The following experiential learning activities were previously funded by the Virginia Sapiro Academic Enhancement Fund:

  • Students in Professor Christopher Walsh’s course “Living the American Revolution” (WR 120) took a trip to Fort Washington Park in Cambridgeport, which was built by the Continental Army in November 1775. Accompanied by a professional tour guide, the class discussed the history of this local landmark and the history of Boston as an important location in Revolutionary era America.

  • For Senior Lecturer Veronica Rodriguez Ballesteros’ “Third Semester Spanish” (LS 211) and “Intensive Spanish” (LS 123) courses, students had the opportunity to attend the Boston Latino International Film Festival to learn more about LatinX identities and cultures through film. Their experiences at the Festival helped to inform the students’ own work on virtual community-building projects with Hispanic communities in the United States.
  • For the course AA/EN 132, “Write Back Soon: Black Writing and the Prison,” Assistant Professor Ianna Owen invited two speakers for a joint discussion: Robin Levi, an editor and lawyer who wrote “In This Place, Not Of It: Narratives From Women’s Prisons,” a collection of incarceration testimonies that explores carceral conditions and incarceration’s relationship with the absence of social services; and Kelli Dillon, a formerly incarcerated woman who provided one of testimonies in Levi’s work. Both women held a dialogue on the causes of and impacts on the incarceration of under-served women, providing students with an opportunity to speak directly with an editor and an author engaged in studying the prison system.
  • The BU student group Liquid Fun led performance workshops on improvisational comedy for two sections of Senior Lecturer Kevin Barents’ WR 151 course “Improvisation Now!” Students learned about fundamental improv skills and techniques, watched scenes performed by the group, and participated in their own improv comedy exercises to better understand improvisational theater.
  • Language students from courses of all levels in the Japanese Program (in the World Literatures and Languages Department) hosted a cultural exchange on the BU campus with recently-arrived Japanese students from the Showa Boston Institute. The impacts of the pandemic have made it difficult for students to travel abroad for immersive experiences, and this social gathering helped students from both BU and the Showa Boston Institute connect with native speakers and share cultural experiences.
  • To learn about radio journalism and podcasting techniques, students in Associate Professor Benjamin Siegel’s HI 525 course, “Development in Global Perspective,” met virtually with NPR reporters Laurel Wamsley and Simone Popperl to learn about the planning and production of radio shows. The journalistic expertise of these reporters helped to inform the creation of a collective class podcast about the history of a selected development project.
  • For the WR 152 course “Examining Graphic Medicine,” Lecturer Katherine Stebbins invited Dr. Ben Schwartz (Chief Creative Officer at the Columbia University Medical Center & a New Yorker cartoonist) and Whit Taylor (cartoonist, editor, and comics writer) to speak on their experiences with medicine and graphic art. The speakers and the students discussed the use of comics to communicate the history of science and medicine, the experiences of physicians and patients, and the challenges of public health education.