The Gaudino Fund is offering a Gaudino Fellowship for a group of 2 to 4 students during the Summer of 2021, based upon a proposed foreign or domestic collaborative project to be held in the same general location, reflecting values identified in the Gaudino Mission Statement, and structured in a manner consistent with Gaudino’s seminal experiential education programs which included separate home stays for each fellow, either joint or separate work/engagement internships, accompanied by structured opportunities for personal reflection. The team selected will be guided and overseen by the Gaudino Scholar, who will help ensure successful arrangements and will conduct appropriate preparatory discussions and follow-up sessions to optimize and help students articulate lessons learned from the overall experience.
Teams of students should organize their projects around two main components: confronting the unfamiliar and self-reflection. The Gaudino Board is particularly interested in projects that encourage students to confront their own personal beliefs, values or views as they are revealed in the face of ‘difference,’ while at the same time developing “habits of the mind,” i.e. applying conceptual thinking and intellectual analysis to such challenging experiences. The Gaudino Board is looking for projects that address specific intellectual problems through direct experience, undertaken preferably in a social milieu that is previously unfamiliar or even uncomfortable to the applicant. For example, proposed projects could address issues of socioeconomic class, race, public health, environmental degradation, human rights, religion, sexuality, violence or migration.
Each team is expected to meet with the Gaudino Scholar in the Spring and submit their group application by April 1. The Scholar along with a group of Gaudino Trustees will pick one project to award the Gaudino Fellowship.
Projects will be evaluated on whether they subject the students to “uncomfortable learning,” i.e. having an experience that challenges one’s view of the world and exposes oneself to those with differing views, attitudes, or beliefs. The expectation is that participants would immerse themselves in the life and work of those of markedly different backgrounds or cultures, home-stays being an example of this. Simply encountering people or cultures that differ from those of the applicant is not sufficient. The intent is to open the student to a learning experience that moves beyond the typically distant, dispassionate, intellectual understanding of others to one that facilitates a more deeply personal, impassioned, empathic understanding of others.
Megamenu Social