The Office of Community and Multicultural Development (CAMD) recently selected six students to partake in its new student scholar program. The scholars for this year’s program are Britney Achin ’08, Jessica Cole ’08, Simone Hill ’08, Mary Krome ’09, Daniah Missmar ’09, and Thomas Smyth ’08. Over the summer, the six scholars will conduct independent research projects concerning diversity and multiculturalism. Each will have a faculty advisor, who will help each scholar throughout the course of their individual study. Lindra Griffith, Dean of CAMD, and Rajesh Mundra, Assistant Dean of CAMD, started developing the program when they entered the CAMD office as administrators last year. “We were thinking of ways to support students who wanted to explore topics related to multiculturalism in a more personal and academic context. The CAMD program was designed to encourage students to pursue rigorously their own interests in multiculturalism, and share that knowledge,” said Mr. Mundra. The Abbot Academy Association approved funding for the grant that allowed CAMD to pilot their scholars program at a meeting in May 2006. The application for this program required students to submit a project proposal, a recommendation from their faculty advisor for their project, a brief biography, and an initial bibliography from preliminary research. After all of the applications had been submitted, a group of faculty members reviewed all of the proposals. The committee chose students’ projects based on their research ideas as well as ability to complete their work and share it with the community. The CAMD Scholars will develop an outline for their projects with their faculty advisor this Spring, to be later reviewed by their advisor and Mr. Mundra. In the summer, each scholar will carry out some of their research through conducting surveys, interviews, case studies, and drawing information from census data. When school resumes in the fall, the scholars will present their completed projects to the Andover community. Some presentations will be used in Martin Luther King, Jr. Day workshops for Uppers and Seniors. Teachers have also shown interest in using the student research for their classrooms. Britney Achin, whose project is titled “I Am: A Study of Self-Identification Among Biracial Teenagers,” will be using her experience as a person of mixed heritage to research how other biracial teenagers identify themselves. “Because the face of multiculturalism is changing, … we need to be constantly engaged in it, adapting to it, trying to become a truly culturally pluralistic society. I think the CAMD scholar program is a great way to do that,” said Achin. Another one of the six CAMD Scholars is Simone Hill, whose independent project is titled “Adversity to Diversity: Understanding the Southern Experience.” The focus of Simone Hill’s project is the changing racial situation of the American South since the period of Reconstruction, primarily centered on the African-American experience and how it is directly rooted in sharecropping and other agrarian values. Hill noted, “I think that the participants in the program will be able to spread their enthusiasm for multicultural and diversity awareness to others, and that it may be able to permeate throughout the school. This is important in the Andover community because sometimes it is easy to ignore and lose awareness of these aspects of life in the activity of school. The project will help remind and awaken awareness of differences for everyone in the community.” The other projects of the CAMD Scholars include “A New Direction in Self-Expression: The Poetry Revolution” by Jessica Cole, “Government-Sponsored Education Programs for Spanish-Speaking Migrant Children in Florida” by Mary Krome, “Why Do They Hate Us?” by Daniah Missmar, and “Racial Quotas at Davidson Fine Arts: 1981-Future” by Thomas Smyth.
