What’s new with Eastern in the City

Along with the St. Davids campus, Eastern in the City’s semester is already in full swing. With 44 first-year students and 27 sophomores attending EIC this year, Dean Vivian Nix-Early expects this year to be “smaller, more focused” and views it as a chance to “really refine the program.”

In a telephone interview Jeneen Barlow, director of EIC, the program is “intended for students in the Philadelphia area [who want] to take advantage of higher education but [cannot] really afford it.” Barlow hopes to see these students find a vision and a sense of belonging, so that they will not just start college, but gain the momentum to finish it.

As Nix-Early said, many of the students who have returned are “committed to the vision and philosophy of EIC.” She went on to say that they are “students who are committed to their learning and committed to learning in the city.”

As for the future, Nix-Early said that at this point they have been working toward “creating a curriculum in line with the mission of the Campolo School for Social Change.” She hopes to see a different type of learning environment emerge wherein the students use “the city as text and [the] city as classroom.” To accomplish this, EIC is encouraging students to use their afternoons to broaden their horizons by making trips to places such as Washington D.C.

Barlow has adopted the philosophy of well-known psychologist and theorist Abraham Maslow for EIC and hopes that “people will discover their vocation,” and “use their life’s work to transform society.” In the future, Barlow expects to see EIC students using their “God-given passions and gifts to serve this world.”