Professor Doris Sommer (far right) sweeps into GHELI on Friday afternoon with two amazing individuals, Bonnie Prado Pino (far left) and Alejandro Roldan (middle), to brainstorm with Sue J. Goldie, faculty director of GHELI. Currently, Professor Sommer is collaborating with GHELI as she develops a new course “Rx: Arts for Global Health” to be offered in the Fall of 2017.
Who is Alejandro Roldan? Currently Alejandro works at Ruta N Medellin, developing programs to facilitate inclusive development and an innovative culture in Medellin, through job creation, institution strengthening, talent training, and access to markets, improving the quality of life of the cities inhabitants and opportunities for youth. Alejandro was a former cultural manager at Biblioteca España in Medellin, where several years ago he fostered a collaboration to introduce nanotechnology and science topics to middle school and high school students from a low-income neighborhood in Medellin. Through his role at Ruta N Medellin, he has led the expansion of Proyecto Interchange to all neighborhoods in the city. Faculty Director, Sue J Goldie, expressed a desire to explore potential avenues for collaborating with Alejandro on educational pilots and prototypes that would contribute to the ‘innovative ecosystem’ in Medellin and provide learning opportunities for youth in Colombia.
Who is Bonnie Prado Pino? Bonnie is from Chocó, Colombia and is currently a PhD. student in Astrodynamics and Space Applications at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University. She explained to Nina Bhattacharya (second from left) that apart from academics, she is committed to ensuring other youth with similar backgrounds have the opportunity to explore career opportunities in STEM. Since 2014, Bonnie has worked with the Afro-Latino Experience Organization (ALE), a non-profit initiative where middle school students from disadvantage schools in her hometown participate in a STEM summer camp, and are exposed to opportunities in science and technology. The mission of ALE is “to increase the worldwide visibility of the racial and cultural identity of African descendant communities in Latin America, in an effort to try to mitigate and eliminate some of the forms of exclusion that follow from different variations of systemic and institutionalized racism”.
Stay tuned for more on Professor Sommer’s new fall 2017 course Rx: Arts for Global Health (Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 13) in the coming weeks. From the syllabus, “Surprising expectations and inviting us to think about the effects, “Rx: Arts for Global Health” offers basic training in the enlightened tradition of aesthetic judgment while it tracks some cases of arts that support global health”. Resources to enrich teaching and learning at the interface of arts and global health are being developed by Sue J Goldie, Anshul Kumar, and the GHELI team, as part of a collaborative effort. Together with Doris Sommer and collaborator Professor Mercedes Becerra, the team aims to contribute educational public goods to the GHELI repository, and disseminate these widely for use locally and globally.