A reflection by Amelia Meman on her feminist mentoring relationship with Assistant Director Megan Tagle Adams.

Megan (right) and I in the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) photobooth.

With Megan’s departure from UMBC (today!), I feel the Women’s Center is saying goodbye to a real social justice champion on our campus. Someone who was constantly striving for excellence in our institution. More than this, though, I feel I am saying goodbye to someone who has taught me what feminist mentorship—in its best iteration—can be.

Traditional models of mentorship are often paternalistic and hierarchical. Relationships are based on a transactional relationship between a mentor–older, more experienced in a particular professional setting, more “successful”—and their mentee—a younger novice looking for their niche, to expand their professional network, and to build on their skills.

2013-2014 Women’s Center staff photo; both mine and Megan’s first time on staff. From left to right: Jess Myers, Narges Ershad, Michael Fell (top), Amelia (bottom), Kelly Broderick (top), Madison Miller (bottom), Megan.

One of my favorite metaphors for this sort of relationship is Paolo Freire’s metaphor of students as containers to be filled—also called the “banking model” of education. In such a model, teachers deposit knowledge and students are meant to memorize and regurgitate. Such a pedagogical method is less about truly learning, and more about recitation. Freire argues, rather, that student and teacher should be able to learn from one another in a dynamic process. The central idea of Pedagogy of the Oppressed  is that pedagogy must be forged with, and not for the oppressed. I know, I know—mentorship =/= teaching; however, I think that Freire’s ideas can be applied to any social justice-oriented relationship—and that is what my mentorship with Megan is in many ways.

In Puerto Rico for the NWSA conference; from left to right: Jess, Amelia, and Megan.

Additionally, feminist and multicultural academicians have contested what mentorship can look like, especially in reaction to the restrictive and frankly stale traditional mentorship model described above. Feminists have developed new models that ask mentor and mentee to account for power dynamics, to treat both as learners and knowledge makers, and to continue reworking the tension around artificial boundaries between professional, political, and personal worlds. Ultimately, mentoring should be based on the feminist and social justice politics we champion.

I would like to take the following post to illustrate what a successful feminist mentorship can look like—using my mentoring relationship with Megan as a model:

Embrace a relationship of mutual empowerment

When I came onto the Women’s Center scene as an Honors College intern in 2013, I was new and so was our Coordinator (now Assistant Director), Megan Tagle Adams. It was exciting to be partnered with this spunky new purple-haired woman who was obviously super cool because she had so much experience in gender studies and feminist activism and all kinds of things.

At Take Back The Night (TBTN) 2015; from left to right: Amelia, Megan, Jess, Yoo-Jin Kang, and Bree Best.

It was in our first meetings together (before Megan had an actual office and when she was just behind a big glass partition in the front office) that we worked together on what would come to be Critical Social Justice.

I remember it so so clearly:

My idea was very vague and very ambitious. Initially, I wanted to do some sort of big, one-time event called an, “Inclusivity Fair,” where we would have UMBC community members and people from Baltimore City come and create engaging, social justice-oriented activities. The concept was fluid and gigantic, and my passion for it was white bright fire hot, which is really never a great combination for a truly successful event. Knowing all of this, Megan worked with me to whittle this giant pile of potential into what is now: an annual event on UMBC’s campus.

Together, Megan and I worked to create Critical Social Justice into an event, an initiative, and a way of working. Megan empowered me—and I her—and together (with the help of numerous others) we created CSJ. She helped me funnel my ideas and my energy into something comprehensive, sustainable, and organized—her strengths exactly. I helped Megan make an impact on our campus in her first year here, and we became quick and powerful collaborators. We empower one another to create great things.

Move away from transactional learning wherein knowledge is deposited—share the learning experience

Post-research presentation at Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) in 2015; from left to right: Megan, Amelia, Yoo-Jin, and Jess.

Although I have, in fact, learned a lot from Megan, I have to acknowledge that we have both been learning from each other. For example, Megan was my research mentor for URCAD. My research was an analysis of This Bridge Called My Back using a postpositivist realist theory of identity as a lens. I know. That’s a mouthful and a half.

Luckily, Megan had a lot of knowledge on feminist theories and especially This Bridge. Not as luckily, she was not steeped in postpositivist realist theory like I was. As my mentor, though, Megan allowed me to teach her about this. Rather than trying to learn all about this theoretical perspective and then take a top-down approach to my research, we came together, collaborated, and learned from one another. I taught her about the theory I was using, and she expanded my understanding of This Bridge. Together, we were able to share our experiences and perspectives, and create a research project that was comprehensive, dynamic, and unique. This was only enabled by our ability to teach and learn from one another.

Promote a holistic model of professional/academic life

As many might know, one of the first things Megan did when she got into the Women’s Center was created the Women of Color Coalition and began really centering conversations about racial justice and intersections with feminism.

From left to right: Megan, Amelia, and Jess. Picture by Yoo-Jin Kang.

In 2013, when both of us started, I had a lot of trouble understanding my racial identity. Megan and I would often come together and talk about what it meant to be biracial, white and Filipina. We understood the strange privilege and not-privilege that we occupied, how it was different from region to region, and how it translated into our cultural identities. Megan really helped me construct a sense of belonging with other women of color and racial justice activism networks.

The personal is political in feminism—and just so, feminist mentorship should rightly blur the lines to promote holistic success. Megan and I both had boundaries around certain topics (as any relationship should), but we also worked together to make professional, academic, and personal discoveries about ourselves and the world we live in.

Share power, share respect, embrace mutuality

As I believe all of these facets of our relationship have demonstrated, Megan and I shared power, shared respect, and embraced mutuality. We were collaborators, co-leaders, teachers, students, friends. As such, I believe our mentoring relationship was something so much more meaningful and enriching than what a “typical” mentorship looks like. It was never about Megan having more power and teaching me how to gain that power. Rather, it was always about sharing power, learning together, and making the world better with each other.

Selfie with Jess, Megan ,and I after we presented on campus activism projects at NCCWSL in 2016.

As folks pursue their careers and their goals, I hope you are able to find mentors that disrupt traditional models of mentorship. As I hope I have demonstrated, mentorship does not have to be limited to learning new skills and benefitting from someone’s established network. Feminist mentorship expands the potentials of this relationship and centralizes the idea of learning from one another to create a world where social justice is essential.

With my mentoring relationship with Megan, I believe we have both grown tremendously and have contributed much to UMBC’s social justice vision. I’m really going to miss my mentor as she starts on a new path as the Director of the  Women’s Resource Center at California State University, Dominguez Hills. However, like any other great leader, mentor, and friend, Megan’s impact will continue to resonate throughout UMBC long after she is gone.

Freaking out before Bell Hooks spoke at NWSA

Computer Agents that Interact Proficiently with People

Prof. Sarit Kraus
Deptartment of Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University
Ramat-Gan, 52900 Israel

12:00-1:00pm Friday, 4 August 2017, ITE ITE 217B, UMBC

Automated agents that interact proficiently with people can be useful in supporting, training or replacing people in complex tasks. The inclusion of people presents novel problems for the design of automated agents strategies. People do not necessarily adhere to the optimal, monolithic strategies that can be derived analytically. Their behavior is affected by a multitude of social and psychological factors. In this talk I will show how combining machine learning techniques for human modeling, human behavioral models, formal decision-making and game theory approaches enables agents to interact well with people. Applications include intelligent agents that help drivers reduce energy consumption, agents that support rehabilitation, employer-employee negotiation and agents that support a human operator in managing a team of low-cost mobile robots in search and rescue task

Sarit Kraus (Ph.D. Computer Science, Hebrew University, 1989) is a Professor and is the Department Chair of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University. Her research is focused on intelligent agents and multi-agent systems (including people and robots). In particular, she studies the development of intelligent agents that can interact proficiently with people. She studies both cooperative and conflicting scenarios. She considers modeling human behavior and predicting their decisions necessary for facing these challenges as well as the development of formal models for the agent’s decision making. She has also contributed to the research on agent optimization, homeland security, adversarial patrolling, social networks and nonmonotonic reasoning.

For her pioneer work she received many prestigious awards. She was awarded the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, the ACM SIGART Agents Research award, the EMET prize and was twice the winner of the IFAAMAS influential paper award. She is an ACM, AAAI and ECCAI fellow and a recipient of the advanced ERC grant. She also received a special commendation from the city of Los Angeles, together with Prof. Tambe, Prof. Ordonez and their USC students, for the creation of the ARMOR security scheduling system. She has published over 350 papers in leading journals and major conferences. She is the author of the book “Strategic Negotiation in Multiagent Environments” (2001) and a co-author of the books “Heterogeneous Active Agents” (2000) and “Principles of Automated Negotiation” (2014). Kraus is a senior associate editor of the Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence Journal and an associate editor of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems and of JAIR. She is a member of the board of directors of the International Foundation for Multi-agent Systems (IFAAMAS).

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This award is given annually to recognize an environmental engineering or science professor who is making outstanding contributions to the teaching of environmental engineering, both at the individual's home institution and beyond. A cash award of $500 is presented to the recipient. Previous winners are ineligible for this award.

This award recognizes excellence in classroom performance and related activities. Specifically, nomination packages should demonstrate that the nominee:

• Possesses and is able to communicate interest in and breadth and depth in subject area knowledge;
• Designs classroom, laboratory, field-based or other learning activities that challenge and motivate students and demand thinking and learning; and/or
• Is committed to professional mentoring and academic advising of students.

Although open to nomination at any rank, the award is intended primarily to recognize a demonstrated commitment to teaching early in a person's career. Therefore, preference is usually given to nominees who are at the assistant or associate level and have demonstrated excellence in teaching undergraduate courses.

Baltimore Sun highlights UMBC programs that prepare students for high-demand careers

The latest special section on education in The Baltimore Sun highlights several UMBC programs that prepare students to succeed in careers in rapidly growing and already high-demand industries. The Sun highlights how the flexibility of these programs makes them particularly accessible and valuable to students, allowing students to tailor their pathway to match specific areas of interest.

Marc Olano, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering and director of the game development track in computer science, described UMBC’s multiple pathways for learning game development. “We created two programs, the game development track in computer science and the animation and interactive media concentration in visual arts,” he explained. “In both cases, the students get a degree in the primary discipline, a B.S. in computer science or a B.A. or B.F.A. in visual arts,” he noted. The “track” system helps students focus their electives specifically on skills “that are used in the games industry.”

Jacqueline Wojcik ‘17, visual arts, who completed a concentration in animation and interactive media and a minor in computer science, shared her experience as a member of UMBC’s Game Developers Club. Collaborating with other students in the club helped her apply skills she learned in the classroom to other creative opportunities. For the coming year, Wojcik has received a Fulbright research grant to complete an innovative project in Oslo, Norway. “I will create digital models from two Viking Age ship burials and then place in interactive, game-like environments so that people can see how the artifacts would have used in the lives of their owners,” she told the Sun. “The project will explore the intersection of games, learning and archeological visualization.”

The education section also highlighted UMBC programs in health information technology and cybersecurity.

The health IT program prepares professionals with backgrounds in computer science, information systems, and health care for growing opportunities in work to prevent medical errors, improve care delivery, and address other major health care challenges through technology. “Not only does it provide students with technical information technology skills, but it also provides a pragmatic understanding of the health care system, which has its own terminology,” explains Krystl Haerian ‘99, biological science, an instructor in the program.

Laura Humber ‘16, health administration and policy, a current student in the health IT master’s program, says that she didn’t think she would end up pursuing an advanced degree in such a technical-sounding field, but she came to realize it could help her take the next steps in a research career focused on addressing opioid addiction. “People think when you say, ‘IT’ that you’re dealing with computers, but it’s making computers work for you and get you the information you need,” Humber explained.

Rick Forno, assistant director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity and director of the graduate cybersecurity program, described in the Sun how UMBC’s cybersecurity graduate programs are also designed work across fields and to connect students with skills that will help them advance their careers. He noted that at UMBC, studying cybersecurity can include courses in economics, public policy, and biotechnology. “Pick a field or major, and cybersecurity applies to it,” he said. “It really is interdisciplinary.”

Students are encouraged to tailor the program to their interests, and gain experience through research and internship opportunities, so they can explore the full range of career opportunities available to them.“You can go to grad school and get a degree and get a job,” Forno reflected. “But we want you to be a professional. You can do more than just your degree. There’s depth to what we offer.”

Read the full education section in The Baltimore Sun.

This post was adapted from a UMBC News artcle written by Megan Hanks. Banner image: The game developers club display in House of Grit at UMBC’s 50th Anniversary celebration. Photo by freelance photographer.

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