Last year, Bates faculty member Brian J. Evans (Theater and Dance, Africana Studies) taught a First Year Seminar entitled “Embodied Activism.” We wrote about the course and its community-engaged project in this previous blog post. In that course, Evans invited his students to explore, among other things, how contemporary Mainers embody their activism. The result was a beautiful booklet that shares those Maine-based stories. 

At last month’s annual conference of the Associate of American Colleges and Universities in Washington, D.C., Evans presented insights from that course in a session entitled, “Co-Creation in Education: Strengthening Communities through Curricular Partnerships.” He initiated that session with his own embodied activism as he used spoken word to invite attendees to exit the typical staid academic conference session and enter what we might call a pedagogy of love. Watch a short performance of his poem “Shine” here.

Professor Evans’s community-engaged course was supported by the Maine-based activists who shared their experience and wisdom with his students, the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, and the Periclean Faculty Leadership (PFL) Program–a Mellon-funded, Project Pericles faculty leadership initiative that supports innovative curricula deepening students’ engagement with critical societal issues in order to contribute meaningfully to communities.