Women's Education Worldwide 2006:

Women's Hopes and Dreams

Dear Colleagues,

First off, our genuine thanks to all of you who attended the second Women’s Education Worldwide 2006 Conference at Dubai Women’s College in the United Arab Emirates from January 4th to 6th and contributed to the success of the event. It was indeed a very simulating gathering.

We enjoyed the opportunity to reconnect with the friends we met at the first conference in Massachusetts and to make new ones. We continued our dialogues about our issues and challenges. We came away impressed by the challenges that lie ahead of us as champions of women’s education. The gathering inspired all of us by the collective intelligence, energy, and passion with which our group is poised to understand “Women’s Hopes and Dreams” in providing effective and relevant education.

For those who could not attend, we are still eager to bring you into the fold. By the end of our meeting, we had come to agreement on a number of issues:

• Establish more opportunities to have students get in contact with one another through student activities such as Mt. Holyoke and Dubai Women’s College Student Leadership Event. It was also suggested to include students in future WEW meetings.

• Work with academic body (faculty) for their new role and the paradigm shift from being traditional instructors to becoming mentors and facilitators to help women realise their dreams.

• Creation of a "center" for international women's student leadership. The center’s objective is to host and promote women leadership activities. For instance, it tied in nicely with the Insight Dubai program (to which a number of our institutions had sent, or planned to send, students). The model could be exported and the program could rotate among our institutions so that it is hosted every year in a different institute.

• Propose to the Rockefeller Foundation to support a gathering to plan and implement the following:
o Establish a (possibly virtual) center for study of women's education worldwide.
o Setup a mentoring networking, put alumnae and alumnae associations of our institutions in touch with one another.

• The President of Smith College Dr. Carol Christ offered to draw up a first draft of the proposal which would be circulated to the whole group for comments before sending it to the Foundations.

• Based on the success of this year’s conference, it was agreed to have a third WEW conference. The conference will be held in Italy, either in Bellagio/Pavia or Pavia depending on the success of the proposal. Tentatively, the conference would occur in June, 2008. However, it was not the only possible time. It was less desirable to have it held in January as an alternative.

• The 3rd WEW planning committee is chaired by Smith College while Mt. Holyoke and Dubai Women’s College will be committee members.

• The theme for the next conference would be around these two themes: “Learning to Work" and "Making our Network Work."

• The committee will also issue a press release and attempt to have it published in the Chronicle and US press.

• We would like to broaden our membership and invite your suggestions for appropriate institutions. We have obvious gaps in our ranks, including southern Africa and Latin America. If you did not attend the conference and would like to be included on our membership roster, please confirm with Jesse; otherwise we will remove you from our mailing list.

• We will assemble a number of electronic mailing lists to link our institutions. We invite you to submit e-mail addresses of people who would like to be included on the following lists:

o Presidents
o Deans
o International education officers
o Academic Faculty
o Student leaders - on this, we are eager to hear your thoughts about more specific student lists, including, for example, leaders in student government, newspaper editors, heads of international clubs. What other categories might be fruitful for your students?

The current WEW web site at Mt Holyoke is updated with the conference material - http://www.mtholyoke.edu/proj/wew/dubai.html

We are thrilled at the potential of this group, and we look forward to working together to advance the agenda of women’s education worldwide.

Yours sincerely,

Howard E. Reed, Ph.D.
Director