For a long time, I [Lily] was reprimanded for being on my phone. I could spend days scrolling through videos, photos, and ideas, while my parents and teachers ridiculed me for my unceasing obsession. But slowly memes became infographics and dance videos sparked different avenues for my creativity. Fascinated with the power of social media — the outreach and the potential that my phone held — I realized that there was much more to it than finding the perfect lighting for Instagram posts or doing silly trends on TikTok.
When given the opportunity in the Workshop at Phillips Academy to work with the Community and Multicultural Development office (CAMD), I knew very little about the organization. Despite attending Andover for three years, I’d never wandered into this wonderful pocket of Morse Hall. Until I joined the Workshop.
Welcomed by the unabated cheerfulness of M. Martin, instructor in English and Tang senior fellow in engaged pedagogy, and the warm CAMD community, my creativity blossomed. Home to numerous unique, curious, and intelligent students and faculty members, I experienced a space that needed to be recognized and shared.
In addition to interviewing CAMD scholar alumni, searching through archives, and generating a report detailing our findings for our CAMD Scholars program oral history project, Alicia ’22 and I seized the opportunity to revamp CAMD’s online presence. This is the moment my ongoing obsession with social media became more relevant.
Our aim is to break down the invisible barrier between the Andover community, the CAMD Scholars program, and CAMD as a whole. We hope to encourage more students to become a part of the space and to utilize the opportunity to become CAMD Scholars.
To create a more cohesive theme and branding on Instagram, we want to help CAMD create a logo used across all of CAMD’s social media platforms. To this end, we came up with the idea to make a CAMD logo design competition for Andover students.
Our hope for this competition is to empower those involved in CAMD. We want to give those students a larger voice on campus, while also inviting others who are less familiar with the space to engage with CAMD. Since our vision is to create a logo representative of the student body, we plan to use Instagram polls to tally votes for the design competition, and then personally work with design winners, CAMD students, and faculty to finalize the design to ensure it encapsulates CAMD’s values.
I am grateful to the Workshop for redefining what learning means to me. Although I wasn’t memorizing equations or reading novels that we are taught to find important, I have been able to find academic success by combining passion, a shared goal, and my skills with social media.
The “CAMD Scholars Program: Advancing DEIJ Teaching, Learning, and Community Outcomes” group includes Jane ’22, Hannah ’22, Alicia ’22, Frank ’22, and Lily ’22.
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*THE WORKSHOP
Each spring term, the Workshop welcomes 20 seniors to this interdisciplinary, project-based course. With an eye toward reimagining what school can be, the Workshop is the senior’s onlyacademic commitment for the entire term. Instead of splitting their time and attention into units of distinct courses and fields of study, they work closely with peers, faculty, and community and global partners on a series of linked, interdisciplinary projects that revolve around a single theme. Within a chosen theme, students explore areas of personal interest. This year’s theme is Experiments in Education.
During the first few weeks of the term, students are working on one of four faculty-led projects. We will be featuring blog posts by students during this time.
- Historiography (led by Chris Jones)
- Listening to Buddhists in Our Backyard (led by Andy Housiaux)
- Andover’s CAMD Scholars Program: Advancing DEIJ Teaching, Learning, and Community Outcomes (led by Corrie Martin)
- Bias (led by Nicholas Zufelt)
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