| Students
and administrators from the nation’s “Work Colleges” – so
called because a college job is an integral part of every student’s
educational program at these institutions – will meet at Berea
College Thursday – Sunday, Oct. 28-31. The event is the annual
fall conference of the Work Colleges Consortium (WCC).
The WCC’s six member institutions include Berea and Alice Lloyd
College in Kentucky; Blackburn (Ill.) College; College of the Ozarks
in Missouri; Sterling (Vt.) College; and Warren Wilson College in North
Carolina.
The conference will include activities designed to help participants
examine work from multiple perspectives ranging from individual experience
through institutional programs to global issues and service.
Guest speaker for the conference will be ethicist and author Gil Meilaender,
Ph.D. Meilaender has edited a volume entitled Working: Its Meaning
and Its Limits (2000) a volume in the University of Notre Dame Press’s
series on the ethics of everyday life. He is the Richard & Phyllis
Duesenberg Professor of Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University.
Students from the work colleges, especially a team from Berea, played
a major role in designing the conference. Among the activities planned
are:
Friday, Oct. 29
11 a.m. – 1 p.m. – visits to student work places on Berea’s
campus, including student craft workshops, the College Farm and the
planetarium and geology museum.
6 – 6:45 p.m., Trustees Room, Seabury Center – guest speaker
Gil Meilaender
Saturday, Oct. 30
9 a.m. – 2 p.m. – Service project at the MERJ Cooperative
on Hwy 421 in Berea, a sustainable community center promoting access
to clean local food and knowledge sharing about sustainable living
which opened last spring. WCC students will be helping with clean-up
on the property and in the greenhouses; clearing fence lines; pruning
and cutting trees, and cleaning out garden beds.
On each Work College campus, there has been a historical recognition
of the value of work and an institutional commitment to promote an
understanding of that value among students through establishment of
a work program. These work programs help students to understand work
as a tool for experiential education, as a means of serving the community,
and as a place for integrating academic learning, practical knowledge,
and life lived in the larger community. The colleges blend courses
in liberal learning and applied studies with their own particular vision
of the undergraduate curriculum.
Berea College’s first constitution (1859) included a statement
that the school would try and make work opportunities available for
students as a means of making higher education affordable. In 1906,
Berea formalized its work program when it required all students to
work a minimum of 7 hours a week in a campus job. Today, students work
in more than 140 departments on campus and in community service positions
off-campus.
The Work Colleges Consortium was established in 1996 to foster collaboration
and information sharing between member institutions, assist members
to improve their programs, develop and coordinate work/service/learning
projects both locally and nationally, and to promote the dissemination
of effective student work-learning programs more widely throughout
American post-secondary educational institutions. The site of the WCC
annual conference rotates yearly among member campuses.
The WCC is headquartered at Berea College and is directed by Dr. Dennis
Jacobs. For more information about the WCC and member institutions,
visit www.workcolleges.org. For more about the conference, contact
Dennis Jacobs at (859) 985-3154 or .
|
