SIT Application Essays

1. Articulate your academic and personal reasons for selecting SIT Study Abroad's field-based experiential format and your preferred program location. Demonstrate the connection between your interests and the program's theme and academic content.

SIT Study Abroad’s field-based experiential format is essential for a community artist like myself. The stories of the community must be the primary source information in the artwork made. Collecting oral histories is an academic passion of mine that developed last semester during a class at Johns Hopkins University. Offered by their Center for Africana studies, the class was called “Race and Community in East Baltimore,” and aimed at using oral histories to preserve the neighborhood’s ill-archived past before it was erased by gentrification.

SIT’s format is also ideal because it will allow for a collaborative art and research project to grow organically, meeting the needs specified by those it will serve. Durban is ideal for exploring art as social change on a global level. The city has had an active community arts scene since the 1970’s, and is now home to organizations like “Art for Humanity” and “Create South Africa,” whose missions are to use art to “promote human rights awareness regionally and globally” and to “develop, preserve and publish, exhibit or market South African creativity, both in the visual and literary arts." These mission statements run parallel with my own interests. As a minority at my high school, and a community artist in inner city Baltimore, I have become aware of the physical racial divides of my surroundings, as well as the psychological separateness of the “other”. Racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance are finely knit into the fiber of Baltimore. In fact, just outside my window last night, a white man screamed derogatory ethnic slurs and death threats at my black neighbor during an argument.

How to best create public dialogue revealing the ugly underbellies of both the oppressed minority and privileged white experiences in an effort to reconcile them? Baltimore and Durban have begun to use community art as the catalyst for deep personal, social, and political change, and I am interested in furthering this effort during my studies.


2. Describe a significant intercultural experience, issue, or event and its impact on you.

My class met up with Donald and Kflu outside of an old Catholic school building in Middle East Baltimore. A room on the top floor acts as the headquarters of the Save Middle East Action Coalition (SMEAC). The coalition was created nine years ago by neighborhood residents who learned about the East Baltimore Development Initiative from the newspapers. EBDI is a fourteen year comprehensive plan to revitalize Baltimore's East side, turning it into an internationally prestigious biotech park and mixed income residential neighborhood. To do this they are evicting current residents, promising replacement housing, and bulldozing their homes. Donald is a displaced resident, and Kflu is SMEAC's community organizer, helping residents fight for fair housing rights.

Donald walked us through his neighborhood, and as I passed an old eviction notice stapled to a boarded up door, I remembered the early 1900's, when this city was the first to bring about legalized segregation and a sentiment of racialized urban reform. I thought of the promises of urban renewal and "serving the greater good" that surrounded slum clearance in 1911. Donald spoke of his love for his neighborhood, and the pain and anxieties of being displaced. Two black and white photos are stapled to the plywood of another abandoned building. One depicts a riot in the 1960's, when the Jim Crow laws were overturned. The other is of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to a crowd. On a wall a few blocks away, a spray paint tag cries out "I wonder if heaven got a ghetto!"

Returning to the catholic school building, my class and I pass Sunday school signs saying "Love one another," and posters of a black Jesus and a black Last Supper. As everyone sits and talks, I ask Kflu what he did before he came to Baltimore. He told me he used to do similar community organizing work in the Bronx. I told him I was interested in getting more involved in SMEAC's efforts, and he called a few weeks later with a project. Remembering I was an art student, he asked if I could help him design a photo collage documenting SMEAC's history as a holiday gift to supporters. We spent all Monday going through hundreds of photos and arranging them in a final poster on a computer. Kflu told me about SMEAC's history and a little of his own. His family is from Eritrea and lives around D.C.'s large huge population of Eritrean refugees. Kflu and I are continuing to work together, now on a photography project documenting his community organizing experience here in the states. I'm learning about Eritrea, grassroots organizing and how the little guy stands up against big business and government. Most importantly, however, East Baltimore, Donald, and Kflu are teaching me how to step outside of myself and look at my world through the eyes of another.


3. Please write a friendly letter to your host family for your homestay

To those I love without knowing,

Thank you for graciously opening your home to me. I can not wait to meet you all! My name is Stephanie, and I'm a student at an amazing art school in Baltimore, Maryland. I am studying painting, but also enjoy writing, photography and book-making. My siblings are interested in the arts as well. My older sister, who is 22, is a theater student, and my younger sister, who is 19, is a dance student. My younger brother, 18 and still in high school, enjoys playing the guitar. My father teaches athletics at an elementary school and my mom is an administrator at a vocational school for refugees in Florida. My family is very close and treasures holidays and summers when we are all home in Florida. I grew up close to the beach and have a deep love for the ocean. I swim as often as possible, and have even been making paintings of water lately. I'm sure my stay with you will also inspire many future paintings and works of art!

Sincerely,
Stephanie McKee


4. Independent Study Project Proposal

The Independent Study Project (ISP) is a key component of SIT Study Abroad programs. Your ability to propose an appropriate project with a single focus is an important factor in admission. A successful ISP aims to increase knowledge in a field of study that contributes to the host culture. Once on-site, you may develop or change your proposal based on additional knowledge of local realities and resources. Your Academic Director will approve and supervise your final project proposal, and you will identify a local expert to act as your project advisor. The culmination of an ISP is typically a 20-40 page paper and an oral presentation. Your topic should be relevant to the theme of the program and host country.

Institutional Review Board
Human Subject Review Policy - In keeping with federal regulations, ethical guidelines for scholarly research, and the mission of SIT/World Learning, all SIT Study Abroad student ISP research involving human subjects must receive SIT's Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval and adhere to standards in SIT/World Learning's Human Subjects Review Policy available online.

The policy is designed to help students develop and implement ISPs that are ethically grounded, culturally sensitive, and respectful of research participants. This process includes local review boards at program sites, with an additional IRB at SIT's Vermont campus. Both will be available to act on any student ISP proposals that raise concerns or questions that cannot be resolved by the academic director and student together.

The SIT IRB has been registered with the Office of Human Research Protections of the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Students should be sure to understand the parameters of their home school's transfer requirements early in the ISP planning stages. We strongly encourage students to also discuss any IRB/Human Subjects Review requirements that the home school may implement for credit transfer, especially if they hope to use their ISP research for future projects.

As you develop your Independent Study Project Proposal, please take into consideration the following:
a one-month time frame
the theme and location of your selected program
the field-based nature of the project
the potential of the project to expand the knowledge base of a particular field of study

What focused question would you like to explore? (Your scope should be narrow so as to allow in-depth study.

I would like to explore how community arts is used as a tool of social reconciliation in Durban. Durban has had an active community arts scene since the 1970’s, and is now home to organizations like “Art for Humanity” and “Create Africa South,” whose missions are to use art to “promote human rights awareness regionally and globally” and to “develop, preserve and publish, exhibit or market South African creativity, both in the visual and literary arts." I have contacted Jan Jordaan, the founder of "Art for Humanity," asking if he needs an intern or assistance with any projects. He responded saying he could use help developing a school program that works with students and teachers to make banners featuring artwork and poems about human rights. The banners are hung around schools in Durban. Mr. Jordaan could also use help managing/promoting their exhibitions. Either of these options could become a practicum based ISP. Another option is working with Zulu women who make art in Durban. The organization "Create Africa South" began a project called "Amazwi Abesifazane, Voices of Women" in 2004. Women share intimate memories expressed in embroidered, appliquéd and beaded cultural documents. I have contacted the organization's founder and chairman, Andries Botha, about working with Create Africa South, and am waiting to hear back from him. In addition to strengthening culture, I'm interested in how the arts can provide minorities and the urban lower class with access to creative industries and new jobs. The 2007 Research Consortium on the Creative Industries of South Africa stated that "the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative of South Africa (ASGISA) has now identified the creative industries, and particularly the craft and film sectors, as one of the identified drivers of sustainable economic opportunities and livelihoods for local communities whilst expanding business opportunities for small, medium and micro enterprise (SMMEs)." What other doors might community arts open for Durban's urban lower class?


What methods would you use to gather information from local sources?

If working with a community arts organization, I would attend their workshops and events. As locals work on collaborative art projects, I would participate, help where needed, observe, and interview. I might ask willing locals if they would at another time share their oral histories, which could be used in collaborative artwork and a final practicum-based ISP paper as primary source information.


What previous coursework on experience has prepared you for this project? Please include previous research experience.

Previous related coursework includes a class I took in Fall 2009 at Johns Hopkins University, titled "Race and Community in East Baltimore." Sponsored by the Center for Africana Studies, the class was part of a five year oral-history research project attempting to preserve East Baltimore’s ill-archived history before it was erased by gentrification. In addition to learning about middle-east Baltimore's racialized development, I found a resident who shared her oral history and allowed it to be posted online as a public document. As a final project, I worked on a mural for the new East Baltimore Community School. I researched the school, interviewed the principle and teachers, and helped teach four after school art classes in which the students worked on the mural. In Spring 2009 I took a "community based murals" class that required collaborating with the residents of a senior citizen's apartment building in west Baltimore. After connecting and talking with residents, I painted a mural for them on the walls of their lobby. In Spring 2009 I took a class at Johns Hopkins called "The African City: Art and the Politics of Place," where I learned the unique cultural make up of countries and cities across the continent. In my final research paper (titled "Ndebele Wall Paintings and Community Murals in South Africa: Affirming Identity Through Process") I argued that it is not imagery, but the process of making community murals in South Africa that links this genre to traditional Ndebele wall painting. Other related coursework includes the community arts internship I've held in Baltimore for three years now. The first year was spent teaching an art class at an art center in east Baltimore, and for the past two years I've been teaching students ages 6-13 at a Recreation center in west Baltimore.