Vassar Quarterly - Summer 2018 - 27

Karl rabe

students at Vassar and elsewhere. By the 2018 spring semester, 15
tutors were working with 80 students at Vassar. Höhn connected
Shea with colleagues at Michigan State, and that school now has
40 students working with tutors through Conversations Unbound.
Vassar alums also rallied to make Conversations Unbound
a reality. Jim Leu '94, Services and Operations Director at the
language-learning outfit italki.com, has been instrumental in
providing a digital platform for the services. Attorney Alisa Swire
'84, who has been working with Höhn on the refugee initiative
since it started, helped Shea and her fellow students navigate the
legal and financial issues involved in getting incorporated and
gaining federal not-for-profit status.
Other alumnae/i have helped in ways large and small-from
providing accommodations to Sudanese refugees while they worked
with Shea to develop a pilot class through Conversations Unbound
to starting a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to pay tutors.
The organization got a significant boost in 2017 when OZY
magazine selected Shea as one of 10 recipients of its Genius Awards.
The award came with a prize of up to $10,000 to expand and
enhance the organization.
This spring, Höhn developed a half-semester pilot class-
German History and Memory After 1945-based on the underlying
principles shared by Vassar Refugee Solidarity and the Consortium.
The class included six Vassar students and six refugee youth
resettled in Berlin-they Skyped in from a classroom made available
by Bard College Berlin.
The course, which emphasized "engaged learning," brought new
perspectives to the fore. Matt Brill-Carlat '19, who now leads the
Consortium, says that both the Conversations Unbound Skype
lessons and the transnational classroom "brought refugee
knowledges and experiences front and center in our curriculum."
Höhn says when she showed her students film clips of the
rubble of bombed-out Berlin after World War II, the American
students were stunned by the destruction of war. But for the
refugee students living in Germany, learning about their new
country's efforts to come to terms with its Nazi past inspired hope.

Clockwise from top: Elise Shea '19 found a win-win way to support refugees-
hiring them as language tutors for Vassar students. rahaf Saad, a Syrian refugee
living in Istanbul, interacts with students during a Vassar Arabic class. Professor
Maria Höhn organized a Vassar teach-in on displacement that included Mariya
Nikolova '07 of the International Committee of the red Cross and others.

As Höhn recalled, "Hanni, one of the young refugee students in
Germany, was uplifted by those images. She said, 'If people could
recover from this devastation, we can recover from what has
happened to us.'"
Shea has another year at Vassar and will continue to lead
Conversations Unbound. Kanoria and DeYoung graduated this
year, but say their experiences will stay with them. "To have such
meaningful engagements and relationships with community
members, folks around the world, and other colleges, as well as
Vassar students, faculty, staff, administrators, and alums, has
challenged me in many ways," Kanoria said. "It has forced me to
examine my assumptions about people, global governance, and
aid structures, as well as the institutional structures we live
through every day-at Vassar or as passport holders of a given
nation-state."
For her part, Höhn says, "Watching this all unfold, working with
the students as equal partners, and seeing their creativity and
commitment, has been the highlight of my teaching career." 
VA S S A r Q u A r T E r LY

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