Programs Include Sept. 15 Event, Cultural Education and Animation Training
Image by Katharine Webster
09/07/2016
Media contacts: Christine Gillette, 978-934-2209 or Christine_Gillette@uml.edu and Nancy Cicco, 978-934-4944 or Nancy_Cicco@uml.edu
LOWELL, Mass. – Three UMass Lowell faculty members recently selected to receive creative economy grants from the UMass President’s Office will invest the funding in community projects in Lowell and Lawrence.
History Prof. Chad Montrie received a $22,182 grant for his “Urban Waters Revolution” project, which will provide education plans and signs at the new Ferrous Park in Lawrence, located at the confluence of the Spicket and Merrimack rivers. Montrie is working with Groundwork Lawrence, Lawrence Heritage State Park and the Essex Art Center on the project.
Ferrous Park was once the site of a laboratory where Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to study and teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked on early experiments in municipal water and sewage treatment. Those experiments enabled Lawrence to become the first city in the country to filter all its water to prevent disease.
Before the lab opened, Richards and a male colleague performed a water-quality survey of the entire state, collecting about 100,000 water samples. Richards tested 40,000 of them and created the first water-purity tables, a milestone in public health.
“She created the first water-quality standards in the world” but did not get credit for her work, Montrie said.
The educational materials that will be produced with the grant will focus on history and Richards’ role, the science of clean water and art. The grant also will fund the first annual Ellen Swallow Richards Lecture, which will be given by Susan Solomon, Ph.D., the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science at MIT, on Thursday, Sept. 15. The event, which is free, is at 6 p.m. at the Everett Mill, Third Floor, 15 Union St., Lawrence. Members of the public interested in attending should RSVP to Chad_Montrie@uml.edu.
Established in 2007, the Creative Economy Fund annually awards grants in support projects by faculty on the UMass campuses in the arts, humanities and social sciences that benefit the economy and enhance the quality of life in communities. This year, UMass Lowell received three of the 11 grants awarded.
In addition to Montrie, UMass Lowell recipients include faculty in the Center for Asian American Studies who won $23,750 to collect, illustrate and publish folktales from Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar (Burma) for use in the Lowell public schools. Thirty percent, or more than 4,100 children, in Lowell schools are Asian American, according to the state Department of Education. Nearly all are Southeast Asians, as Lowell has the second-largest community of Cambodian immigrants in the nation.
“A narrative is a way of making sense of experience,” said Psychology Prof. Allyssa McCabe, who studies the role of narrative development in children’s literacy. “We want to prepare these stories both because the content will engage students who are at risk of dropping out, as are many Southeast Asian American students, and so that the stories make sense to them on a very deep level.”
The project began when two professors in UMass Lowell’s Graduate School of Education, Phitsamay Uy and MinJeong Kim, each had a child, which led the faculty to start talking about the difficulty of finding children’s books about the cultures their families came from or the experiences of Asian American immigrants, especially Southeast Asians.
Kim was working with a kindergarten teacher at the Bartlett School in Lowell who collected Khmer stories for use in her classroom, and Uy and McCabe were already collecting Southeast Asian stories for their research. They sometimes found self-published books at conferences. But teachers didn’t have access to these books and stories or training in how to use them effectively. New state teacher evaluation standards require teachers to engage with families and the community. Uy and Kim saw a huge need – and an opportunity to involve families who are often shy about working with the schools because of language and cultural differences.
“These families have lots to offer,” Uy said. “Our immigrant communities all have stories they grow up with.”
The researchers plan to invite students from UMass Lowell and Lowell schools, along with parents, to community gatherings and ask them to recount folktales and their own experiences as immigrants. From those, the professors will select some to work with local authors to put them in writing and art students to illustrate them for picture books. Then, they will train local teachers to incorporate them into the curriculum.
Uy will evaluate whether the community process helps the parents and schools work together better, Kim will follow the teachers for a year to evaluate how they’re using the books and McCabe will study the impact on children. They hope their work will serve as a model for other schools and communities.
“Folktales are very moral-centered and culturally rich, so these folktales and multicultural children’s books can be used as part of teaching critical-thinking skills and multicultural awareness under the Common Core standards – not just for this population, but for all kids,” Kim said.
The third creative economy grant to UMass Lowell went to Assistant Prof. Pouya Afshar who teaches in the Department of Art and Design, who will start an animation program for local middle- and high-school students.
When Afshar was a high school in Iran, he was required to study math and physics instead of art. After his family moved to the United States, he was able to attend the California Institute of the Arts as an undergraduate and, as a teaching assistant, helped run animation workshops for middle- and high-school students in Los Angeles. Now he will use his $18,669 Creative Economy grant to start a similar program at Lowell High School through which high-schoolers will be trained in animation by UMass Lowell art and design majors.
“I didn’t get to study what I wanted in high school and I see how rewarding it is for high school students to follow their passions and get to do what they want,” said Afshar, who will work with faculty in the Graduate School of Education to train the student instructors.
The idea is to provide the high school students with an outlet for self-expression, while teaching professional skills to those interested in a career in digital media.
“The final film is going to be a group project and it’s going to be based on an idea they come up with about their life in Lowell,” Afshar said. “We’re going to encourage them to think about their environment, where they live, their culture, their society.”
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