UMBC Parent Preview

The UMBC women’s lacrosse team opens its 2013 slate, the first under co-head coaches Amy Appelt and Tony Giro, on Saturday, Feb. 16 when the Retrievers travel to American for a noon contest at Jacobs Field.

UMBC made a trip to its third straight America East Championships last season, finishing with a 3-3 mark in league play and earning the third seed in the tournament. The Retrievers look to build upon their semifinals appearance from a year ago and get back to the league title match for the third time in four seasons. Tony Giro and Amy Appelt enter their first season as co-head coaches of the program, having been on UMBC’s coaching staff for five and four years, respectively. The duo return 12 letterwinners and seven starters from a squad that defeated a pair of top-20 programs in 2012.

The Retrievers were one of four teams to earn a first place vote in the 2013 America East Preseason Coaches’ Poll, receiving one first-place vote and 19 total votes from the seven coaches. Stony Brook, who defeated the Retrievers in the league tournament semifinals last season as the No. 2 seed, was picked to finish first in the conference after returning all 12 of its starters from a year ago. Regular season America East Champion Boston University and AEC tournament champion Albany were tied for second with 29 votes apiece. UMBC followed in fourth, in front of Vermont (17), New Hampshire (13) and Binghamton (seven).

“Regardless of where you are in the preseason poll, on any day, we feel that anyone – if you prepare and do the things you need to do – can beat any opponent,” Appelt said. “At this point, every game is a new game. We’re not looking ahead to April or May; we’re looking ahead to American and taking it game-by-game, week-by-week.

“For a team that’s so young that’s how we have to look at it,” Appelt continued. “We always have the hunt in our mind, we want to get to that championship weekend, but in order to get there we have to take care of each piece first.”

For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, organized by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in partnership with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and curated by Maurice Berger, is the first comprehensive museum exhibition to explore the historic role played by visual images in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for civil rights in the United States. Through a host of media—including photographs, television and film, magazines, newspapers, posters, books, and pamphlets—the project explores fight for racial equality and justice from the late-1940s to the mid-1970s. For All the World to See includes a traveling exhibition, website, online film festival, and richly illustrated companion book.

Read a review of the exhibition by Lionel Foster for the Baltimore Sun: “Using images to change history”

Listen to Maurice Bergers’ interview for NPR’s Maryland Morning about the exhibition: “Viewing the Civil Rights Movement Through a New Lens”

JOIN US ON SATURDAY, APRIL 6, 2013! Just for Juniors is a program designed to introduce high school juniors (and sophomores) to the exciting opportunities at UMBC. Learn about:
• Admissions
• Financial Aid and Scholarships
• Housing
• Co-ops and Internships

Visit http://www.umbc.edu/undergraduate/visit/ to Register

[Cross-posted on Co-Create UMBC].

STRiVE 2013, UMBC’s fifth annual homegrown student leadership retreat, sponsored by the Office of Student Life and Student Government Association, took place last week at the Skycroft Conference Center. I served as one of 12 coaches (6 staff members, 6 students). Each STRiVE is different (I’ve participated in all five), but they are always life-altering.

The phrase “leadership retreat” really doesn’t do STRiVE justice. It obscures the poetry and magic of the lived experience. What happened in the hills west of Frederick last week was mostly spontaneous, profoundly real and deeply poignant. 62 UMBC students and staff members, most of us strangers to each other when the week began, helped each other to discover that despite our fears and vulnerabilities, and partly because of them, we are strong, wise and perfectly capable of transforming our lives and world together. We know this now without a doubt, because by week’s end the transformations already had begun.

STRiVE’s intellectual foundations include the “social change model” of leadership developed by higher education scholars, student development theory, social cognitive theory, and Harry Boyte’s pioneering ideas about preparing people for active roles in democracy. Based on our synthesis of these ideas, one of the core principles of STRiVE’s design is that we coaches empower the participants as co-creators of all their experiences, including the retreat itself while it is happening. To do otherwise would risk stunting their growth by equipping them to thrive only in leadership simulations, when authority figures are available to give instructions and assign roles.

One form this script-busting takes is the “here and now moment,” which means spontaneously and appropriately interrupting an activity or discussion to address issues with the group’s process. Toward the beginning of the week, a coach might call a “here and now moment” to point out that participants’ energy seems to be waning, or that a few people are dominating the discussion, and ask the group to consider solutions. By the end of the week, if all goes well, the participants are calling “here and now moments” of their own. As I told the group last week, the capacity to call a “here and now moment” may not be the most important skill developed at STRiVE, but it’s one on which the value of many of the others depends. Only if you are critically aware of your circumstances, and feel empowered to interrupt the flow of events, can you become an effective agent of positive social change in the real world.

With our democratic institutions under strain, in a culture that tends to cast citizens as consumers rather than co-creators, we need many more people capable of interrupting and transforming the here and now.

Another core STRiVE principle is absolute respect for the capacity of UMBC students to apply their wisdom and insight to make a difference right now, not just on some distant day when their education is supposedly complete and they are ready to take action. The diverse participants in STRiVE 2013 are incomplete but aware and alive, flawed but perfect, and more than strong enough to change the world. With their help and example, more of us may yet discover this same truth about ourselves.