Stonehill College Students Join Theory and Praxis in Armenia Program

Ohanyan chimed in and said that Gernes was the one to push her to work with first- and second-year students in General Education learning community courses, while she initially wanted to only take upper level students to Armenia.

“This course developed as a dialogue between Anna and myself,” Gernes said, “and it still is this wonderful dialogue that we have. In working together we almost complete each other’s sentences. I have been reading for the last year in Armenian history and literature and am really excite to travel in a few days to Yerevan. It is my first time.”

The wedding of theory, practice and experiential learning is fairly unique. Gernes said that many institutions now outsource these types of programs to third-party providers, making them much more homogeneous. The problem is that they are labor intensive and require such great personnel resources. Gernes said, “I have to be willing to go all in, essentially, and devote a chunk of my life to it. … It is not a one-year commitment, it is not a two-year commitment. It is probably more like a ten-year commitment. It is a career choice.” He will be writing two or three articles as a result of the summer program. He concluded, “For me, it was an easy choice. It allowed me personally to put my historical work into a very immediate global and international context so that was a breath of fresh air for me personally.”

Gernes reflected that one of the things he personally adds to the overall program is the dimension of past and present and connections between Armenian and American societies. As an American historian, he said, “I really began to see Armenia as an idea and a lens through which we can observe history and culture. So when we are studying Armenia we are also studying the Bolshevik Revolution, World War I and II, the pogroms in Russia, the situation of the Middle East, the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of the Soviet Union, the relationship between American, Europe and the Middle East, and the history of immigration. It is so incredibly rich that we can really use Armenia both as a place and as an idea to talk about world history. That is what is so exciting to me. Of course, I am both interested in history and literature, and making those connections.” In particular, Gernes is interested in the connections between the history of the American anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement and humanitarian efforts in Armenia at the turn of the last century.

He is studying World War I era posters raising funds for Near East Relief, often prepared by well known Madison Avenue illustrators. He is deconstructing one image in particular which will be the topic of his keynote talk at the Armenian conference and later an article. It is a Middle Eastern waif in traditional dress looking out longingly to her audience, with the headline “Lest we perish.” This is a 1918 poster by Ethel Franklin’ Betts. He will look at the discourse of turning true stories into very powerful images that were part fiction and part fact, and how those images were used. Gernes also just wrote a short essay on Zabel Yesayan’s In the Ruins comparing it with Emily Dickinson’s poetry that talks about grief.

 Theory and Praxis

Ohanyan said, “There is a very deep connection between the coursework and the internships. It is theory, practice, theory. We essentially built a loop — a self-reinforcing loop. We think that is the future of learning. In the classroom they do take the theory, but when we place them in internships we place them in a tightly mentored internship environment with practitioners.”

She saw that “there is a lot of learning that is occurring with practitioners which I cannot teach to my students as a trained academic.”

It is designed so that the students choose the topic of the paper they will write in coordination with their prospective internships. Ohanyan and Gernes find out from the internship providers what projects they have at the moment and then take these ideas to the students, who will write papers in the course in an applied context. Ohanyan stressed, “They do realize that the stakes of learning are really high.” They work directly with the community on the abstract theories that they have studied. After the internship is finished, the students take a course which tries to integrate practice and theory. This integrative seminar includes participation in the annual international student conference on global security studies in Yerevan. At this conference, undergraduate and graduate students from all around the world present papers. Practitioners come to organize professional development seminars.

Ohanyan highlighted that her field of studies, political science and international relations, is heavily ethnocentric and Eurocentric. For example, theories developed to explain great power competition are downscaled to explain relations between Armenian and Azerbaijan. The Stonehill program shows the value of studying from the so-called peripheries of the world. To understand Russian foreign policy it helps to look at countries like Armenia.

“Armenia,” she said, “is such a central puzzle to study world history,” and it should be focused on “not as an extension of a bigger conversation for the theory, but with analytical independence, with its own agency.” Furthermore, students get to realize this by working with organizations like the Armenia office of Transparency International, Civilnet or the Women’s Resource Center, because they all, Ohanyan said, “grapple with common problems of human insecurity….They learn better and more about those issues in Armenia than if they spend a few months in Spain or France, even if interning at the United Nations. That would give them the experience but they would not get close to the actual project implementation.”

The Velvet Revolution in Armenia has added a different sort of value to the Armenian internships. Gernes said, “Many American students are naïve about the value of democracy and civil engagement. Armenia is kind of a crucible for that. Our hope is that they go to Armenia and see democracy in action with fresh eyes.” Ohanyan said that the LION program originally was built on a liberal island of civil society, but now many of the program partners are actually part of the government.

This year’s learning community has its own online blog created by Gernes, https://textmuseum.typepad.com/armenia_and_america_a_sha/, where students (and Gernes) write their impressions of Armenia and post useful information.

Helping Armenia

While the program primarily caters to Stonehill students, it also helps Armenia. It gives it additional recognition as a sought-after site for international internships while highlighting the positive recent changes in Armenian society. Furthermore, Ohanyan stated, “It really should be acknowledged that Stonehill College does an enormous service to Armenia. It creates an opportunity for Armenian students to participate in an international conference. Younger voices who do not have a space to present their work get feedback. All in English, it is built as a way to help these Armenian students but also provide professional development seminars for professors.”

Gernes runs a workshop for Armenian faculty on integrating writing into the curriculum. He said, “It is commonplace in the United States but less so in Europe. I will be working with no more than 12 faculty and giving them an intense workshop on how to incorporate sequence writing into their syllabi. We have another one called the pedagogy of controversy: how do we teach controversial subjects in the classroom? How do we use it as a learning moment?”

The primarily non-Armenian students who come to Armenia from Stonehill also get very attached to the country and culture. Ohanyan exclaimed that after living there for four or five months in the longer original program, “essentially they are coming back with tears in their eyes.” Though they do not have formal Armenian language courses, they pick up many words, learn Armenian dances, and become, as she called it, “culturally competent.”