Jesuit Foundation Supports Pedagogy, Prison Projects
The fall Jesuit Foundation Grants awarded a total of $55,000 to projects focused on ecclesiastical architecture, prisons, and hip hop, among others. All projects are set to begin this spring.
Grants for pedagogical projects include curriculum changes, student leadership programs, and technology updates. In their project “The Building of Spirituality: Examining Ecclesiastical Architecture in a Learning Module for History,” Nina Bakasian, History, and Ginny Wallace, Education, will examine the history and significance of religious architecture in the San Francisco Bay Area as part of their History 110 course, European Civilization.
“Creating Community: Student Leadership and Diversity Training in the Ignatian Tradition” will create a new training program and a specialized curriculum for student leaders. The project was developed by Felicia Lee, University Life, Steve Corder, S.J, Ignatian Fellow, Ray Quirolgico, Residence Life, and Alison Richardson, Student Activities.
“Prisons & Punishment: A Service Learning Approach to the Philosophy of Incarceration” is a service learning course that will match USF student tutors with student-inmates at a state prison in the Bay Area. The project is coordinated by Jeff Paris, Philosophy.
Aranzazu Borrachero, Modern and Classical Languages, will create a workshop series for Spanish faculty to design and implement a new interdisciplinary core curriculum as part of the project, “Spanish Studies at USF: A Proposal for Curriculum Change.”
The project is designed to create compatible language and literature programs at USF and three Jesuit universities abroad: Universidad Javeriana de Bogota, Colombia; Universidad Iberoamericana de Puebla, Mexico; and Universidad Alberto Hurtado de Santiago, Chile. An exchange of research, faculty and students with other institutions, international guest lecturers, and creation of cross-curriculum foreign language programs at USF will be some of the ways the partner schools will collaborate.
“The complexity of reality calls for interdisciplinary education,” Borrachero said. “International education does not just refer to creating conditions for our students to travel more, but to develop curriculum within an international context.”
Vincent Pizzuto, Theology, has designed a course, “The Hermeneutics of Jesus,” to study Jesus as a historical and religious figure.
Richard Spohn, former director of the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good, developed a six-session, non-credit training program for students on the skills and principles of “smart activism” called “Project Smart Activist.”
David Wolber and Chris Brooks, Computer Science, plan to coordinate a USF student trip to Tacnu, Peru to update two Jesuit schools with new computers, networks, and software as part of their project, “Bridging the Digital Divide in Peru.”
An Ignatian Spirituality Grant was awarded to Dina Gardner, University Ministry, for a spring break immersion trip to L’Arche, a faith-based community in Toronto, Canada for people with developmental disabilities.
Community in Conversation Grants this year focus on conflict, family business, and cultural expression. “The Survivors of War Project” by Roberto Gutierrez Varea, Visual and Performing Arts, addresses issues of civil and human rights in a series of dialogues culminating in an original performance of the play, The Doll Hospital.
The project will bring together El Teatro Jornalero!, an immigrant day-laborer theater company founded by Gutierrez Varea; The Religion and Immigration Project at USF; and various civil, social, and human rights groups in San Francisco for several panel discussions on the nature of conflict and its impact on women, children, and the impoverished. “We are looking at survivors of conflict and larger cycles of violence,” Gutierrez Varea said. “We want to examine how the common folk find solidarity in resistance to conflict.”
The Doll Hospital is an original production in the style of an epic Greek play. “We can relate the experience of the Trojan women in Euripides’ play to life in Latin America and civil rights in the Middle East, and loop all these cycles of conflict together in a creative dialogue,” Gutierrez Varea said.
The “Enterprising Housing Initiative for Family Business” by Eugene Muscat, School of Business and Management, is an architectural design exercise in collaboration with Asian Neighborhood Design and the Gellert Family Business Center to generate solutions to the living and working needs of low-income families operating home-based businesses in San Francisco.
Allyn Nobles, Yuchengco Philippine Studies, will present a hip hop summit titled “Lenzes: A Summit on the Filipino Hip Hop Perspective” in March for the USF and south-of-Market, inner-city Filipino youth communities. The summit will celebrate Filipinos’ artistic cultural expression.
A research grant awarded to Susan Katz, School of Education, will be used to examine the effect of teacher-student relationships and social networks on the academic success of Roma (gypsy) students in Hungary. The project is titled “Educational Justice for Roma Students in Hungary: An Ethnographic Study of the Ghandi Gymnasium.”
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