UC Berkeley Innovations

New course. Many recent scientific studies show that meditation and volunteering support good health for the heart, brain, and whole being. Combined, they foster positive neuroplasticity. In this course students study the science of neuroplasticity, and learn brief contemplative practices to calm and focus their mind and open their heart to new perspectives in relating to members of different cultures, and socio-economic backgrounds. They also volunteer outside of class for one to two hours each week at English-inAction, International House, or Refugee Transitions, and Equal Opportunities Program at UCB. This experiential learning deepens their knowledge of other cultures as they assist international students, refugees, and immigrants in the often-challenging transition to American life.

Follow up course to “Each One Helps One”. This course integrates the most recent findings of Cognitive Science, and Neurobiology with Meditation and Service Learning. Participants study about the most recent findings on interpersonal neuroplasticity through video talks and readings. In class besides analyzing and discussing the readings and talks, they learn contemplative practices to develop greater awareness of self and others. They complement the intellectual discussion about neuroplasticity with the direct experience of assisting someone from a different culture by volunteering at Refugee Transitions, East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, the International House I-Host Program, or the YWCA English-in-Action Program. To assist participants in their volunteering activities, we have in each class, small group discussions, where participants who volunteer with the same organization, share their experiences and reflections for that week of volunteering. Please see Testimonies page in this website. Blog on Helping Others has no Age Barriers, Conference of Contemplative Mind in Higher Ed. Seattle, 2014.

Recognizing the potential of university students and the needs of the community, this course integrates the most recent findings of Cognitive Science, and Neurobiology with Meditation and Service Learning. Participants study about interpersonal neuroplasticity through video talks and readings. In class besides analyzing and discussing the readings and talks, they learn contemplative practices to develop greater awareness of self and others. They complement the intellectual discussion about neuroplasticity with the direct experience of assisting someone from a different culture by volunteering at Refugee Transitions, East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, the International House I-Host Program, or the YWCA English-in-Action Program. To assist participants in their volunteering activities, we have in each class, small group discussions, where participants who volunteer with the same organization, share their experiences and reflections for that week, and reflect on the neuroplasticity that occurs while volunteering one-on-one. In the bigger group participants discuss those experiences relating them to what we are studying about neuroplasticity through our readings, video presentations by experts. Ted Talks and documentaries.

A major question today is “How can we nourish our soul even in the midst of challenges?” Wisdom traditions teach us that happiness resides in being fully present by entering the Now with a new gaze of innocent discovery and total union. This course invites students to cultivate that inner stillness and to open up to the radiant presence that is already within us and around us. Our tools for inner cultivation are the tender poetry of Pablo Neruda combined with contemplative practices, and a quick view at recent findings on Neuroplasticity. Through Neruda’s poems we will reflect on our childhood, on the cycles of life, death and renewal, on the joy of laziness, and on how poetry call us from everywhere in our daily life. Our classes will begin with a brief meditation to let the poetry sink on us, blending our inner and outer worlds. In one of our sessions we will watch together Il Postino, a beautiful film that captures Neruda’s way of looking at the world and includes several of his poems that we are reading in class.

Recent scientific findings on how the way we think, feel, and act shapes our brain and nervous system confirm what the empirical sciences of India and China have said for thousands of years: that our mind and body are vastly interconnected. In this course students learn easy, effective daily practices to redirect their emotional energy toward greater flexibility in responding to all of life’s joys and challenges, while gaining wisdom and compassion toward themselves and others. In the first hour of class we discuss main concepts of the readings about neuroplasticity assigned for the day and explore questions about practical examples and applications (or testing) of those concepts in our daily life. In the second hour students learn practices from Classical Yoga, Qigong and Buddhism to focus the mind and cultivate clarity and creativity.

Traditionally the role of the university has been to cultivate the mind. Now neuroscience tells us that all learning is, in fact, embodied learning. A cutting edge question of our time is: “How to access the mind through the body and how can we harness neuroplasticity to bring forth a better world?” Through presentations on line by renowned neuroscientists who research and practice meditation, we learn about what is neuroplasticity, that innate capacity of knowing ourselves and of introducing positive changes in our life. We then compare those recent scientific findings to what Classical yoga’s primary sources teach us about how–through observation and self-inquiry–we can familiarize ourselves with the workings of our mind and heart; and how we can harness that subtle energy to cultivate greater wisdom and compassion towards ourselves and others.

To explore through the lenses of art, philosophy and science, two fundamental questions: “Who are we?” and “How do we create meaning for ourselves?” in this course we discuss the embodied bases of human understanding as presented in Cognitive Science, in Buddhist philosophy, and in Borges’ writings. We first study the main principles of Cognitive Science about how we bring forth worlds with our perception, interpretation and responses, and we compare them with the principles of Buddhism about how we influence and shape the realities we live in. Then, in essays and short stories by Jorge Luis Borges we explore the same themes evoked through a literary lens. To complete our study of the mind as embodied learning, we observe our minds in the process of creating meaning. This course includes a lab component of self-reflection, critical inquiry, and contemplative practices to focus the mind and foster discernment and inner knowing.

Jorge Luis Borges was fascinated with Buddhism and with dreams. In this course we explore the relation between these two themes, and their presence in Borges’ essays, poems and short stories. We read by him What is Buddhism?, “The South,” “Nightmares,” “The Ethnographer” and “Coleridge’s Dream.” Since both Borges and Buddhism sustain that we first need to know our mind (or minding) before we can know the world we perceive through it, we begin each class with brief contemplative practices to focus our mind and open ourselves to intuitive knowing.

Jorge Luis Borges’ fascination, since his early childhood, with Buddhism is not known to most of his readers. In this course we read lectures and essays he wrote Buddhism, learn basic Buddhist principles from classical sources, and trace the presence of those texts and principles in Borges’ short stories and essays. Central to both Borges and Buddhism is the question of how our minds create the realities we inhabit. To foster discernment and inner knowing, we begin each class with brief contemplative practices.

In this introductory course we read a selection of Borges’ short stories, essays, and poems. Beginning with his brief essay “Borges and I”, and continuing with “The Other”, “Conjectural Poem”, “The South”, “The Secret Miracle”, etc, we explore how Borges interweaves a rich world of Argentine nuances and traditions, and of private longings and preferences, with his interest in oriental philosophies and in the world of dreams.

One of the UC Berkeley awards that Amelia Barili received is the Chancellor’s Award for Public Service. She was distinguished with this honor in 2008 for the work her students and her do assisting the Latino Community. Later that month, prof. Barili was profiled in this article from the UC Berkeley Letter Home. She speaks of the difference that Service Learning makes in students lives. “When they interact with refugees–says Barili–students see that their own troubles are not so bad”. Barili believes strongly that with the privilege of an education, comes the responsibility of sharing that knowledge beyond the boundaries of the campus. Many of her students are inspired by this way of teaching and learning and keep volunteering many years after that first experience in Barili’s class. Read their testimonies in Students Volunteering Locally and Abroad.

Because of her innovative undergraduate and older adult courses, and her work with the community, prof. Amelia Barili was finalist for the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching award on campus.

In 2011, professor Amelia Barili, received the Chancellor’s Community Partnership Grant for her project “Spanish Grammar and Political Asylum.” That UC Berkeley award was granted to prof. Barili and to East Bay Sanctuary Covenant–with whom she had been partnering since 1999–to expand and deepen the capacity of the student volunteers and of EBSC to serve Latino immigrants and refugees.

The new and expanded program created with this grant included three major steps.

The first step was to hire a paralegal/staff attorney to work with the Spanish 102A students, explaining the intricacies of the political asylum process, to better prepare them to assist the UCB Law School students as interpreters in political asylum cases and U-visa Cases. As result of this Chancellor’s Community Partnership Grant, the number of Spanish 102A students working with School of Law students in the pro-bono EBSC legal clinic augmented exponentially. From 1 student in 2010, to 10 Spanish students assisting as interpreters in 2012. They assisted the EBSC team of law students in writing detailed declarations that included the clients’ personal background and the persecution they suffered in their home countries. They often followed the cases from the first “intake” all the way to interpreting for the clients at their interviews at the San Francisco Asylum Office.

The second step was to hire an undergraduate student, who had taken Spanish 102A before and volunteered at Santuario–as EBSC is familiarly called–, to coordinate between the Spanish students and the six busy EBSC staff members. With the assistance of Barili and the ESBC staff, the undergraduate coordinator developed a handout of instructions to guide new students on the various procedures at EBSC, from answering the phones and receiving clients who come with a wide range of legal assistance requests, to doing ‘intakes’, (‘intakes’ are the refugees stories for their political asylum processes). This part of the handbook was developed in collaboration between the student coordinator and the paralegal/staff attorney that we hired with the grant. The student coordinator also developed an effective system to maintain records, schedule and kept track of students hours for volunteering, produced instruction folders to easily guide students in their daily office tasks at East Bay Sanctuary.

The third step was to give greater visibility to this joint project between UC Berkeley and East Bay Sanctuary Covenant. To that effect interviews were filmed with members of this NGO and with students from Spanish 102A and prof. Barili. They were integrated in a short documentary titled “Building Nurturing Communities: A Berkeley Story”, which was uploaded to Vimeo and You Tube. In that documentary students and community partners reflect on what is unique about this collaborative learning experience.

Barili developed this innovative pedagogy–which bridges the university and the community–as part of her Spanish 102A Advanced Grammar and Composition course. It is a win-win opportunity for everyone involved.

Educational benefit for the students involved

From a purely linguistic perspective, students have a real-world setting in which to practice their Spanish language skills. They speak and listen, face to face with Spanish speaking immigrants. They also have the more challenging experience of speaking and listening to immigrants on the telephone, which is much more difficult because there are no visual clues.

Even more important from a cultural and socially integrative point of view: they learn about the immigrant experience. Many students in the UCB course are themselves immigrants who came when very young or children of immigrants but do not know the great difficulties their families experienced in assimilating or in obtaining legal status in the United States. Clients at the East Bay Sanctuary are in the process of petitioning for legal status, petitioning for relatives, applying to adjust status to become Legal Permanent Residents, or applying for citizenship. In assisting clients with these legal applications, students will see how complicated these processes can be and understand the great difficulties their own families might have had. Often students comment that they had no idea of what their families went through.

In the new and expanded collaboration with UCB Law School students at the EBSC legal clinic, Spanish 102A students also learn about other cultures. Many of the clients they work with are indigenous (Mayan) Guatemalans. This is a unique opportunity to interact with the large Mayan population (near 5,000 of them) in the Bay Area, who themselves are learning Spanish. When acting as interpreters in U Visa program at EBSC, students also learn about the culture of violence against abused women and LGBTs that occurs throughout Latin American and the world.

Above all, students gain valuable life experience and develop a more caring attitude towards those in need. Most of the Sanctuary’s clients are barely literate at best and quite poor. Students interact with families who are struggling to get by economically and only beginning to learn how to access social services. They interpret for them filing out employment applications or applying for social services. They also interpret at medical/mental health appointments.

Being at a stone-thrown away distance from campus, East Bay Sanctuary Covenant introduces students to a very different Spanish-speaking world than the one they experience in the classroom. After reading “La Soledad de América Latina”, the 1982 Nobel Speech in which Gabriel García Márquez comments on different models of development and their impact in that continent, and having read the testimony of Guatemalan indigenous Nobel prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, students have the opportunity of meeting at Santuario, the actual people that had to run away from the violence these authors are writing about. This NGO has more Spanish-speaking asylum clients who have fled persecution in their home countries than any agency in the Bay Area. Students work with indigenous Guatemalans, victims of the latest genocide in the Americas, currently victims of a discrimination comparable to that suffered by African Americans in the American south after the Civil War. They also help with clients fleeing violence in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries

While volunteering at Santuario, students have also the unique opportunity to work with victims of domestic violence, often so severe that it amounts to torture, and learn that it occurs in all countries and that many countries refuse to protect women and children from their abusers. In other cases, students work with LGBTs who have suffered terrible persecution, often at the hands of law enforcement, simply because of their sexual orientation.

Perhaps most important of it all, students learn that they can make a difference and that they can use the knowledge and skills they are learning at UCB to actually respond to needs in the broader community. This inspires students to dedicate themselves to learn, and opens their hearts/minds towards contributing to create nurturing communities. Often they continue contributing to the Latino community locally and abroad, and in some cases create NGOs to help others. See the page Students Volunteer Locally and Abroad in this website

Benefit for the Community Partner

The Sanctuary has the largest affirmative asylum program in the Bay Area. In it law students in the California Asylum Representation Clinic (CARC) at Berkeley School of Law represent clients in the asylum process, under the supervision of the Sanctuary staff. The program is continuously expanding. Spanish 102A students in this new phase of our partnership, supported by the 2011 Chancellor’s Community Partnership Grant–worked as interpreters with a team of law students, assisting them in writing detailed declarations that include the clients’ personal background and the persecution they suffered in their home countries. They, then, translated for the clients at their interviews at the San Francisco Asylum Office. Spanish speaking clients are generally indigenous Guatemalans (Maya) who fled the most recent genocide in the Americas, victims of domestic violence and LGBTs who were persecuted on account of their sexual orientation. With the help of the Spanish 102A student volunteers acting as well informed interpreters–because of the training received with the paralegal–East Bay Sanctuary, was able to expand their services to the Latino immigrant population of the Bay Area.

Besides having the new opportunity of working in the above expanding programs, Spanish 102A students continued to perform general office duties including answering the telephones, interviewing drop-ins, assisting clients with applications for employment, petitions for family members, residency and citizenship, or simply talking and listening to clients. These duties are most of what Spanish 102A students have done up 2011. Barili and East Bay Sanctuary were able to enrich and broaden the students’ experience and serve more clients, in this new phase of their partnership, thanks to the support received by the 2011 Chancellor’s Partnership Grant.

In 1999, Barili began implementing this innovative pedagogy of integrating what is learned in the classroom with practice based knowledge acquired learning from/with the community. Since then, over 600 of her students have put nearly 10,000 hours volunteering at East Bay Sanctuary covenant and at bilingual schools in the Bay Area, assisting Latino children and un-accompanied minors from Center America.

Because of her strong contributions to UC Berkeley’s equity, inclusion and diversity work, Amelia Barili was nominated on September 2015 for Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence.

Among the contributions cited in the nomination is the work she does with her undergraduate and older adult students helping them develop their voices and serve those most in need in the community through such courses as “Biographical and Autobiographical Writing: Telling the Stories of the Undocumented”; “Volunteering, Global Education and Good Writing”, “Engaging with Life: Volunteering and Neuroplasticity”; “Harnessing Wisdom and Compassion through Volunteering”; “Each One Helps One: Neuroplasticity in Action”.

She was also nominated for the CAAIC award for her dedication to expanding the creation of service learning courses, and supporting engaged scholarship–throughout campus and in collaboration with other universities–by initiating and implementing Faculty Learning Communities on Collaborative Service Learning (2013-14) and on “Volunteering and Global Education” (2015-16).

The UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence has traditionally been given only to Deans and tenured Faculty. That Barili was nominated for the award, being a lecturer, speaks highly of the appreciation for her work with students, colleagues and the Latino community locally and overseas.