Centre News

For the spring history course about race and gender in Latin
America, Centre students helped advertise Woman to Woman
clinics, which were held at Ephraim McDowell Health. Students
were also on-hand at the clinics to help out with the different
screening stations and to interpret when needed.

For Brianna Leavitt-Alcantara’s “Development of the United
States” course, students researched local history for Constitution
Square Park (above) and the Danville-Boyle County Convention
and Visitors Bureau.

The Community-Based Learning (CBL) program was introduced at Centre College last fall, encouraging professors to integrate community service into their curriculum. While the program is available to any professor, first-year history professor Brianna Leavitt-Alcantara was the first history teacher to incorporate CBL into her courses this spring.

(Experiential learning, which includes CBL, is a major goal of the College’s strategic plan, CentreForward.)

“In my own educational experience, I’ve felt that learning outside the classroom has been really important and a great way to learn,” she says.

Leavitt-Alcantara approached CBL coordinator Kerri Howard to see how she could incorporate CBL in a history class.

“I made a few phone calls to schools similar to Centre with CBL courses, but history CBL doesn’t seem to be as common at small liberal arts schools,” Howard says. “Basically, Brianna and I just tried to take the general principles of CBL and apply them to a history course.”

In both the “Development of the United States” and “Race and Gender in Latin America” courses, students were required to step out of the classroom and apply their knowledge in the Danville community.

Leavitt-Alcantara notes that there were “so many questions about local history that we don’t have the answers to.” Local organizations lacked the manpower to answer many of these questions.

In the “Development of the United States” course, students researched local history for Constitution Square Park and the Danville-Boyle County Convention and Visitors Bureau. Students searched for primary sources, old newspapers and archives, creating a log of their findings for future researches.

Ethan Epping ’12 of Crestview Hills, Ky., researched the free black community of the 1700’s and 1800’s in Danville. While he was initially skeptical of service learning in a history course, he views the experience as a positive one. “I really gained an appreciation for the type of groundwork that professional historians do,” Epping says.

Another student in the class, Kat Cantelou ’12 of Ooltewah, Tenn., researched the Danville Social and Literary Club, founded in 1839 in Danville.

“The club is a group of men who gather 12 to 14 times a year to have dinner, socialize and discuss different topics,” Cantelou says. “The members are all required to host a meal and be an essayist for a topic.”

In the “Race and Gender in Latin America” class, students were required to complete 10 hours of community service. In efforts to try to better connect the Latino community with public health, students advertised free Woman-to-Woman health clinics in Boyle, Mercer, Garrard, and Lincoln counties. The clinics, which are sponsored by Ephraim McDowell and occur in the fall and spring, garner low attendance among Latino women.

“For the project, my group did research regarding exactly where we could find people from the Latino community within Garrard County,” Andrew Hagerman ’11 of Lexington, Ky., says.

Hagerman and Jake Vollmer ’11 of Mount Sterling, Ky., passed out flyers near a Catholic church in Garrard County, reinforcing their findings that the best place to reach the Latino community was through churches. “It was rewarding to actually think that we could’ve made a difference and weren’t actually just doing something for class credit,” Hagerman says.

Another student in the class, Kat Cantelou ’12 of Ooltewah, Tenn., researched the Danville Social and Literary Club, founded in 1839 in Danville.

“The club is a group of men who gather 12 to 14 times a year to have dinner, socialize and discuss different topics,” Cantelou says. “The members are all required to host a meal and be an essayist for a topic.”

The efforts of the class ultimately brought about recommendations for more accessible and effective clinics, increasing the number of Latino women who attended the clinics in three counties. Students also discovered that bigger challenges, such as the lack of a representative center and translators were often lacking.

Later in the term, the class had in-depth discussions on the transition of Latino immigrants to the United States. “It’s a nice fit to think about how those dynamics play out in our own community,” Leavitt-Alcantara says.

While Leavitt-Alcantara notes that there were “points of frustration and discomfort,” especially with regards to the language barrier, by the end of the project “it helped them see another part of the community, opening their eyes to the immigrant experience.”

In the future, Leavitt-Alcantara plans to continue incorporating CBL in her classes, though perhaps not making it a mandatory component.

Howard also hopes to build on the program for the coming school year. “I’d like to do more education for faculty members, such as a few workshops a couple of times each term about different aspects of CBL (designing a syllabus, supporting students, and so on),” says Howard. “I think it’s also important to bring CBL faculty together so that they can know who else out there is doing community projects and be able to swap ideas.”

Additionally, she would like to see CBL spread more into Division III courses, including biology and chemistry.

“I think that as professors realize that there’s support for them if they want to use CBL (because it is a lot of extra work), they’ll be more willing to try it,” Howard says. “And word gets out as more faculty try CBL, other faculty members see what they’re doing and are more likely to pick it up themselves.”