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Pilot Project Profile - Bates CollegeLead Contacts | Issue Focus | Pilot Project Plan | Timeline | Progress Reports Lead Contacts
Issue Focus
Progress Reports
Pilot Project PlanBackgroundNicole Witherbee, Federal Budget Analyst for the Maine Center for Economic Policy, will serve as part-time Project Coordinator for the Bates-Bonner PolicyOptions Initiative through August, 2010. Grant funds would also support the hiring of a student assistant and other project expenses such as conference travel. As Project Coordinator, Nicole Witherbee will oversee, mentor, and vet student policy research and the preparation of policy briefs for the Bonner Policy Options wiki. Most of the research will come from the Bates upper-level seminar “Internships in Public Policy Research” (Politics 423), currently taught by Nicole Witherbee herself. At the same time, Nicole and David Scobey are reaching out to faculty whose courses, research, community projects, and senior-thesis students offer opportunities for further policy briefs. Student Engagement
The Harward Center partnered with the Politics Department to launch Politics 423: a practitioner-taught policy research course in which students pursue individual projects with and for Maine government agencies, advocacy groups, and CBOs (see more below under faculty engagement). Politics 423 students have worked with more than two dozen partners; many have gone to jobs with PIRGs, policy non-profits, and political organizations. Students this year worked for the Maine Women’s Lobby, the League of Young Voters, Maine Equal Justice Partners, the Office of Minority Health, the Maine State Employees Union, and a Maine State Senator for their internships.
Politics 423 represents an ideal platform for policy-based civic engagement. Yet student research in the course has been highly localistic and contextual, designed to meet the needs of our partners. In its first years, the course did not necessarily integrate project partnerships with more systemic policy debates, constraining the students’ civic development, their breadth of exposure, and their contribution to a broader culture of democratic policy-making. Linking Politics 423 to the PolicyOptions network will expand the efficacy of our policy work without diluting our commitment to grounded, collaborative work.
In the Winter 2010 Term, the Politics 423 cohort will be immersed more fully in the PolicyOptions wiki from the start of Winter Term, using it as a medium for assembling relevant resources, drafting issue briefs, and revising their work.
The students in Politics 423 each year will remain the core of our PolicyOptions participation, but we hope to add as many as a half-dozen policy briefs each year from across the curriculum.
Already this Winter 2009 Term, several members of the Politics 423 cohort were CBR Fellows, and we expect that our new Bonner Leaders will be interested in taking part in (and perhaps working for) the PolicyOptions project.
All of this work will benefit from a student assistant to aid Nicole Witherbee in her leadership of the Bates-Bonner Policy Options initiative. A student project staffer will help to support Politics 423 and its partnerships; orient students to the wiki and maintain its content and linkages; help in the vetting of issue briefs; provide support to our outreach to other Bates faculty and students; and help to organize events and presentations.
Faculty Engagement
Drawing on her incomparable range of knowledge and relationships, Peggy Rotundo each fall develops policy partnerships and matches them with prospective students for the Winter Term seminar Politics 423. In its first three years, the course was taught by a retired staffer of the state legislative research office. Nicole Witherbee took on the seminar this year and will teach it in 2010. Nicole has broad experience and deep expertise in policy analysis: as a federal budget analyst for Maine Center for Economic Policy, the state’s most important NGO dedicated to fiscal, economic, and development issues; through her previous work on poverty, gender, and community development issues; and as a graduate of the Heller School’s doctoral program at Brandeis University. Equally important, she has rich experience as a part-time college educator, having taught for several years at the University of Southern Maine and Salem State College.
In Politics 423 this Winter Term (January-April, 2009), Nicole instituted a series of changes that effectively wove the PolicyOptions initiative into the syllabus and seminar requirements. She required students to acclimate themselves to the wiki, to use the Policy Briefs template in drafting their research and analysis, and to load their findings into the wiki. (She also required each researcher to “re-translate” her/his research back into a more concise, conclusive deliverable for the community partner.) As in past years, the course included a visit to the state Capitol in Augusta (and a meeting with the Governor), as well as an end-of-term presentation session to which all partners were invited.
The new shape of Politics 423 has incorporated the core aspects of the PolicyOptions project design: use of the wiki to foster collectively-produced “research in public,” use of the Policy Briefs template to systematize student analysis and presentation, use of community partners as interlocutors, guides, and “co-educators” for our students, and use of convenings to advance students’ civic development. Our students are dispersed in individual policy projects rather than working together on one, big issue; so that bringing community partners together in big events or an “editorial board” ended up making less sense than asking them to vet student research on their own issue, in their own time.
We are currently startly to enlarge Bates participation in the PolicyOptions network, reaching out to colleagues in Education, Economics, Politics, Sociology, and other departments whose courses, thesis students, and scholarly research offer opportunities for engaged policy work. Deliberative Democracy Forum
When the Harward Center for Community Partnerships was launched in 2005, Bates had neither a coordinated program of student policy engagement nor strong links to the Bonner network. Happily this has changed in the past four years. Early on, Director David Scobey and Associate Director Peggy Rotundo (who led the Center for Service-Learning and has long served in the Maine legislature) made a strategic commitment to supplement Bates’ strong record of community partnership and service with a more robust role for policy and political issues in the College’s civic engagement work. The Center launched a Civic Forum series, bringing diverse experts, practitioners, advocates, and activists to campus to discuss public issues of importance to Maine and beyond. (Most Civic Forums are re-broadcast as part of the “Speaking In Maine” program of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network.)
As this project grows, we will continue to explore the best ways to present and make public the fruits of student policy research. Bates hosts an effective, important student research fair in late March, the Mount David Summit, and it may make sense to invite community partners and other stakeholders to a student policy presentations then. Similarly, the Maine Center for Economic Policy (Nicole Witherbee’s workplace) publishes a monthly series of issue briefs, and it may make sense to invite students to publish selected research projects there—giving publicity to their partners’ issues and garnering a publication credit for themselves. We are not sure what will be the best venues for making public our students’ public work—in addition to the Policy Options wiki—and we look forward to developing this aspect of the project. Editorial/Advisory BoardNicole Witherbee is asking community partners to vet both the final products and the wiki-based issue briefs.
TimelineSpring 2009
Summer 2009
Fall 2009
Spring 2010
Summer 2010
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