Levine/Weinberg Fellowship
The COVE selects students annually for the Levine/Weinberg Endowed Summer Fellowship. This fellowship provides highly qualified students — interested in pursuing a career in community and/or public work — with summer internship funding in the field of direct community service. This year’s recipients are:
Cynthia Melendez ’19 is a double major in educational studies and Latin American studies. She interned with ESL teaching program at the Tandana Foundation in Ecuador this summer, building on her participation in the COVE/Lampert trip with Tandana in January and her semester-abroad experience in Chile this spring studying comparative education and social change. One of Melendez’s short-term goals for this experience is to be able to compare and contrast rural education in Chile to rural education in Ecuador, while also looking at the ways in which social movements and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) have emerged to advance intercultural education in both countries. She believes that being able to make this comparison will be beneficial to her career and academic pursuits. Melendez is excited about the opportunity to both gain hands‐on teaching experience within the formal classroom as well as a better understanding of how nonprofits are managed and run. She eagerly returned to Tandana because its mission is not to “help the poor,” impose a developmentalist worldview, or institute any particular religion in a community, but rather to create and nurture real, responsible, and reciprocal relationships among people of different cultures, so that both counterparts can learn from and share with one another.
Melendez is an OUS (Office of Undergraduate Studies) scholar from a single-parent immigrant family from Guatemala, who has utilized the opportunities at Colgate to inform her intellectual, personal, and academic journeys. Having the support of the Levine-Weinberg Fellowship allows her to focus on her professional future in international education and social change sectors, providing her with the opportunity to grow her skill set to be a changemaker after Colgate.
Mary Bryce ’19 is an English literature major, who is in the teacher prep program at Colgate. Mary is from a small town in Maine with few internships for future teachers. She previously worked as youth mentor at an agricultural learning center that works with the local school district to provide experiential learning programs for their students. She loves this center and has continued to work in experiential learning as a staff member of Colgate Outdoor Education. To combine these experiences and goals, she came up with the idea of developing her own program at the center, the Roberts Farm Agricultural Learning Center, to gain experience in both teaching and curriculum planning.
The internship at Roberts Farm consists of planning and preparing programming for two three‐week sessions with groups of 10 to 12 seventh- and eighth-graders. She prepares curricula based on the students and their needs, incorporating adaptation and flexibility of content and methodology. The experiential nature of the center lends itself to hands on, problem-based learning through farm and land trust work. This experience delivers skills in problem solving in the classroom and creativity in lesson planning.
In preparing for the internship, Mary wrote, “I hope to someday be a teacher. To be able to do all of this direct, hands‐on teaching work will be invaluable to me. Students at this stage in the teacher preparation track often do not get to experience teaching directly. More often, they will be observing or working as teachers’ aids at best. While what I learn in the classroom and during teaching observations is important, I feel that nothing can really prepare you for working with students and teaching better than actually doing it. Often, becoming a great teacher comes simply from experience, and the sooner I can start building that experience, the better prepared and the better teacher I will be. In the Colgate Education department, I have also learned about the importance of being able to work with different students, students from varying backgrounds, and different learning styles at a single time. Working at Roberts Farm — because it will help me with problem solving, creativity in the classroom, and lesson planning — will be a great opportunity to gain these experiences. Overall, working at Roberts Farm will help to put me on track to becoming the best teacher I can be.”