Headshot of Sauro by Marlayna Demond ’11.

Your favorite heroes are joining forces to fight Thanos in Avengers: Endgame. Suddenly, you watch as one by one, they are dropped off on Sesame Street in New York City. You’re seeing the story unfold on the page because you’re creating a merged universe as an exercise to enhance your English language skills. What will happen next? Only you know.

This interplay of fanfiction in language learning and instruction is what Shannon Sauro, associate professor of education and faculty member in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program at UMBC, strives to showcase in her reading and writing courses. (Indeed, one of Sauro’s students proved that they could merge the Avengers and Sesame Street into one universe for a fanfiction project.)

Fandoms exist in numerous forms, whether related to movies, TV shows, novels, music, video games, or other aspects of pop culture. But how is it relevant to teaching and learning? As Sauro explains, quoting fan studies scholar Mark Duffett, a fan is “someone who has a strong, positive emotional connection to someone or something famous.” Her students come from different backgrounds with these connections under their belt, which makes it easier for them to form an emotional connection to the work as it unfolds. This ultimately helps them gain new language skills.

Learning for fun

Prior to moving to the U.S., Sauro lived and taught in Sweden, where she noticed that many students used fanfiction to develop their English language skills. These students took part not only in consuming media in English, but also discussing this media in their own fandom communities. 

Maryland language teachers take part in a workshop on fanfiction for foreign language teaching held by the UMBC TESOL program in November of 2019. Photo courtesy of Sauro, standing.

“We can see different cultural attitudes around fiction writing, and I found this refreshing in Sweden because in the Swedish national curriculum, they emphasize the learning of foreign languages not just for work, but also pleasure and the consumption of cultural products [and] self-expression,” shares Sauro. “So writing fanfiction is something you do with language. It’s not considered frivolous or not academic.”

In the U.S., this integration of fanfiction into language learning may not look as familiar to students and instructors. But fanfiction can enable students’ creativity while building on necessary reading and writing skills.

Gaining appreciation for the craft

Headshot courtesy of BB Kim.

Language-learning classes often stress the importance of reading and analyzing canonical texts to hone skills. But fanfiction allows students to play around with literary tropes, dialogue, plot, and character development—all within the context of their favorite fandom. BB Kim ’22, a TESOL graduate student, would have never guessed that she’d be writing about the Disney film, Frozen, for a fanfiction project in Teaching Reading and Writing to ESOL/Bilingual Students.

As an ESOL instructor herself, Kim saw the potential of fanfiction to engage students in fun, creative ways. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t skeptical at first about the idea of rewriting the plot of an existing movie.

Kim’s realization arrived only after she finished writing her take on Frozen. With a single click, she published her story on a fanfiction website for a real audience to read and leave comments on (imagine if Elsa embraced her powers from the start instead of hiding them away!). Kim wasn’t expecting her work to receive such attention, but seeing it on the website gave her an undeniable sense of accomplishment. 

Kim was especially appreciative of Sauro’s clear and organized instruction, as the students weren’t pushed into the realm of fanfiction without preparation beforehand. “I feel like it was a nice brain break from taking classes that are more theory-based… So it was definitely memorable,” says Kim, adding that Sauro’s teaching style has served as a model for how she conducts her own classes.

Finding yourself in the story

Sauro asks her students to interpret an author’s writing style and incorporate it into their own. Elements like structure and word choice require attention to linguistic detail, making the study of fanfiction quite the endeavor. 

The three-country project, FanTALES, in which Sauro was a contributor, has set out to tackle just this. With the collaboration of researchers and teachers from Sweden, Belgium, and Germany, the project has materialized as an online platform providing learning materials to students and instructors. What sets it apart from traditional language education is its emphasis on storytelling (i.e., fanfiction and interactive fiction), digital literacy, and multilingual avenues of learning and interacting with other language users. Students are given a platform to creatively and critically express their identities and perspectives through writing.

Language teachers and trainers participate in the 2019 FanTALES workshop held in Valencia, Spain, as part of the International Conference on Intercultural Learning in the Digital Age. Photo courtesy of Sauro, right.

“By inviting students to either play with the text, transform it, put themselves in it, or merge it with something they actually like, it gets them more engaged and involved with the text and more likely to commit that time to it,” says Sauro, who incorporates materials from FanTALES into the fanfiction project she assigns to students. Even after the students have written and published their stories, she asks them to reflect on the choices they made throughout the writing process. The bigger takeaways that some students gain reveal the value of personalized storytelling.

“I think for me the takeaway is don’t be afraid to do something different… Don’t be afraid to shy away and be creative and allow students to learn in different ways—to be flexible, to be open-minded,” says Kim.

What Sauro hopes for her students, in addition to increased language skills, is to recognize how they can write themselves into a text to express their truths and experiences. 

“Often when working with language learners, or young people in general with any different background, you can see that there are certain texts that get reified and selected as a canon, but they don’t represent all the lived experiences in society or in the classroom,” says Sauro. “And fanfiction is a way to give students a voice to talk back to that text, to correct that text, and to write themselves into the canon, into the literature, and into the media that their society or their classrooms celebrate and value.”

******

Header image: Sauro connects with a student in her office. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11.

With Joella Lubaszewski ’10, theatre, UMBC’s coordinator in fitness and wellness

In the hustle and bustle of exams, family dinners, and everyday life, it can be easy to forget to take time for yourself—time that isn’t spent thinking about the errands you need to run or the emails cluttering your inbox. One could argue that Ferris Bueller said it best when he reminded us, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” 

A great way to reconnect, relax, and recenter is through yoga. UMBC’s coordinator in fitness and wellness, Joella Lubaszewski ’10, theatre, has spent hundreds of hours getting certified so she can teach you the art of finding your calm.

Tools of the Trade:

• A willingness to try (seriously, that’s it): “There are a lot of different types of yoga and ways to practice, you don’t necessarily need anything special,” says Lubaszewski.
• Optional: Yoga mat and yoga blocks.

Step 1: Get Started!

So frequently people seem to think they need to have a certain level of flexibility or balance to get started (or the right wardrobe), but Lubaszewski wants to assure newbies this is not the case. 

“I think anybody can do yoga in some capacity,” says Lubaszewski. “There are a lot of different kinds of yoga. Maybe you’re never going to put your foot behind your head, that doesn’t mean you’re not doing yoga. Maybe for you it’s more of the meditation or the act of practicing.”

She encourages those who are new to try a few studios and a few classes before throwing in the towel—the RAC offers quite a few options, too. Having trouble getting started? Try journaling or reading beforehand to ease yourself into the class and center your focus. 

Step 2: Find Your Space

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a full yoga studio in your home? Yes. Is that feasible? Maybe not, but it’s okay to dream big. The good news is you don’t need a fancy space or equipment to get started. The rise of online classes has made it easier than ever to take a virtual class from virtually anywhere.

 “Some days your practice will be just from your bed in your pajamas and some days it will be on the floor, it just depends on what you need that day,” says Lubaszewski. 

The important thing is finding a space that’s yours. One of the biggest challenges that comes with starting is focusing on your practice. You may find that you concentrate better when you’re in an in-person class with others, a live video with an instructor, a pre-recorded class you can do at your own speed, or even just working through your own flow. 

If you’re trying yoga for the first time and can’t seem to get the hang of it, you’re not the only one. Lubaszewski recalls that when she first started practicing she admits she thought it was, “a little boring,” but as she integrated it into her regular routine, she fell in love with it. 

You don’t need to have a reason to start or set an intention to start your practice that day. “It’s such a personal thing; if you have a clear reason and intention, sure, you can think about that. If you don’t, maybe you’ll figure it out along the way, but it’s not a problem if you don’t,” she assures new students. 

Step 4: Turn Your Brain Off

“I say this during savasana [the final resting pose of almost every class]—try not to think that as soon as class is over you’re going to get changed and go to the grocery store and run your errands,” Lubaszewski encourages. “Just stop, don’t think for a minute.”

We know this one is easier said than done, but if you’re really going to let yourself relax, you’re going to have to channel your inner Elsa and “let it go.” There are so few occasions when we’re actually encouraged not to think, but this helps to reflect on the work you just did and capture the last vestiges of peace before returning to real life. 

Through recurring events like Mindfulness Mondays, UMBC students and staff are encouraged to find ways to breathe and relax. Here, RAC fitness instructor Erica Sligh ’20, biological sciences, leads a yoga class next to the Library Pond in 2019.

Brain still stuck on a hamster wheel of thoughts? Lubaszewski suggests making an inventory of all the things you can feel—your legs on the mat, your arms at your sides, the fabric of your clothes, etc. 

Step 5: Practice Makes Perfect

Even after over a decade of practice, Lubaszewski still doesn’t consider herself an expert (hence why it’s called a practice). For her, the appeal is that you can do it every day but still find new and different ways to suit your needs. 

“One of the reasons I really love yoga is that it can be whatever you need, when you need it. Sometimes it’s sitting down for an intense 90-minute workout, sometimes it’s 30 seconds of just breathing because you’re feeling overwhelmed.”

Step 6: Recapture Your Peace Throughout the Day

As you start to condition yourself to take time throughout the day, it can get easier to recapture some of those feelings of peace, even without rolling out your mat.  

“It can be easy to wake up and jump into all the things you have to do,” says Lubaszewski, “but giving yourself permission to stop and focus for a second can calm you down and change the trajectory of your day.”

*****

All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11.

At first glance, Justin Glaze ’16 seems like the quintessential UMBC alum—a graduate in business technology administration but a minor in fine arts, a track & field athlete who went on to work at T. Rowe Price. But if he looks a little more familiar than most Retrievers, it’s probably because you’ve seen so many of his facial expressions as the runner-up on season 17 (with Katie Thurston) of ABC’s The Bachelorette. Glaze sat down with UMBC Magazine to discuss the behind-the-scenes friendship of so many of the men on set and how they still keep in touch daily. He also shares some UMBC memories, like forming an unexpected connection with President Freeman Hrabowski and eventually hanging his own art in the Hrabowski’s family home.

UMBC Magazine: So, you were the runner-up on the most recent season of The Bachelorette. How’d that happen?

Justin Glaze: In November 2020, during Tayshia’s season, I was in my house eating Ben & Jerry’s—and it was COVID so you couldn’t really go out and do anything. I was single as a Pringle. I was in a group chat with some people that watch the show and we were kind of joking about applying. It just so happened to be [an episode with] an art group date, and I was like, “Wait a minute. If I was on this date right now, I feel like I’d crush this.” 

So I thought, “If it’s a short application and I can knock it out during a commercial break, why not?” Less than a week later, I got an email from a casting producer from ABC and two months later, I was getting casted.

UMBC Magazine: We loved watching the bromance develop this season. Can you share a bit about your relationship with the other guys?

Justin Glaze: Oh yes, but I don’t know where to start. But take Michael A., for example. He’s taught me no matter what life throws your way, no matter what you’re going through, to keep pushing forward. He’s experienced almost all that life has to offer, and so that’s invaluable to have as a close friend, to be able to bounce ideas off of and to kind of keep you grounded. We’ve all been able to lean on each other through tough times though. I’m super grateful for the house of guys that I had. 

UMBC Magazine: How did your time at UMBC prepare you for this experience?

Justin Glaze: At UMBC I learned about creating a strong social circle and staying true to myself, which were crucial elements of my time on the show. Being a student-athlete at UMBC, you’re all joined together through the unity of sports and the togetherness of cheering for each other, whatever team you’re on. 

Obviously UMBC’s a fantastic academic school and that, in my opinion, is what should come first and foremost, but you have to be involved in something. It really helps you to branch out and feel included and have that tight-knit feel, which I think helped me get through college. 

The other thing I felt strongly about on the show was something reinforced to me at UMBC: Stay true to yourself. Be comfortable with who you are. As long as you know who you are, you have a strong support system who knows who you are, that’s what’s most important. 

UMBC Magazine: How did you end up choosing UMBC?

Justin Glaze: UMBC is huge on inclusivity and diversity, and so it felt like a natural fit for me, but I did consider transferring because I was thinking about using my art skills to study architecture. But at a meet-and-greet my freshman year with Dr. Hrabowski, I thought, “You know what? Let me go shoot my shot and introduce myself.”

To no one’s surprise, he was super friendly—asked what my grades were like, what my major was, what I was interested in. I told him my thoughts about transferring, and he was like, “Okay, well, how about at the end of the semester, shoot me an email, we’ll set some time up, and we’ll figure something out.” I’m like, “There’s no way. I’m just a freshman, one of however many thousand.”

Long story short, I ended up meeting with him and to this day, he’s been probably one of my biggest mentors. He introduced me to the job I’m at now and took me under his wing for the remaining four years and beyond, and so he’s played a huge role in my experience.

UMBC Magazine: What’s your fondest memory with President Hrabowski?

Justin Glaze: Every time I met with him, he served me a big slice of humble pie. He gives me that tough love that I need, and that’s what I love about him. He shoots it straight and he sees the potential in me. He has this drive to always improve himself and be better, and that is something that really resonates with me. 

I have to say, it’s also pretty cool that I have a couple pieces of commissioned artwork I’ve done that he has hung up in his house.

UMBC Magazine: Wait, what? Tell us more.

Justin Glaze: I was definitely nervous, because for all my art clients, I want to give my best, but especially him—after all he’s done for me—I wanted to give my best work. I was very grateful that he had the trust in me to create some artwork for some special people in his family. So yeah, it was an honor.

UMBC Magazine: How have you been managing the return to normal life after you came back from the show?

Justin Glaze: I was a bit naïve as to what it would be like. I expected a little bit of it, but I didn’t expect the magnitude that it is. It’s still new to me how to navigate it. I’m the type of person, I’ll talk to anybody, so when people come up to me, gym, grocery store, out in public, I don’t want people to be nervous. I’m a normal, nice guy. I’ll talk to people, take pictures. It doesn’t bother me.

The biggest thing is just coming to grips with people’s expectations of you. It’s been tough trying to find that balance of staying true to who you are but also knowing that being true to who you are can be perceived in so many different ways. 

UMBC Magazine: If the season was in a post-COVID era and you were able to bring Katie [the eponymous bachelorette] to Baltimore for a hometown visit, what places or activities would you have done with her?

Justin Glaze: For the best view, I would have taken her to Federal Hill to overlook the harbor. I think that would have been a really nice place to chat and talk about home with that view. Katie is really into animals, so I would have taken her to the aquarium, maybe through the zoo. Definitely would have taught her how to pick crabs.

UMBC Magazine: If you had the chance to do it all over again, would you?

Justin Glaze: Without hesitation. The good, the bad. All of it. 100%. 

*****

Interview conducted by Tsai-Ann Yawching.

All photos courtesy of Corey Jennings ’10.

What if the answer wasn’t the goal? What if the joy was found in asking a better question? Individualized Study instructors Stephen Freeland and Eric Brown eagerly invite their students to delve into the mystery and wonder of the world, balancing that awe with an intrepid curiosity that doesn’t accept surface-level explanations. What can we learn about ourselves, they ask, when we don’t expect a ready-made answer to our questions?

Stephen Freeland and Eric Brown ’93, M1, interdisciplinary studies, stand off to either side of the Fine Arts classroom. Playfully adversarial, the two Leos know how to pull each other’s levers. The question on the whiteboard asks the students in Brown’s Human Context of Science and Technology class to reconsider life as they know it: the origins of life, the evolution of life, the label “intelligent life”—and not just here on our blue marble, but in galaxies far, far away.

Freeland and Brown are not scared away by “what if” questions. Freeland, an evolutionary biologist, and Brown, with a background in the history of science, both find their homes in UMBC’s Department of Individualized Study (INDS). The pair seems like they would thrive under the interrogation of any 4-year-old’s barrage of “whys.” But this childlike curiosity isn’t aimless (it never is). Instead, the colleagues of almost a decade take great pleasure in finding ways to question established scientific norms and help students eschew culturally constructed labels that might accidentally shield them from further scientific discovery.

Some of the students eagerly step into the scrum. Being asked to question something as fundamental to her biology studies as the moment of the origin of life clearly takes Emma Galambos ’23, psychology, aback. 

As she wraps her head around what Freeland is positing, Galambos peppers him with questions about a basic tenet in most biology textbooks. Developed as an idea in the 1960s, the “RNA World” hypothesis states that life began with a simple RNA molecule that could copy itself without help from other molecules, like DNA and proteins. And somewhere in this RNA-only universe, the origin of life happened. It’s a commonly featured point on famous graphs that claim to explain the pre-biotic origins of the universe. 

Freeland thinks, to put it simply, this is rubbish. But despite Freeland’s extensive background in evolutionary biology, Galambos has a few things to push back on—which is something Brown actively fosters with his students. 

“I was taught the RNA World hypothesis in previous courses, that RNA was the precursor for life,” says Galambos, reflecting on the exchange after the class concluded. Currently an EMT who plans to attend nursing school after graduation, Galambos says, “I’ve been taught that there was a distinct origin of life and Dr. Freeland’s concept goes against this idea, but I find his explanations and ideas very fascinating.” Brown facilitates the in-class conversation by occasionally prodding Freeland to expound on his alternative take.

Freeland goes on to outline his proposal on the board with a few simple x-y axes, changing what looks like a sharp vertical upswing into a more nuanced diagonal line (to indicate there may have been one or more stages before RNA, from which RNA later evolved). “Something that grows out of the natural way I do science, and what has made me a scientist,” says Freeland, INDS director, “is to imagine the counterfactual. You imagine what it isn’t, in order to see more clearly what it is.”

He’s currently trying to publish a paper that questions the dominant paradigm of the RNA World hypothesis while also working on a review for a different manuscript that criticizes the well-accepted theory. He emphasizes the word trying, “as it’s sort of proven to be strangely unpublishable,” he says with a wry smile, “at least within the U.S.”

Regardless of any professional hurdles, the joy that Freeland and Brown bring to this scientific tug-of-war is evident in their ease with each other and the way they eagerly invite the students into the mystery and wonder of the world with reverence—and a healthy dose of skepticism.  

The alien problem

Similarly unpublishable to an extent is genuine scientific inquiry into the existence of extraterrestrial life. Not that it’s stopping Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard’s astronomy department. Loeb is the jumping off point for Freeland and Brown’s classroom conversation: how does a well-respected astrophysicist earn the ire and interest of colleagues across the globe? Belief in aliens is the short answer, and the slightly longer version is by sincerely positing the likelihood of communicative life near and far using an equation developed in 1961 by Frank Drake.

Brown jots a formula on the board. Known as the Drake equation, it attempts to solve for the numbers of technologically advanced civilizations in the galaxy, using factors like the average number of planets in the Milky Way that can potentially support life per star that has planets, the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life, the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space, etc. 

It’s more of a thought experiment than a mathematical formula, but it’s had broad implications for how astrophysicists consider extraterrestrial life. Brown wraps up the exchange with what could be a loaded question to his colleague: “So, your estimation then is that there’s a lot of life in the galaxy?” 

“Yes,” Freeland gamely replies. “But I’m growing more careful to say that there has been a lot of life in the galaxy.”

“It could be a cosmic graveyard out there,” Brown follows up. “Yes, life comes about and then life disappears. It could be that one of these terms in the Drake equation is a really, really small number.”

There are other even more banal and prosaic reasons we haven’t discovered signs of life elsewhere, says Freeland. We haven’t tried. 

“Our state of actual scientific knowledge about our own cosmic backyard and neighboring planets is minimal, zero,” says Freeland. “Our species has only conducted three full experiments to test for the existence of life outside of Earth, and they were all on Mars and they were all in 1977. One of those three is still up for debate because by the standards that they began the experiment, it demonstrated there was life. The consensus was to re-explain the outcome.”

“All of that is to say,” says Freeland, “don’t mistake this: there is an absence of evidence, not an evidence of absence. That would be my biggest point to you.”

Upsetting the established balance 

Freeland and Brown are using the example of extraterrestrial life as a starting point in their discussion, but they’re not just interested in the possibility of little green people arriving in spaceships—although they wouldn’t turn them away. Freeland and Brown see the opportunity to open students’ minds to question self-reinforcing patterns: something is “discovered,” then put in a textbook, then taught for decades, and now it is true. This could be said about well-regarded theories of the origin point of life to other entrenched systems like white patriarchy, Freeland gives as an example.

“It comes to this vicious circle where we’ve created a culture that can’t remember to see it other than the way our culture sees it,” says Freeland. “And as time goes on, it actually gets progressively harder and harder for alternatives to penetrate that.”

“Part of the reason why I don’t believe in capital T truth,” Brown addresses his students, “is because I think humans are good at tricking ourselves into believing that we have discovered the truth about the world. And then, in 100 years when that’s no longer the truth, we’re also very good at telling retroactive stories about how those people were just mistaken.”

So what is true?

Brown’s and Freeland’s shared astrological sign popped up earlier in the class when they asked the students if they put any stock in the zodiac. The students were wary of aligning themselves with the stars, but Freeland and Brown are quite happy to explore what the social ramifications are of always hearing about being a Leo actually contributing to their natural sense of self-assurance. In this way, something becomes (lowercase-t) “true,” a truth defined by shared experience as opposed to objectivity. 

Many things students dutifully copy from lectures and textbooks and assume are truthful building blocks are actually obsolete concepts at this point, Brown and Freeland point out. Like scientific discoveries of old, it’s difficult for society to adjust to new information. Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment for his heliocentric views—in our age maybe that looks like a denied tenure package or rejected manuscripts for questioning the scientific norm. 

“What’s interesting about this to me,” says Brown, “is that it seems so anti-scientific, that I can’t believe something or I can’t argue something because this other proposed theory has won the current approval, even if I have evidence otherwise. Ought it not be that it’s the evidence that guides you?”

“The danger here,” replies Freeland, “is if we mistake the model that we are using and the labels that we’ve all grown familiar with—if we mistake them for objective reality…then we’re never going to see past those labels.” Freeland points to UMBC’s Kevin Omland, professor of biological sciences and expert on the evolutionary biology of birds, to make his point. “Omland is finding that actually the more we study, the less there is an objective line to say where one species begins and another one ends. That’s not to say that labels can’t be useful, but they mean different things, depending on what question you’re asking.”

Freeland brings that back around to his own research—debunking the moment of the origin of life. Pointing again to his alternative theory, the diagonal line representing gradual interplay of RNA and DNA, Freeland says, “what is interesting to me about that diagonal line is that there’s nowhere on that to call the moment of the origin of life. The origin of life is actually a seamless part of the unraveling of the universe, the way that time and energy can make the universe go. That’s a much more interesting universe, really.” 

Asking better questions

What purpose is there in asking big questions we’ll (probably) never know the answers to? Aristotle famously addresses this human tendency in the first sentence of Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire understanding.” For some, that understanding leads down an unfamiliar but fulfilling path that might make your colleagues—or your students—uncomfortable with the destination.  

Galambos says that Brown doesn’t hesitate to share “that a student changed his perception or will continue to ask the student further questions about how they got to the idea” because he seems naturally intrigued by his students’ responses. Freeland and Brown are not alone in their mission to revive and share their students’ natural curiosity about the world—or at the very least help them learn how to ask better questions. It’s one of the pillars of UMBC’s mission to welcome all students to our community of inquiring minds. 

“And the further I go,” says Freeland of his 25-plus year research career, “the more I’m convinced, like all good research, what you learn is where the question was wrong, and the question gets better rather than getting an answer.” 

*****
Illustrations by Michelle Rudman.

Artist, educator, community and cultural worker, and curator: Kimberley Acebo Arteche identifies themself with all of these labels. But their path as an artist was a considerable diversion from their original plan to enter the field of medicine. 

“I come from a Filipino family and the expectation is always that the children either become nurses, doctors, or pharmacists,” says Arteche ’11, visual arts. Their mother worked at Howard University Hospital, mostly with other Filipino nurses, and Arteche’s high grades in science pushed them in that direction.

Photo by Jamie Cardenas, courtesy of Arteche.

It was at UMBC that Arteche, now the co-director of the Berkeley Art Center, decided to delve into other ways of exploring their identity and visibility. Joining the Filipino American Student Association freshman year was one step, another was their role as a founding member of the campus hip-hop dance group Major Definition.“I did struggle a little bit trying to navigate what my identity was as an autonomous person outside of my parents home. I started dancing and that led me into a few years of training with a dance company in DC called Culture Shock,” they say.

This exposure to folks pursuing arts pushed Arteche to switch majors and they began their journey down a new path: photography—finishing a visual arts major in only a year and a half. 

Independent study

Headshot of Gonzalves. Courtesy of Marlayna Demond.

Coincidentally, Arteche’s graduation in 2011 was the same year UMBC established the Asian studies program. It felt like such bad timing, Arteche remembers. “I’ve had been looking for this kind of education in this kind of history for so long!’” they say. Arteche even emailed American Studies Professor Theodore S. Gonzalves to ask if she should try to get a second degree at UMBC, this time in Asian studies. He offered to meet with her regularly instead.

Gonzalves, currently the interim director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, introduced Arteche to Filipino American literature and had them read America Is in the Heart, a book by Carlos Bulosan about the struggles of Filipino migrant laborers in the 1930s and 1940s. Gonzalves and Arteche also discussed Carlos Villa, an artist, educator, and community arts organizer and the first person in the United States to teach a Filipino American arts course. 

From these conversations, Arteche situated themself in the greater historical and colonialist context of America. “What came out of that was me finally realizing that, although my family had just immigrated to the U.S., my history here in the United States is so much longer,” they say. 

Rethinking the gallery

After getting their M.F.A at  San Francisco State, Arteche teaches there while also working at the Berkeley Art Center, and pursuing their own art. “For me, all of that informs each other. I’m teaching two classes now [and] one of them is the intermediate darkroom class. My focus is also on decolonizing photography, because our history of photography, in the European American Western canon, is about documenting indigenous peoples and like using that as a tool for colonialism.”

While at the Berkeley Art Center, Arteche aims to break down ideas of art being within the “white cube gallery with crisp white walls.” One of their art exhibitions is Bodyless, which features colorful and bright dusters suspended in spaces as if being worn, but, as expected by the title: without a body inside the dress.

Bodyless exhibit. Courtesy of Arteche.

Dusters, Arteche says, are very significant to their community. “They’re the dresses that you wear at home. A lot of times your grandma doesn’t even wear underwear underneath the dresses, because they’re at home, they’re doing physical domestic care work,” Arteche says. As the only one pursuing arts in their family, and a self proclaimed black sheep, Arteche has been digging into family history to understand oral histories and experiences. 

They collected dusters from their own family members and created Bodyless, the experience of being seen as a body in space but not being seen as a full human. “You see the outline of a body. That also is very similar for me, as a person of color in art spaces. When I got out of grad school, so much of me being affiliated with white art spaces was so that I could check off these diversity boxes.”

Love Aswang gallery. Curation and photo courtesy of Arteche.

They noted that they value being conscious about equity within art spaces. “[With] my role at Berkeley Art Center, we have been very conscious to not underpay artists. [I try to be] very intentional, like in all of the layers of all the work that I do, to make sure that each decision we make also sets people up to be well and be healthy.”

Reclaiming our bodies

Most recently, the San Francisco Arts Commission awarded Arteche funding for their work, an upcoming project called Kundiman ng Katawan. “It touches on these really tense political histories in the Philippines like the [Ferdinand] Marcos dictatorship, and also just how colonialism has compromised our relationship to our bodies, and how we feel like success and wealth and freedom is tied to how much money we can make and that also kind of puts our bodies at this way where it’s really just a tool for capitalism. I’m unpacking all of those things in this project that’s going to premiere next year,” they say. 

As for their future, they hope to move towards taking on larger art commissions, and having their work acquired by museum collections. “Artistically, my goal is to make art that makes folks question their relationship to culture and question their relationship to history, in whatever that means for them,” Arteche says.

— Anjali DasSarma ‘21

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Header image: Arteche at a speaking engagement. Photo by Minoosh Zomordinia, courtesy of Arteche.

Something that has become clear in 2021 is that when celebration is called for—-go all in, in a safe, socially distant fashion, of course. In this spirit, UMBC is excited to announce the 32nd annual Alumni Awards, hosted by the UMBC Alumni Association Board of Directors. While the in-person ceremony may be smaller than past years, there are multiple ways to watch and interact virtually. 

More alumni than ever are being celebrated this year. In addition to the past categories, the Board is honoring a cohort of Retrievers whose work impacted pandemic response on local, national, and global stages. Likewise, the Rising Star category couldn’t be contained to a single alum, so three bright stars are highlighted.

“They are entrepreneurs, leaders, educators, creators, artists, and explorers,” says Stanyell Odom, director of Alumni Engagement. “They’ve stepped forward to lead us during a time where sound leadership was required to get us through some of the most difficult days of our generation.”

Meet the 2021 award recipients

In the Rising Star category, the Alumni Board recognizes Christine Osazuwa ’11, interdisciplinary studies. Osazuwa uses her skills to highlight the intersection of diversity, music, marketing, and technology, and even living overseas, she finds ways to continue mentoring UMBC students.  

Also in the Rising Star category are Michael Berardi ’19, media and communications studies, and Deep Patel ’19, biological sciences and financial economics—cofounders of OCA Mocha, an Arbutus coffee shop that emphasizes community-arts. They’ve found a myriad ways to serve the community even during a pandemic.  

To learn more about the recipients of the 32nd Alumni Awards, you can read about the Outstanding Faculty awardee Dr. Michael Summers in multiple stories. Summers is the Robert E. Meyerhoff Chair for Excellence in Research and Mentoring and a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UMBC.

Meet Dr. Michael Hassett, M.P.P. ’17, Ph.D. ’19, public policy, the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award, a budget analyst for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and president and founding member of Friends of Tonga, Inc. Friends of Tonga received a 2021 Literacy Award from the Library of Congress for their implementation of highly successful practices in literacy promotion.

Outstanding alumni are recognized in multiple categories. Engineering & Information Technology honors Dr. Scott Banta ’97, chemical engineering. From the Humanities, meet Sean Pang ’09, English, M.A. ’11, education. Natural & Mathematical Sciences celebrates Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett ’08, M16, biological sciences and sociology, scientific lead of the Vaccine Research Center’s coronavirus team.

Baltimore City middle school teacher Theresa Bruce ’09, political science and social work, is the recipient for Social & Behavioral Sciences. Visual & Performing Arts honors Tewodross Melchishua Williams M.F.A. ’00, intermedia and digital arts, founder of the film and digital media studio collective Visual Jazz and associate professor and program coordinator of visual communication and digital media arts program at Bowie State University.

The Alumni Association Board of Directors is also taking the opportunity to give special recognition to four alumnae closely tied to the pandemic response: Moderna vaccine lead Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett ’08, M16, biological sciences and sociology; Baltimore City Health Commissioner Letitia Dzirasa ’03, M11, biological sciences; and National Institutes of Health investigator Kaitlyn Sadtler ’11, biological sciences; and special advisor to the senior vice chancellor of Academic and Student Affairs of the University System of Maryland Dr. Kate Tracy, M.A. ’01, Ph.D. ’03, psychology.

Please join the ceremony online on October 20, starting at 6:30 pm.

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Header image: Photo of the 2021 UMBC Alumni Awardees. L-R: Dr. Michael Summers, Deep Patel ’19, Michael Berardi ’19, Tewodross Melchishua Williams, M.F.A. ’00, Dr. Michael Hassett, M.P.P. ’17, Ph.D. ’19, Dr. Kaitlyn Sadtler ’11, Freeman Hrabowski, Sean Pang ’04, M.A. ’11, Dr. Kate Tracy, M.A. ’01, Ph.D. ’03, Dr. Scott Banta ’97, Dr. Letitia Dzirasa ’03, M11, Theresa Bruce ’09, and UMBC Alumni Association President Brian Frazee ’11, M.P.P. ’12. Not pictured: Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett ’08, M16, and Christine Osazuwa ’11. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11.

Provost Philip Rous shared an emotional moment with the UMBC community yesterday as hetook to the stage at the university’s Fall Opening Meeting, just a day after UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski announced he will retire in June 2022. He shared a message he’s been hearing from across Retriever Nation, one of gratitude and hope.

“Each of us holds in our hands the legacy of Freeman’s leadership and that of all members of our community who have built it into what it is today. But as Freeman often says, ‘success is never final,’ so that legacy is not static, it’s dynamic,” Rous told the group. 

“It’s forward-looking and it belongs to all of us,” he said, noting that our community’s strong foundation of shared values will allow us to continue the “important work of building and advancing this remarkable university to even greater heights.”

As Retriever Nation awaits the start of the search for UMBC’s sixth president, Hrabowski thanked the community for their support and encouraged them to think about how to carry on the important mission and values of this community.

“Here is my message—this is the house that love has built,” said Hrabowski, following a huge standing ovation in the RAC. “We show the world that we can transform lives through education.”

Messages of congratulations and gratitude from alumni, legislators, and other friends of UMBC have poured in since the announcement went live Wednesday afternoon. Here are a few of our favorites.

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Learn more about the presidential transition process at president.umbc.edu.

Story by Jenny O’Grady and Randianne Leyshon ’09. Photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC Magazine.