A COMMITMENT TO COMMUNITY
2008 Kidder Faculty Award: Professor Lynne Bond
LYNNE BOND
UVM YEARS
On the psychology faculty since 1976, also dean of the Graduate College for eight years.
IN PRINT
“Movers and Shakers: How and why women become and remain engaged in community leadership,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2008.
A STUDENT’S VIEW
“She’s a real role model for the life well lived.”
Don’t expect to find psychology professor Lynne Bond at the podium, lecturing for fifty minutes about the psychology of women or about how people develop concepts of knowledge and truth. More likely she’ll be listening, soliciting ideas and encouraging responses, facilitating collaboration among students. In fact, she probably won’t even be at the front of the classroom; more likely her class will be gathered together in a circle, and Bond will be among the students, leaning forward, giving them her full attention.
Her way of being in a classroom is in keeping with the insights she’s gained from her academic research, as well as her experiences as a mother, traveler, and lifelong student. They are right for her, and apparently right for numerous students present and past who have sung her praises, helping Bond to earn the 2008 George V. Kidder Faculty Award, presented annually by UVM’s Alumni Association.
Perhaps one reason why her students are so effusive about Bond is that she takes them so seriously, not only as students, but as people. During her own undergraduate years at Wheaton College, Bond admits she was, “an uncommitted student.” One day during her sophomore year, a professor called her in and told her, “You ought to take yourself more seriously.”
“I remember being shocked and flattered, but mostly shocked that a teacher would pull me aside and say that,” Bond says. Now, she tells her students the same thing: “Take yourself seriously.”
“I want to help people appreciate the power of their minds and voices, appreciate the potential of collective mind and voice,” she says.
BURLINGTON TO HAVANA
Thinking in terms of a collective mind and voice is something that comes naturally to Bond. The child of two social workers, Bond spent part of her childhood in Settlement Houses, a form of social reform that began in the late nineteenth century, where professionals offer social services to the urban poor by living among them and serving the communities directly.
Bond spent her early years in California, where she and her parents lived and worked among migrant Mexican orange pickers, and in Cleveland, where they lived in an Eastern European community. Even after they moved to Cleveland Heights, “Settlement Houses remained a huge part of my life, all my life,” she says. “I saw Martin Luther King, Jr., there, and did a lot of social action, activist stuff.”
In her academic pursuits, it made sense that Bond would gravitate to the relatively new discipline of community psychology, which she describes as “a new way of looking at communities, applying what we know about human development to create communities that are good for people.”
She has taken several UVM classes to Cuba, working with researchers at the University of Havana to study community psychology as it is practiced in the country Bond calls, “a living laboratory since the revolution.”
“In the structure of every community there are assumptions about what makes for healthy communities,” she says. “We rarely think about it, or question how it might be different. Community structures are largely invisible to us. But in Cuba, the society is designed around a specific set of articulated goals, including free education and health care for everyone.”
This practical application of how to support healthy communities has also been part of Bond’s community psychology courses, where students have partnered with local government to conduct research on issues related to Burlington neighborhoods. When City Hall wanted to test the value of government-supported block associations, Bond structured her graduate and undergraduate courses to help answer that question. The graduate course developed a survey, and the undergraduates went out in teams and conducted interviews, brought back data, and did data analysis. The course ended with student presentations to citizens from the neighborhoods they’d canvassed, representatives from City Hall, and officers from the Burlington Police Department.
“Right from the start, students know it’s real issues and they’re going to apply it there and then,” Bond says.
Enthusing about the potential for empowerment in such projects for students and community alike, Bond notes that one-on-one interviews are a key part of the process.
Rather than employing a neutral point of view, community psychologists actively promote a healthy community through the very act of assessment. Bond advises her students that interviewers must communicate that they truly care what their subjects think. “It’s about careful listening, inviting people to share what they’re thinking,” she says.
Teaching students to perform interviews is part of nearly all of Bond’s classes. It’s a skill she believes has application beyond students’ potential careers, also informing friendships and working relationships. She likens good interviewing to good teaching. “You are trying to push someone to the edge of their best thinking,” she says. “Asking questions yet leaving the door open. You learn the skill of pushing without smooshing.”
A TEACHER’S ART
It’s easy to see why students warm to Bond. She’s approachable and friendly, and invites student input with generous responses like, “Great idea,” and “Absolutely!” Her passion for her subject is matched by her sincere interest in her students and their ideas.
“In Lynne’s class, you feel like a person… not a student,” says Jess Roy, who is enrolled in Bond’s Psychology of Women class. “Her approach is egalitarian. She is constantly asking us questions, challenging and providing us the space and opportunities to formulate our own answers to questions, our own ideas.”
It’s not that Bond doesn’t feel the need to fill fifty minutes with information. She does, but she resists it because she feels that “cramming kids with knowledge” isn’t the way to get them to learn. “What I really want is for them to think,” she says. “I want them to benefit from past scholarship, and use that knowledge to apply to new ideas. At the same time, they are using one another to refine and develop those ideas.”
Attendance is mandatory in Bond’s classes—seemingly a strange dictate for such a student-friendly professor—but it’s because she believes that one student’s absence robs every other student of a genuine learning opportunity. “By being part of the class you are offering your thoughts, hearing others’ thoughts and building on them. Skipping class undermines not only your own learning, but others’ as well, because you are depriving them of your ideas,” Bond says.
Renewing her own experience as a student continues to refresh the professor’s perspective as a teacher. Bond frequently takes courses, classes in art most recently. She’s found a passion in carving stone sculptures, but has recently worked with new materials in a new way. She took large sheets of Styrofoam and using a saw and then glue, melded them together to make a large abstract form. After extensive sanding and shaping, she puttied and painted until the multiple layers looked like one smooth slightly asymmetrical globe. All very in keeping with her own style of learning, which she calls “constructivist.” Then she ripped a large jagged gash in the smooth surface, and out of it cascades a lava-like mass of chunky debris.
An art critic might make hay with this interesting juxtaposition of the tranquil smooth surface and the eruption of unexpected complexity and energy from the fissure. Does it reflect Bond’s concept of a smoothly functioning community animated by the surging individuals who form it?
One can speculate on the art’s intent, but for the artist the reward of such creative endeavor is clear—a life lived to the fullest. Bond’s worldview is continually changing, growing, being enriched through her work, her art, her travel, and her family. It’s a passion that isn’t lost on her students.
“She’s a real role model for the life well lived,” says Melinda Marie Davis, a graduate student in experimental psychology.
In a college classroom, Bond’s passion and commitment shine through. Clearly, she’s where she wants to be, doing what she wants to do. Though she is thirty years past her own graduate student days, Bond still recalls the different mindset she brought to her first classes as a twenty-six-year-old UVM instructor. “I felt this urgency to be sure my classes were just packed with all this information,” she says. “As time goes on, I’m less and less concerned. Now we say less, and think more. And I’m enjoying teaching more than ever.”
WHO WAS GEORGE KIDDER?
Professor George Kidder’s life, interwoven with the University of Vermont from his undergraduate days to his retirement, hearkens to a bygone era in higher education. A Burlington boy, he studied Latin at the University, earned his bachelor’s in 1922, and immediately took up teaching alongside his former professors.
Kidder would leave for short spans to continue his education—first as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, later to complete his doctorate at the University of Chicago—but his career remained centered at his alma mater. Through his decades as a professor and nearly twenty years as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Kidder helped the University grow, always keeping his focus firmly on undergraduate teaching and providing Vermonters with a sound education.
To honor the University of Vermont’s finest teachers, the UVM Alumni Association established the George V. Kidder Award in the early 1970s.
PAST KIDDER AWARD RECIPIENTS
1974, Edward Feidner; 1975, Betty Boller; 1976, Jeremy Felt; 1977, Paul Eschholz; 1978, Donald Gregg; 1979, Edward Miles; 1980, Samuel Bogorad; 1981, Milton Potash; 1982, Arthur Tuthill; 1983, Lyndon Carew, Jr.; 1984, Mark Stoler; 1985, James Pacy; 1986, Christopher Allen; 1987, Wolfgang Mieder; 1988, Raul Hilberg; 1989, William Lewis; 1990, Robert Tyzbir; 1991, Charlotte Mehrtens; 1992, Shirley Gedeon; 1993, John “Doc” Donnelly; 1994, James Gilmore; 1995, Robert Detenbeck; 1996, Roger Cooke; 1997, Mary Jane Dickerson; 1998, Kenneth Gross; 1999, Paula Fives-Taylor; 2000, Lauck Park; 2001, Anthony Magistrale; 2002, Thomas Hudspeth; 2003, Robert Lawson; 2004, Frank Bryan; 2005, Stanley “Huck” Gutman; 2006, Philip Ambrose; 2007, Richard Sugarman.
