GSE Students Mentor Seventh Grade Girls in Project Athena

In an effort to show young girls the possibilities that lie ahead for them, parents and daughters across the nation will celebrate "Take Our Daughter to Work Day" this Thursday.

But 16 seventh-grade girls at the Longfellow School in Cambridge have the opportunity to closely observe an older role model the entire school year.

The seventh-graders are participants in the Project Athena program, which matches them with students from the Graduate School of Education taking "Psychology of Girls and Women," a class taught by Associate Professor of Education Annie G. Rogers.

GSE students act as mentors in the program, using in the real world what Rogers teaches them about the need for girls and women to have the courage to speak up for themselves, according to Instructor in Education Joann Stemmermann, the program coordinator.

"The goal [of the program] isn't to improve girls' academic scores per se, but to help each girl stay connected to who she is, to keep her psychologically strong," Stemmerman says.

Project Athena combines one-on-one mentoring with activities for the entire group of mentors and students, who are handpicked for the program by their teachers.

Mentors and students meet once each week for a variety of activities. Some of these have included in-line skating, skiing, walking, trips to museums and visits to each other's homes, according to program participants.

Mentoring pairs also attend monthly program nights, where they reflect on what they are learning, and go on group trips at the beginning and end of the year.

The October kick-off event was a weekend retreat to a youth hostel in Littleton, Mass., in which participants created art projects and went rock climbing. On May 1, program participants will embark on a daylong canoe trip down the Charles River.

One of the more unusual items on the agenda is a trip that two sets of mentors and students are taking to the State House next Thursday along with Stemmerman and Margarita Otero-Alverez, the principal of the Longfellow School.

The group will meet with state legislators to discuss funding for the program and to teach the students how the government gives grants. Each year, the program receives about $13,000 from the Massachusetts Campus Compact, an agency which funds community service projects that gets state money.

"It's an interesting day for the girls to be politically active," Stemmermann says.

Project Athena runs under the Harvard Outward Bound Project, a GSE initiative affiliated with Outward Bound USA which teaches students at the school about experienced-based learning through a number of workshops and events each year.

It is also run in collaboration with the Center for Ventures in Girls' Education, a non-profit organization that designs and runs girls' programs.

More than a Greek Goddess

Mentors and mentees say the program's importance lies not in the activities they do, but in the relationships they form.

"They assigned us a girl we were supposed to have a relationship with," says mentor Sheryl H.Cardozo "and now I really love her, in a good mentoring sort of way."

"I've learned how to make friends with people, just because they're there," says Cardozo's mentee, Rebecca E. Slatin, 13. "I wouldn't normally get to know some of the girls or some of the mentors in the program, and I got to know them and they're nice."

Some mentoring pairs have taken their relationship beyond the required meetings.

Three girls in the program--Minnie R. McMahon, Yvonne Davis-Dottin and Slatin--organized a slumber party with their mentors. The group of six watched movies, ate junk food and prepared for the next program meeting in which they ran an activity.

Mentor Sally E. Stone says her mentoring relationship has been particularly beneficial because she and her mentee come from very different backgrounds. Stone is Caucasian and from the South, while her mentee is Haitian and originally from New York.

Stone says because of the program, Sally has "a sense of the broader possibilities for life after the Longfellow School."

Showing young women the opportunities that an education provides is one of the most important aspects of Project Athena, according to Stemmermann, who is assisted by Instructor in Education Mary E. Casey in running the program.

"Just the fact that the mentors are in college rubbed off on them," she says. "Maybe they wanted to be a hairdresser before, but by the end of the year almost 90 to 100 percent of the girls were saying they wanted to go to college, a real benefit that we observed."

But mentors agree that the program often teaches them just as much as it does the seventh graders.

Cardozo says Slatin was essential to a video she recently made for another GSE class, in which she was required to create a portrait in any medium of someone from the GSE community.

Slatin not only served as the subject of the portrait, but also provided necessary technical assistance, according to Cardozo.

"She's better at engineering than I am," Cardozo says. "The first day she showed me how to use the camera."

Cardozo says the mentoring experience has taught her concepts that articles and classes cannot teach.

"In all the courses I take about adolescent girls' development they kind of get lumped together in a group," she says. "They're all individuals...It's important to know all the theory behind what's going on, but sometimes you have to put the book down and look at her and listen to her, even if it isn't what the book says."