Keene State College aims to reinvent community conversation

Understanding and taking responsibility for common places and ideas that people share was the theme for this year’s biennial symposium at Keene State College.

“Finding Your Place in the Evolving Commons” was the title and theme that housed a five-day long variety of events exploring “our places in public spaces we set aside for care and cultivation of the resources, public and private, that we share in community with others. The commons refers to this space, recognizing that its reality is often rooted in but not limited to physical locality and literal presence,” according to the symposium’s website.

Program Manager of Diversity and Multiculturalism at KSC and symposium committee member, Kim Schmidl-Gagne, said the commons are there so people can come together to exchange thoughts and ideas.  The symposium raised many questions relating to a variety of different commons, which aimed to boost thoughtful dialogue among students, faculty, staff and the community.

“Questions like ‘what do we owe ourselves culturally? What do we value in terms of supporting the arts and what does that bring to us? How do we learn from it? How do we share those experiences, so a shared experience could be going to a concert together, what does that add to our being together as a community?’” Schmidl-Gagne continued, “So that’s what the commons is, those things that we share whether its physical spaces or things that are a little less tangible, like the air we breathe and the quality we want it to be… But I think it really started with how do we have challenging dialogues about these things.”

Samantha Lewis / Equinox Staff:
KSC Symposium organizers place a chalk board on Appian way for students to express their ideas. The theme, “The Evolving Commons” intended to encourage students to share dialogues and become active in the community, organizers said. The photo above has been edited by The Equinox Photo Editor to remove inappropriate content.

Schmidl-Gagne said this year’s symposium theme was selected differently than in previous years.  Early on, faculty members would come up with ideas that were supported and chosen.

In the planning for this year’s symposium, which began two years ago, former provost Melinda Treadwell put out the word around campus that they were looking for a theme and encouraged individuals and groups to submit proposals.

A group that Schmidl-Gagne was a part of called The American Democracy Project, which is a multi-campus initiative that seeks to foster informed civic engagement in the United States, came together and produced a proposal for the evolving commons theme and was then selected.

Schmidl-Gagne explained that this year’s theme was designed to last for a whole year.  There were events hosted last spring relating to the commons and events will continue until spring of 2014.

“This is the third symposium I’ve been involved in and they’ve all been wonderful,” she continued and said that when past symposiums were complete, there was little follow-up action. She said this year is different. “This one—because we’ve been working on it for so long and it will continue—we’re really hoping to bring about some cultural change and some deep learning and deep exploring of the topic,” Schmidl-Gagne said. Junior and economics major Chris Crothers is a student in Political Economy of the Commons, a 400-level economy class which directly correlates to the symposium theme and allowed students to be active in the symposium events.

Crothers presented at an event discussing the conflict in Syria and said the event related well to the theme.

“It was an open event for discussion about the issue.  It brought people together and helped people who maybe didn’t really understand what was going on too well hear from their peers about what is going on in other people’s words and opinions,” Crothers said.  Schmidl-Gagne said she hopes the theme will help strengthen the dialogue between the college community and the Keene community as well.

“We’ve spent a lot of time on campus talking about telling students how to behave off campus or in response to Pumpkin Fest or the Red Sox. I think one of the things that is starting to come clear is that when students move off campus in particular, they feel separate from the communities that they move into, so how can we help the communities they move into talk to the students as neighbors and understand what it means to be a neighbor and have them lead some of that welcome?”

Schmidl-Gagne continued, “I don’t want it to be like ‘you need to behave’— it’s not the finger pointing thing, it is the ‘welcome to our community’ and ‘here’s what our community values and we want you to feel a part of this and we’ll help you, you helps us.’”

All events were open and free to the KSC Community and the public, however the student turnout was not as promising as it could have been.  Schmidl-Gagne noted that the committee realized that many students who were not required to attend an event for a class would find it hard to make daytime events.

Keynote speakers like Colm Lydon, a deputy superintendent in the Boston Police Department, discussed how a common was violated by the Boston Marathon Bombings.

Cheryl Brown Henderson, the daughter of Rev. Oliver L. Brown, one of the plaintiffs in the famed lawsuit Brown versus the Board of Education, discussed education as a shared common. These speakers were scheduled at night to promote student attendance. However some students said that lack of attendance was due to limited promotion of the event. Sophomore Dezary Agosto attended a symposium event as a class requirement two weeks prior to Pumpkin Fest and said she has not heard much about the symposium since then.

“The event I went to was really cool, but I don’t know much about the theme at all.  I don’t think it was well promoted throughout campus really, there’s the chalkboard on Appian Way but I would of liked to know more of what it was all about,” Agosto said.

Crothers said he did some of his own promoting of the event to get the word out.  “I did my best to try to spread the word about [the symposium] because I think the theme is important for students to know about it and be involved with,” Crothers said.

Rachel Heard can be contacted at rheard@keene-equinox.com