Field work course receives award

Juliana Kiyan Staff Writer

The Poughkeepsie Institute received the 2005 America’s Community Partners of the Year award from the National Society for Experiential Education (NSEE). The Poughkeepsie Institute is a team-taught, interdisciplinary and intercollegiate course that focuses on community field work. A local press conference on Nov. 2 featured directors and students of the program, who presented the Institute’s most recent research on the arts community in Poughkeepsie.

Director of the Poughkeepsie Institute and Field Work at Vassar Peter Leonard said that the honor is “truly a community award and educational accomplishment. This award indicates what a great collaborative community Poughkeepsie is.”

At the NSEE’s National Conference in Philadelphia on Oct. 29, Leonard jointly accepted the award with Kurt Daw, Dean of Fine and Performing Arts at SUNY New Paltz, and Maria Marewski, Executive Director of the Children’s Media Project. The NSEE highlighted the Poughkeepsie Institutes’s 2004 report, “The Arts: Poughkeepsie’s Fragile Promise,” which documented “the aesthetic, educational and civic emergence of art in Poughkeepsie, even as it underlines the fragility of this potentially community-enhancing development,” according to its executive summary.

Dean of the Faculty Ronald Sharp said, “Peter Leonard has done a superb job of coordinating this program with colleagues from other local colleges and universities. We are delighted to be collaborating in this way to enhance the quality of life in Poughkeepsie."

The foundation for the course was initiated in 1994 by a senior seminar that analyzed the role of community in America. The Poughkeepsie Institute was created through a legal ordinance the following year, with the city as its main partner.

The semester-long course is taught by a range of talents from the participating colleges and community institutes: Culinary Institute of America, Dutchess Community College, Marist , SUNY New Paltz and Vassar.

“The role experience plays in education attaches what you think to what you do…reuniting the relationship between thought and action,” said Leonard.

As the course’s final exam, students hold a press conference in front of local leaders, during which they present their research in a report and a short film. The topic of the report is of local concern, yet it holds national implications.

Leonard hopes that the recognition which the national award has brought to the Poughkeepsie Institute will illustrate the importance of field work in the college experience. He said, “The collaborative work of the students in the Poughkeepsie Institutes shows in a small way, a road map on how intellectual life can count for community life.”