6:01 pm |
An what a TA you were! It was a joy to have you in that role and subsequently as my favorite supervisor. I very much appreciate your thoughts on the role of the admissions counselor, and hope you and everyone else in PAT and MAT (and anyone else reading this) recognize how crucial and important the role is! I miss you, and hope you’re well.
June 2, 2008 at 12:19 pm |
Having seen Rebecca and David Shallenberger at the NAFSA 2008 Conference in DC recently and remarking that I “miss” SIT, Rebecca invited me to (b)log on – so here I am. I’m not sure I’m in the right “spot” in the virtual world, but when I was at SIT, I intuitively knew (for the first time in my forty-something life) that I had arrived at a very special place and in a community with which I shared core values. Since leaving about five years ago, I have found relatively few communities that try as earnestly to listen to others and allow others to be heard as equitably and purposefully as I experienced at SIT.
However, one place I have found that approaches this is McGill University in Montreal, Quebec where I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (a continuation of the SLM degree -ad hoc and interdisciplinary). Because of, in part, my studies at SIT, I was accepted at an advanced level into the program. The self-discipline and real world experience SIT values prepared me well for this course of study. So for those who might be wondering whether SIT’s non-graded, experiential ed. approach is going to be viewed by others as “soft”, I would reassure you that the “hard” or rigorous aspects of studying in non-conventional settings with non-conventional people have paid off one hundred times over for me- personally and professionally!
Michele P.