Category: Courses & Independent Study

Betsy Cannon ‘11, a physics major who now works as a programmer for tumblr.com, describes her path into programming as a “winding journey”. After she graduated, Cannon spent her first…

This election season, one thing seems clearer than ever: it’s hard to get a room of people to agree on anything related to politics. But on Saturday, September 22, 65 student activists from Northfield, Faribault, and the Twin Cities came together around a topic that everyone could support: political advocacy skills.

French and Francophone Studies professor Cherif Keita has spent more than a decade of his life researching the life of John Dube (1871-1946), the first president of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC). “When I visited South Africa for the first time in January 1999,” Keita said,“I realized the extent to which Apartheid, as the most violent form of European colonialism, had robbed Africans of their sense of pride and self-worth.” For this reason, Keita said, he turned to film-making “to dig into the past and bring to Africans of today the models of positive leadership that, as a people, we are sorely lacking right now on the continent.”

Nancy Wilkie, William H. Laird Professor of Classics, Anthropology and the Liberal Arts and co-coordinator of the Archaeology Concentration at Carleton College, has been teaching at Carleton since 1974. She also served as President of the Archaeological Institute of America from 1998-2002 and currently is an Honorary President of that organization.
Her archaeological career began in 1968, when she helped to survey the region around the Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Greece and then excavated at the site of Nichoria from 1969-1975. She also has worked in the region of Delphi and Lamia in Greece, conducted excavations in the Nile Delta of Egypt, and directed an archaeological survey in Grevena, Southwest Macedonia, Greece in all of which many Carleton students were able to participate.

I initially became involved with the CCCE my freshman year as a volunteer with Uplift, a tutoring program focused primarily on helping Somali youth at Fairbault Middle School. We travel to Fairbault to help mostly ELL students with their homework and provide a fun and educational after school space. I became a program director for Uplift my sophomore year and am still one today. I started working as both the One Time Events Coordinator and the Political Engagement Coordinator in the CCCE this fall. The One Time Events portion of my job includes responding to requests from the community members for volunteers and helping student run programs including Carls-Against-Cancer, Books for Africa, and the Red Cross.

The Center for Community and Civic Engagement, with support from the VIZ initiative, presents a retrospective of the Carleton College Election Study: Lights! Action! (Smoke & Mirrors?) CAMPAIGNS! The exhibit, which opens November 13 in the three Weitz Center White Spaces and will be up for one week, features the work of students in three Carleton courses analyzing media coverage of the elections since 2000. Students will be on hand from 12-1 to explain their posters and findings.  Electoral cupcakes will be offered as treats.

In a recent editorial about the achievement gap in the StarTribune, Northfield’s TORCH (Tackling Obstacle, Raising College Hopes) was given a shout-out. Carleton and TORCH have a long-standing partnership in this work. With the help of Carls and Oles, this organization has made it possible for students in Northfield to raise the Latino graduation rate from 36 percent in 2004 to 100 percent in this past year.

Read the full article on the StarTribune website.

Come for pizza, talk to others who have similar projects, and get support for your community engaged comps project.

Read the latest issue of the Periclean Progress Newsletter.