Lauren RubensteinMay 13, 20132min
Two Wesleyan students have been awarded grants through the Davis Projects for Peace Program to bring their grassroots project proposals to fruition. Class of 2014's Mfundi Makama’s $10,000 grant will support The Buddies Program, which he recently created as a way to empower young women in Swaziland through educational achievement. Greg Shaheen ’13 will use the funds to establish a community-based eco-center focused on environmental education and action for teenagers in Lebanon. The projects will take place this summer. Student applicants at more than 90 Davis United World College Scholar Program partner schools—including Wesleyan—design grassroots projects that promote peace, build…

Lauren RubensteinMay 13, 20133min
Anthony Braxton, the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, has been honored with the 2013 Doris Duke Artist Award, one of the country’s most prestigious awards for individual artists. It comes with a $225,000 honorarium. Braxton is a composer, saxophonist, teacher and philosopher with a career spanning half a century. He is also the founder of The Tri-Centric Foundation, a nonprofit that cultivates and inspires the next generation of creative artists to pursue their own visions with the kind of idealism and integrity Braxton has demonstrated throughout his long and distinguished career. The foundation also documents, archives, preserves and disseminates…

Lauren RubensteinMay 13, 20133min
When Anna Haensch tells new acquaintances that she’s a mathematician, many people immediately recoil. “There’s this repellent nature to math,” she said. “There’s this big wall up around it—people find it terrifying or uninteresting.” That’s exactly why Haensch, a Ph.D. student who just successfully defended her dissertation, wants to learn how to communicate better to the general public about math. She is the recipient of a Mass Media Fellowship, administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Haensch's fellowship is sponsored by the American Mathematical Society (AMS). The 10-week summer program, which starts June 3, places graduate and post-graduate…

Lauren RubensteinMay 13, 20131min
Assistant Professor of Psychology Anna Shusterman had an op-ed published in The Hartford Courant about a low-cost, intensive, and effective pre-K program piloted in Middletown last summer, which she argues could be a model for the nation. Pre-kindergarten preparation programs are critical to narrowing the achievement gap between low-income students starting kindergarten and their wealthier peers, she writes. Kindergarten Kickstart, a short-term summer program in which Wesleyan students taught alongside experienced teachers using research-based methods and curriculum, showed measurable improvements in kindergarten readiness after just five weeks. Read the op-ed here.

Lauren RubensteinMay 13, 20131min
The Liberty Bank Foundation has awarded a grant of $30,000 over three years to support the Kindergarten Kickstart program, a summer pre-K program that is a collaborative partnership between Assistant Professor of Psychology Anna Shusterman's lab, MacDonough Elementary School, North End Action Team (NEAT), and the Connecticut State Department of Education's Family Resource Center. The program was piloted for the first time last summer at MacDonough. The grant will provide about 50 percent of the program's operating cost for each of the next three years, and allow the program to expand to two locations. Each site will be staffed by three…