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Credit: Photo by: Roy Groething
Assistant Professor of music Nanette
DeJong looks on as Music 101 student
Israel Isales thumps out a salsa beat on
his conga drums. Introduction to music
is one class that has been revised to be
more multicultural under auspices of the
Bildner Campus Diversity Initiative.
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Students of different cultures and races at Rutgers live side by side, but lead largely separate lives. “What are the barriers here?” asks Isabel Nazario, associate vice president for academic and public partnerships in the arts and humanities, and co-author of the Bildner proposal. “What are the assumptions at Rutgers? How do we come up with an action plan where we see some results in the future?”
For example, Nazario says, it may be rare that students of different backgrounds congregate to watch “Amandla!,” a movie about South African resistance through music, or “Real Women Have Curves,” about a Mexican-American girl torn between college and her old world family. But between 300 and 400 people of different cultures attended those two movie nights last fall. The events were cocurricular activities that are part of the grand scheme of cultural interaction inside and outside the classroom.
The following glimpses of three separate programs, one on each
campus, demonstrate the way in which the Bildner initiative
has made a difference.
Word power in Camden
Camden is a short ride from Philadelphia, but for many of the students at Rutgers-Camden, the urban centers are a world away from the small-town life they are used to.
“These students were not conscious that they were from all white suburbs,” says Assistant Professor Holly Blackford. “It never occurred to them to even think about it.”
As director of the campus’s writing program, Blackford used money from the Bildner grant to coordinate a letter-writing program between a class of high school freshmen from West Philadelphia High School and students in “English Composition 102.”
“Comp 102” instructor Christine Fitzsimons says that the student body at West Philadelphia High School is about 98 percent African-American. About 60 percent of the freshmen enrolled in Camden in fall 2003 were white, compared to 15 percent in the entire Philadelphia school district.
The students exchanged ideas about the meaning of the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Almost immediately, Blackford says, the freshmen quizzed the composition students on college life, and the writing students were bewildered when they learned that the students at West Philadelphia
didn’t even have access to a guidance counselor. “Our students were immediately inspired to promote college and the college experience,” Blackford says.
Throughout the series of five letters exchanged over the course of the spring 2004 semester, the students discussed less weighty topics as well. Many of the girls wanted to know about the dating scene and what “college boys” were like.
Several of the students also sought a glimpse into the freedom college offers. To protect first-year students, administrators have taken to escorting the students from class to class, isolating them from upperclassmen, Blackford says.
The students from both classes finally met up at an event called Comp-Poster. There, the composition students prepared research posters on the landmark Brown decision, and both college and high school students took in a documentary on the subject. The event was large, with about 200 students from other composition classes participating.
“What we’re teaching in composition is communication,” says Tess Schaufler, an English graduate student and teaching assistant who organized the Comp-Poster event. “In this day and age a lot of that means knowing how to read visual images. In their careers it’s likely they’re going to have to think about visually putting something together, whether it’s PowerPoint, a brochure or arranging things on a business Web site.”
Redefining musical canons
In prior years, students who took “Introduction to Music” on the New Brunswick/Piscataway campus likely never learned about Trinidadian pan steel orchestras, the pelog and slendro music scales of Indonesia or gagaku court music of Japan.
Western music conventions dominated most of the curriculum and students studied composers with names like Bach, Schubert, Vivaldi and Wagner. But “Music 101,” taught by Associate Professor Andrew Kirkman and Assistant Professor Nanette DeJong, introduced hundreds of students to Radiohead, Mr. Bhangra, Sugarhill Gang and Boukman Experyans of Haiti.
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