Mission Statement
The Thea Bowman AHANA and Intercultural Center strives to:
- Provide community, support and resouces for all Boston College students with a focus on students of color, LGBTQ+, and historically marginalized students.
- Educate faculty, staff, and students on how to build a community of belonging by celebrating identity and culture, building relationships, and fostering mentorship.
Vision
Our vision is to validate, elevate, and celebrate all student identities at Boston College.
Inspiration
Our work is inspired by the life and philosophy of Thea Bowman, a Catholic nun of the Franciscan Sisters of the Perpetual Adoration, who “helped people everywhere she went to explore their identity and to find their deepest humanity.” (Smith & Feister, 1)
Pillars of the Office
Ingrained in our mission are the following:
Promote a Sense of Belonging
We provide counseling and tuition remission programs to ensure all students have equal access to the full college experience.
Build Community
We seek to bring members of the BC community together through events, retreats, and mentoring opportunities.
Support Opportunity
We recognize AHANA students who have contributed to campus life through service, academic excellence, or leadership.
BAIC Values
In 1973, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, S.J., then General of the Society of Jesus, coined the phrase “men and women for others.” He envisioned that graduates from Jesuit educational institutions would be people who worked for justice.
Our work is rooted in the Catholic tradition of our University, specifically in the Catholic Social Teaching Principles, which we understand express a commitment to addressing institutional racism and inequities for AHANA and low-income students. Our guiding principles are:
Human dignity and rights
We believe that a just society is based on respect for human dignity.
Common good
We believe that we all have a stake in ensuring that individuals within our community reach their fulfillment and can fully participate in their communities.
Subsidiarity
We believe that we have a duty to denounce unjust situations in society and to work with authorities to protect people from abuses.
Solidarity
We believe that our interdependence calls us to contribute to positive changes in society.
Theoretical framework
Our work is grounded on multi-disciplinary theories, namely,
- Critical Race Theory - is a framework that grew out of work in legal studies over concern with slow progress on civil rights and social justice issues. It is used to deepen understanding of the educational barriers for people of color, as well as exploring how these barriers are resisted and overcome.
- Cultural Capital - Students bring cultural capital that can be of great value to them in their journey through BC. This capital includes: aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, resistant.
- Meritocracy - There is a complex relationship between education and social mobility. Education can provide an opportunity for empowerment and social economic mobility through hard work and talent. However, education can also reproduce social inequalities by rewarding the social and cultural capital of more privileged groups.
- Affiliation - Recent research shows that same-race peer group affiliations for students of color reinforce socially conscious values and the pursuit of activities and careers in service of their community. In addition, when white students interact with students of color they too derive the same types of benefits, underscoring the educational value of affirmative action in helping institutions fulfill their mission to prepare educational leaders.
- Racial Identity Development - Racial identity development is a complex and fluid construct and cannot be understood apart from other social identities. Racial identity is shaped by social, political, geographical (and religious) contexts.
- Inclusive Excellence - Tenets of Inclusive Excellence call on BC and the BAIC to strive for equitable educational outcomes for AHANA, multicultural, and multiracial students and to ensure that diversity goals go beyond increasing racial/ethnic diversity.
- Social Justice Tenets - Understanding how privilege, resistance, and dominant ideology function in the University can help the BAIC engage with, and educate, members of the University who work with AHANA students with the goal of working towards social justice.
Definition of Terms
Social diversity education focuses on appreciating social differences without an emphasis on power dynamics or differential access to resources and institutional support needed to life safe, satisfying, productive lives. (Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 2007)
Social justice education focuses on understanding the social power dynamics and social inequality that result in some social groups having privilege, status, and access, whereas other groups are disadvantaged, oppressed, and denied access. Social power can be defined as access to resources that enhance one’s chances of getting what one needs or influencing others in order to lead a safe, productive, fulfilling life. (Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 2007)
Racial identity development process by which individuals achieve an awareness of their sense of self in relation to race within a larger social, cultural, and historical context. (Wijeyesinghe & Jackson, 2012)
Cultural competence education process to facilitate the acquisition of a set of cognitive, affective, and behavioral skills and characteristics that support effective and appropriate interaction in a variety of cultural contexts. (Benett, 2008)
Multiculturalism seeks to promote the valuing of diversity and equal opportunity for all people through understanding of the contributions and perspectives of people of differing race, ethnicity, culture, language, religion, gender, social orientation, and physical abilities and disabilities. A multicultural curriculum provides a more comprehensive, accurate, intellectually honest view of reality; prepare all students to function in a multicultural society, and better meet the learning needs of students… (Morey and Kitano, 1997).