Browsing by Subject "Haverford College"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Breaking Down Barriers: Supporting Minoritized Learners in Undergraduate Computer Science Courses
    (2024) Bartsch, Juno; Murphy, Chris
    This work addresses the structural inequities that prevent minoritized learners from succeeding in introductory Computer Science (CS) courses at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges (the “BiCo”) and beyond. In this work, I conducted a literature review, surveys, and interviews of students in introductory CS courses. I was able to survey 43 students with various backgrounds, identities, and experiences in BiCo CS courses. I found that first-generation and low-income students reported feeling underprepared for CS1 and had significantly lower ratings of self-efficacy. More broadly, minoritized students struggled with finding a sense of belonging and persisting in the CS major. Many students felt supported by the TAs, but a significant portion of students reported not having a support system beyond their peers. A number of students reported that CS1 was too difficult, time consuming, taught in ways that were not understandable to them, and inaccessible due to classroom policies. Based on these findings, I made the following recommendations: implementing CS0, standardizing CS1, improving training for CS peer educators, improving departmental coordination, as well as shifting the CS departmental culture. Following through on these changes will make CS more inclusive, accessible, and welcoming toward minoritized students.
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    Haverford College and Bryn Mawr College
    (1963) Cadbury, Henry J. (Henry Joel), 1883-1974
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    Haverford College Holds the Center: Navigating Issues of Free Speech and Anti-War Activism in the 1960s
    (2024) Winkler, Lucas; Krippner, James; Gerstein, Linda
    This thesis uses the Vietnam War protest movement as a case study to explore campus conflict and free speech at Haverford College. Using internal memorandums, letters, newspapers, statements, photographs, legal briefs, and interviews found in the Haverford College Special Collections and the Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, this thesis analyzes how Haverford College managed anti- war activity on its campus, upheld academic freedom and freedom of speech, and applied Quaker values to campus controversies. It argues that the history of the anti-war movement at Haverford provides an example of students being able to protest effectively and constructively while also allowing for the expression of dissenting views because they were mentored by a generally supportive faculty and administration. This thesis begins with an overview of Haverford during wartime, specifically the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. This history of the tensions between Haverford’s Quaker traditions and an increasingly non-Quaker campus frames the context within which the Vietnam War would play out. The second section explores Haverford’s most notable anti-war activity between 1960 and 1965. While most students at Haverford were not opposed to the war this early in the ‘60s, there were a handful of student radicals whose actions raised awareness of the war’s moral problems. The third section explores the effects of student antiwar demonstrations, how President John Coleman evaluated Haverford’s policy on military recruitment visits, and how a protest statement at Bryn Mawr led to condemnation from alumni and administrators for violating academic freedom. The fourth section examines Haverford’s antiwar activity from 1969 to 1971. It explores how President Coleman protected Haverford from legal trouble while expressing his support for a withdrawal from Vietnam, how Haverford’s students and faculty struggled to organize for the 1969 National Vietnam Moratoriums, how Haverford’s students organized a college-wide meeting with members of Congress on May 7, 1970, moving beyond the traditional image of radical activism in the process, and how a physics professor at Haverford exposed a covert FBI surveillance program on anti-war dissidents and how the school’s administration responded to it.
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    Interview with Emma Cadbury and Ann Trentman/ by Dina Mazina
    (2008-03-17) Cadbury, Emma; Trentman, Ann; Mazina, Dina; Conners, David
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    Navigating Health Care Worlds: Community, Belonging, and Care at Haverford College During the Covid-19 Pandemic
    (2024) Komatsu, Naomi Bleier; Sertbulut, Zeynep
    The Covid-19 pandemic had a profound impact on how individuals and communities care for one another. It exposed and compounded the structural inequalities that are faced by marginalized communities worldwide. At Haverford College, students, staff, and faculty experienced the pandemic in different ways, depending on their social positions in the community and the wider world. The pandemic made visible an insider/outsider dynamic present within the community, but at the same time offered an opportunity for community members to contest and alter this dichotomy. Drawing on an array of anthropological scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork, including participant-observation and semi-structured interviews, that I conducted at Haverford College in the winter of 2024, this thesis addresses questions of institutional and community imperatives to provide care during the Covid-19 pandemic; what it means to belong in this community; and what care practices that are centered on an awareness of structural inequalities look like. I argue that caring and belonging in the Haverford College community are intimately linked, and involve demonstrating the values of the imagined insider: a person dedicated to social justice, egalitarianism, and community. During the pandemic, students, staff, and faculty came together to organize community care practices in order to bring attention to the social hierarchies and structural inequalities present within the Haverford College community. Through these care practices, they attempted to challenge these social structures and demonstrate their worthiness of care and protection by performing the role of an imagined insider.
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    The Solution, Not the Problem: The Unseen Experiences of Living with Chronic Illness at Haverford College
    (2024) Cohen-Shields, Maya; Hong, Emily
    In this thesis, using photovoice methodology, I strive to better understand and find commonalities among the experiences of students with chronic illness, including myself, at Haverford College. With this greater understanding of the ways in which these students cope, function and succeed in a college space, I am able to understand how the ableist foundations of higher education impact students with chronic illnesses, and how their experiences can give insight into moving past those foundations. Through understanding disability models and the concepts of normalization and disability as a problem, I argue that those with chronic illnesses are still pushed into the idea of normalization and “compulsory able-bodiedness” but show by our lived experiences how we are pushing those boundaries and finding ways to still be able to succeed in these spaces. However, what is now needed is for colleges to look to students with chronic illnesses to understand how they can better shift the college’s policies and fundamental functioning to move beyond seeing disability as a problem to be fixed and more as people needing to be included and set up for success within the higher education system itself.