'Issue 4' Archive
This fourth edition of Civic Matters, a journal about civic engagement by members of the Bryn Mawr College community, again brings together pieces by instructors, staff, students, and community partners as they think about the experience of crossing campus boundaries and engaging with the community beyond our borders …
These thoughts of geographical and class consciousness are never far from my mind, and they affect both what and how I teach. The professor-student relationship and the imparting of specialized academic knowledge no longer form the all-encompassing pedagogical framework they once did. I used to survey the faces in my classroom and see students, and then individuals. Now I see “people in the world,” in the deceptively simple vernacular of a good friend of mine. I see them as citizens who exist, wittingly or not, in relation to other people and places they’ve lived in, encountered, and never heard of …
My mother’s matter-of-fact, Pennsylvania Dutch practicality was the primer by which I had been taught so many things, including civic engagement. Ours was not the world of charity balls and patrons. We simply knew that, if there was work to be done, we should lend a hand. Somebody had to …
Bryn Mawr College and ACPPA Community Art Center have been collaborating over the past year to bring a number of exciting arts opportunities to the College and to the Norristown community. Recently, a member of the Civic Matters editorial team, Julie Zaebst, had an opportunity to talk with artistic director Amy Grebe and student Adrienne Webb about their own work as artists and the “8,001 ways to partner together” that they have come up with over the past year …
Below is a photo essay of the Art Club’s Art Gallery Opening, which took place in Arnecliffe Studio in November 2009.
Through participation in various trainings and community organizing efforts, across lines of race, class, gender, and ethnicity and in solidarity with women from around the world, I saw clearly for the first time the imperative of interconnectedness in the ongoing struggle for social justice in what is becoming an increasingly intimate global community. As I listened to the stories of the women around me, learned from their experiences, and at times discovered surprisingly similar realities in the U.S., I began to reflect more seriously on the desperate need for collective, policy-driven responses and strategies to address global social problems …
In 2006, three women who lived in Havertown, a small community just south of Bryn Mawr, came together and unintentionally started a revolution. They included a stay-at-home mother, a small business owner, and an anthropology graduate student finishing her doctorate at nearby University of Pennsylvania (Penn). Having met each other through volunteer work, they soon realized that they shared two passions: improving the quality of their local neighborhood and business district as well as sustainable, healthy eating …