Wheaton lands grant to develop courses linking college to local community

Wheaton has been awarded a three-year, $150,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to fund the development of new courses with connections to the local community.

The grant, part of the foundation's Pluralism and Unity Program, will provide support for the design and implementation of Wheaton's proposed Community Connection Program, a series of eighteen courses connecting classroom, community and campus culture while spotlighting issues of race, culture, ethnicity and class.

''By linking learning in the classroom to service experiences and providing opportunities for students to share those experiences outside the classroom, we hope to develop a greater understanding of differences and at the same time, forge a richer community, '' said President Dale Rogers Marshall. The courses will be in a range of disciplines and will link to service opportunities at organizations across the region.

The Community Connection Program is an outgrowth of Wheaton's ongoing college-wide curriculum review. It builds on the King Connections Pilot Program, named for Patricia A. King '63, who through the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, provided a grant of $20,000 to initiate this special project. Ms. King is the first alumna, the first woman and the first African American to chair the Wheaton Board. In the pilot program, Professor of Anthropology Donna Kerner and her students made important connections in the course Feast or Famine, which studied the politics of food. Through academic projects, service experiences and a set of ''table talk'' dialogues on campus, students explored how class, ethnicity and gender contribute to the differential availability of food and how communities are working to make land and food more evenly distributed.

''To educate responsible citizens for leadership in a diverse and complex society, Wheaton strives to be a genuinely multicultural community which values both our differences and our shared beliefs,'' said Marshall. ''This grant will be a wonderful catalyst for shaping campus culture.'' Wheaton was one of seven institutions out of 17 proposals chosen for a grant in the foundation's Plurality and Unity Program.

Wheaton, located in Norton, Mass., is a highly selective college of the liberal arts and sciences with a student body of 1,500. It is a member of the Twelve College Exchange, which also includes Amherst, Bowdoin, Connecticut, Dartmouth, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Trinity, Vassar, Wellesley, Wesleyan and Williams