Finally, A Little Clarity

What culture exactly am I sustaining? This is the question I have been avoiding since I entered this graduate program. I have many times now seen the confusion as those I am talking with attempt to make sense of what I am doing, and have in the past decided it easier to just let each person answer the question however it best makes sense for them.




In reality, I am dealing with the culture of higher education. I am creating a program that celebrates and gives voice to college students, whether they are students who have been sexually assaulted or not. Though trauma and sexual violence are going to be emphasized in training, and most likely many students who use the peer listening program’s services will be survivors, this is not the culture being sustained. This is one major part of what needs to be addressed when attempting to hold, support, and listen to college students.


That is what I realized when wrapping up my work in Introduction to Cultural Sustainability. I wrote a nine page paper and only really devoted half a page to the concept of dealing with trauma. Even with survivors, they are not their trauma and I do not want to project a message that implies that they are. They are college students, whole college students dealing with a range of issues. They are individuals attempting to balance a huge workload, making new friends, relying more and more on themselves emotionally, physically, mentally. They come from a number of backgrounds, varying in level of exposure to the “real world,” in types of parents and upbringing, in past trauma and suffering.


I would like to build a program that treats these individuals as people with great insight and experience, and as people who could use a peer who knows how, and genuinely wants, to listen. The community I am working with is college students, and I am dealing with the creation and sustenance of a culture within that community that truly listens to one another. Once that culture is present, an array of student crises that exist at college campuses will most likely come to light. But it is important for me to identify that crisis is not my culture.

Groundwork Proposal

For our Introduction to Cultural Sustainability course, our final product is called a groundwork project. This is essentially an outline of what it is we will be working on through the remainder of the curriculum. The first piece of my groundwork project is the following proposal:

Peer counseling is a service offered these days at more and more schools and is beginning to be accepted as necessary. The philosophy of peer counseling is that students in college may benefit from counseling but not be willing to see a professional, or maybe would be better assisted by someone on their own level. Peer counselors understand their limitations in helping students, having received usually forty hours of training rather than a medical degree. Largely, peer counselors present themselves as sounding boards and referrals. Yet they still call themselves counselors. This is an important distinction to make when analyzing the semantics of these types of programs, as this word is one that can mean something much deeper than perhaps it is meant to.



As a graduate student and staff member at Goucher College in the Office of Community Living, I have been granted the responsibility of creating one such peer program for Goucher students. This program is specifically being developed for survivors of sexual assault, but services offered will not be limited to sexual assault survivors in our community. I would like to create a peer network that moves away from the word counseling and instead embraces the concept of listening. I think it reasonable to expect that the ability to truly and sensitively listen to another person, and then to provide the appropriate responses and resources, can be acquired in a forty hour training session. I also would like to use that idea of peer listening to install educational programs about different student issues. When a school has a peer counseling program as well as educational/awareness raising programs, the two are related but different. If we were to implement a peer listening program and also begin projects centered on awareness through listening to one another, the two would seem to complement each other. I also would like to utilize that idea of listening by allowing undergraduate students to feel as though they have a strong role in the production of peer listening and awareness programs. I would do this by allowing student leaders to conduct parts of trainings, to be responsible for other student peer listeners, and to identify and implement which specific issues need to be focused on when raising awareness and educating the larger student body. This way, when I finish my graduate education and therefore most likely leave Goucher and the Office of Community Living, the work I have done will not leave with me.


For the last few years, I have learned an awful lot about sexual assault, domestic violence, trauma, and Goucher College. This information will be very valuable to me as I move forward, although I still have much to learn. In order to develop a program that I can reasonably expect to be sustainable and helpful to students, I would like to learn more about other student issues (i.e. disabilities, substance issues, racial tensions, etc.), about how other colleges’ peer programs run, and about healing through listening in general. Some of this research can be acquired through attending trainings and visiting Goucher’s peer institutions, and some I can learn through library research.


Since I have the privilege of being able to focus on the development and coordination of this program for the next three years, I would like to revolutionize the preexisting model of what peer counseling is. I plan to use knowledge of other institutions’ programs and integrate the concepts of listening and cultural sustainability in a way that breeds a new, more holistic and humanistic peer program. At the end of these three years, I would like to have accomplished two main goals: 1) a peer listening program at Goucher that is sustainable in my absence and 2) a template that allows other schools to easily implement similar programs.

It'll bring you to your f-in knees...

Goucher College has a very defined demographic that, while diverse, has a few elements that are not likely to change. As a private, small liberal arts college a few miles north of Baltimore, Goucher consists of college students who would choose to attend such a school. This does not represent the majority of American society, or even Towson, Maryland. It is a community I am very passionate about working with and hopefully benefiting, but one that undeniably has a predictable demographic nonetheless.



On Saturday, I had the honor of attending a retreat for volunteers who help survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse all over the Baltimore area. Most of these women were survivors themselves, and were just reaching a point in the healing process in which they wanted to give back. Many expressed a feeling that they survived and were given the strength to heal so that they could help others in similar situations. Since the majority of my work with domestic violence and sexual abuse thus far has been largely academically oriented, i.e. I am either reading a scholarly piece of work, meeting with college students, or asking for help from professors, this change of context had a huge effect on me. The room that day was saturated with insight and unimaginable experience that created an overpowering energy-- one which felt like the exact perfect equilibrium of warrior and nurturer.


We began the day with a yoga session led by one of the volunteers. I had done yoga many times before, but never did I understand this concept of yoga as spiritual. For me it had always been about exercise, flexibility, and sometimes, at best, it had meditative purposes. But this instructor knew how to tap into that energy and invite every person to help her reform it into total peace, strength, and understanding. One line that she said, while we were in savasana (a relaxation pose in which you completely ground yourself in the floor, lying on your back): “So much of the time you feel like you are holding the world. For this moment, let the world hold you.”


The entire day was rich with these little pockets of brilliance, but for confidentiality reasons I am not going to share any other direct quotations. Generally people talked about the need to reach out to children, about the importance of gathering, about the beauty of sharing a story, and about the human condition as one of natural counselor. Many of the ideas and thoughts stated that day had entered my mind before through scholarly journals and texts. Somehow, though, coming straight out of the mouth of a survivor, of a lived experience, without any editing, meaning was there as it had not been before. I found my soul place that day. My point of no return, of pure excitement and emotion, is when I am with those who have experienced what others cannot even bear to hear about. They may be sad, and horrifying, and many may not want to confront them, but I realized on Saturday that stories of trauma are gifts as well, to other victims as well as non victims who just need to receive them.

Freedom: A Right to Build Connections

One article that my Intro to Cultural Sustainability class read before the residency began was Wendell Berry’s “Hell hath no limits.” This is a piece that especially struck me, and the quote that follows in particular:



"In our limitless selfishness, we have tried to define 'freedom,' for example, as an escape from all restraint. But, as my friend Bert Hornback has explained in his book The Wisdom in Words, 'free' is etymologically related to 'friend.' These words come from the same Indo-European root, which carries the sense of 'dear' or 'beloved.' We set our friends free by our love for them, with the implied restraints of faithfulness or loyalty. And this suggests that our 'identity' is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections."


This passage highlights the intersection between sets of words critical to social justice that we often do not relate to one another: free with friend, escape with connection. As someone attempting to create a program built around peer to peer connection, this is particularly resonant. This is the philosophy behind such a program. We think of freedom as a right, as a need, but we do not think of it in terms of connection and love. Not just "free to be you and me" but free to be loved, adored, held, and heard. All of these take two people, and I appreciate Berry's initiative in bringing our attention to the selfishness with which we tend to define and interpret freedom and the connectedness with which we tend to enact it.


For the next couple of years, I plan to embrace this connected freedom and base the peer listening program I am helping to create on this concept. This program will be an opportunity for college students to feel as though they are free (and qualified) to make connections with other college students. Those students who have issues they do not want to or cannot face alone will be free not to have to. This is a scenario that in my opinion should be the right of any student, just like freedom in general.

Why is my bed in my living room?

This month, on top of beginning a Master’s in Cultural Sustainability and a new job in the Office of Community Living at Goucher, I also moved into an on campus apartment. While on a trip home this past weekend, I had a conversation with my father about how to set up my very first apartment. His advice: put my bedroom furniture in my living room. This made perfect sense to the both of us since my bed is most likely the nicest piece of furniture I will own during my time of residency here, and my living room is also the biggest room in my apartment. His exact wording was, "With this apartment, throw convention out the window." While this all made clear sense to the two of us, somehow every time I tell someone else what I have done I am at first met with a puzzled look. Luckily, this does not faze me, as it is a look I have now grown accustomed to. My job, education, and living arrangements for the next three years are all fairly puzzling at first glance. For instance, why would I study cultural sustainability as a means to develop a peer listening program for college students who have experienced sexual violence?


During my residency for the introductory course to the grad program, I realized very quickly that the project that seemed so straightforward to me only confused my classmates. From the perspective of a graduate student who would be dealing with more conventional interpretations of the word culture, such as indigenous languages or Native American communities, I was the oddball.



It is a privilege to be allowed the opportunity to interpret the terms “culture” and “peer listening” in such unconventional ways. I am here to broaden my approach...to put my bed in my living room. If I wanted to create a peer counseling program using the exact blueprint of other colleges before me, then I could do so through a graduate program relevant to those goals, i.e. counseling or student development. But I have enrolled in a graduate program built around community, culture, folklore, expression—terminology not often used by directors of peer counseling networks. I have been granted the gift of unconventionality, and this, when handled with care, can become one of the most precious gifts to have received.
 I would like to approach this project from the perspective of positive sociology.


That is why I have named this blog “Positive Voices.” One of the ways to help a rape survivor heal is to return to them a voice. Many times this means allowing the survivor to speak of his or her own trauma. This is thought of as a valuable and positive part of the healing process.

The other piece of this idea of positive voice is the belief that those listening to the stories are benefiting as much from what they are hearing as the vocalists are from what they are speaking. That in training students to hold others’ stories of trauma, we are not only helping to heal those in our community who have been traumatized but we are also enriching the lives of those giving the “assistance.” We talk about substance abuse issues, about eating disorders, about intimacy issues. What we do not talk about as much, as it relates to sexual assault and other student struggles, is culture, folklore, discovery, connection, and the opportunity to teach through story. With this graduate program, with this peer listening program, and with my apartment, I am ready and willing to throw convention out the window in exchange for invention.