The Cura Series is a compilation of educational experiences across the institution that simultaneously work to build an inclusive community, to provide a platform for students to discuss and understand differences, and to support students as they cultivate new and lasting relationships.
Divisional Cura Programs
Weeks of Welcome opening session:
This session encourages first-year students to explore different aspects of their own identities and to reflect on how these shape the way they engage in various spaces. The workshop, which is implemented with each residential hall floor community by trained peer trainers (Core facilitators) includes a learning component to introduce shared vocabulary and guided self-reflection on identity followed by a dialogue-based activity to process the experience.
Ongoing residential programs:
Throughout the school year, Core facilitators lead monthly programs designed to foster student self-reflection on identity and community engagement. These sessions create a safe and welcoming space for students to participate in meaningful dialogue, encouraging them to consider their roles in building more inclusive residential communities.
BRAVE Workshops with Bowman Advocates:
Bowman advocates (BAs) are sophomores, juniors, and seniors who have been trained by BAIC staff to facilitate cross-cultural activities and dialogues within the BC student community. BAs deliver the BRAVE workshop to first-year academic courses (CTK, FYNS, ERA) designed to build a more inclusive Boston College community by educating first-year students about microaggressions and helping them to understand the negative effects of such actions/words/ etc. and motivating students to intervene in situations charged with negative bias.
Cura Programs Beyond the Division
4Boston
BC's largest weekly service organization. Volunteers serve four hours each week of the academic year with community partners in the social service, healthcare, or education sectors and engage in one-hour group reflections centered on community, social justice, and spirituality.
Dialogues on Race
An interactive, facilitated process that opens lines of communication and fosters mutual understanding about racial differences and decreases racial tensions. The program convenes participants from as many parts of the community as possible to exchange information face-to-face, share personal stories and experiences, honestly express perspectives, clarify viewpoints, and develop solutions that address community concerns.
APPA Volunteers
A service-immersion program committed to working with under-resourced populations in the United States via shared service and direct encounter. The heart of Appa's work is spent in community when volunteers travel to 30 different cities and towns during spring break, living in solidarity alongside the families that they are serving.
Courage to Know
Three-credit academic course designed to confront students with the most fundamental formational questions that will guide their time at BC and beyond:
Who am I?
What am I good at?
Who am I called to become?
This course calls on contemporary literature, current research, and social commentary to frame discussions around the impact of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, intimacy, faith, and vocational discernment.
- Connected to our Jesuit, Catholic tradition, the Cura series helps to connect students with skills and practices around fostering a sense of belonging and respecting each other's differences. These events, experiences, and opportunities seek to provide students with skill building around how to behave or support historically marginalized populations to foster inclusivity in practice.
- These skills support students during their time at BC and beyond. In an increasingly global world, all students need to develop high levels of cultural competency in order to succeed in their collegiate and post-collegiate journeys.
- The data indicates that Culturally Engaging Campus Environments (CECEs) increase a sense of belonging specifically for historically marginalized populations, which translates into higher levels of collegiate success (Museus, 2017). Cura programs help Boston College build a CECE by providing culturally relevant and culturally responsive programming.
By participating in a Cura program, students will be able to:
- Appreciate and honor the difference of others.
- Engage with content and reflect on how their identities, experiences, and ideologies impact understanding of the world and people around them.
- Understand how they, as an individual, can navigate difference and impact positive change.
- Identify how they as individual contributors and as a group, can support and create communities of care.