Exchange program with Northern Ireland underway
Professor at Sandhills Community College first to participate
By Kathryn Reed, Summer Intern, System Office, Public Affairs
Denise Baker left the country to find the best of Northern Ireland
and came home five weeks later with the best of the United States.
Baker, a professor of fine arts at Sandhills Community College,
participated in an exchange program this spring in which she traded
jobs with Jasper McKinney, head of the design and technology faculty
at Northern Ireland’s Newry Institute.
The program, proposed by H. Martin Lancaster, president, North
Carolina Community College System, was designed to allow faculty
members to investigate the “best practices” that each school uses to
prepare students for changing economies and careers. The exchange is
the first in a multi-year, ongoing collaboration between the North
Carolina’s community colleges and the equivalent colleges in the
United Kingdom, especially Northern Ireland. Future collaborations
will include student exchanges, joint research projects, formation
of sister institutional agreements, and exchanges of seminar and
forum speakers.
The Newry Institute is one of 16 schools comparable to American
community colleges in Northern Ireland. The school has 22,000
full-time and part-time students and specializes in culinary arts,
art, design and electronics. Newry is located between Belfast and
Dublin in the eastern economic corridor of Ireland where most of the
economic growth of the last ten years has taken place.
Before the program began, Baker asked friends, family, students and
colleagues to send postcards to her while she was at NI to “see how
many postcards can cross the Atlantic Ocean in 31 days.” McKinney
made a similar request for postcards from friends and coworkers in
Northern Ireland.
“It was blind faith,” Baker said. “When I did it I thought if I got
100 I would be lucky.”
Baker’s expectations were exceeded by leaps and bounds, however. She
returned home with more than 850 postcards and the basis for a
conceptual art project.
The traveling exhibit, which Baker titled “Invitation to
Communicate” will unveil at Sandhills in 2007. The exhibit will
display the postcards that Baker and McKinney received as well as
materials exchanged between ten pairs of pen pals they arranged. The
project will make a cultural comparison between both North Carolina
and Northern Ireland and the United States and the European Union.
“Did I ever dream that it would come to this?” she said. “I just
think it’s cool as heck.”
Baker explained that because places put their most appealing images
on postcards, the project “highlights the best of North Carolina and
the best of Northern Ireland.”
She said another aspect of the exhibit will be a focus on “a very
intimate form of communication.”
“We’re the invisible generation,” she said. “All our communication
is deletable. I feel that there’s going to be a void in history 200
years from now because we don’t leave anything behind.”
Baker hopes her exhibit will be displayed at community colleges
throughout the state and then at NI.
McKinney echoed her enthusiasm for sharing their exchange experience
with others. He said the exchange program is a positive link to the
future and emphasized the importance of looking beyond borders for
fresh approaches to challenges. Baker said the postcard project
reflects this sense of participation and cooperation.
“It was a more inclusive exchange,” she said. “It was broader than
just myself and Jasper.”
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