Allston Community Embraces Ed Portal

The walls are bright pastels: green, periwinkle, red, and orange. In the center of the large room, two young children, joined by two Harvard undergraduates, laugh in unison, shaking a bag full of ice, cream, and vanilla extract and dancing to “Walk Like an Egyptian.”

This is the Harvard Allston Education Portal, a space that serves as a gateway for teaching and learning between the University and the community. The Portal, which is the brainchild of Director of Life Sciences Education Robert A. Lue, offers free mentoring and enrichment opportunities in science, math, writing, and public speaking for the neighborhood’s children, in addition to computer classes and a speaker series geared towards adults.

The Portal sits less than three blocks from a piece of land slated for the construction of the Allston Science Complex—a now desolate pit of concrete surrounded by scaffolding that has come to represent the tensions between Harvard and the community. But those involved with the Portal say that hostility between the neighborhood and the University seems to disappear at the Ed Portal’s glass doors.

‘BI-DIRECTIONAL DOORWAY’

The people interviewed for this article—Harvard administrators, the undergraduates who mentor children at the Portal, and parents who bring their children to learn in the one-story building—all echoed the same sentiment: The Education Portal is free from the tensions between the University and the community.

This is all the more surprising given the organization’s origins. Harvard created the Ed Portal in 2008 as a component of the legally-binding cooperation agreement that the City of Boston required the University to sign before it could break ground on the Allston Science Complex. As part of the agreement, Harvard pledged to distribute $25 million dollars over the next decade for community benefits.

But Lue, who created the Portal and now serves as its faculty director, says that the Portal is not intended to be a gesture of obligation. Instead, he says, it has served as a way for the community and the University to truly interact.

“I pitched the idea of the Education Portal as a really exciting opportunity to rethink how the community and the University come together,” Lue says. “It’s a bi-directional doorway, like a sandbox where the community and the University can collaborate and develop ongoing projects.”

In creating programming for the Ed Portal, Lue is advised by a committee that includes Allston residents so as to ensure that the space fulfills community needs.

And while disputes between the University and the community are largely absent from the project, Lue says December’s halt in construction on the Science Complex has had some negative effects on the Education Portal.

“I did have high hopes that when the building opened we would have access to facilities that would further support programming at the Portal,” Lue says.

MENTORING, NOT TUTORING

All the Harvard undergraduates who mentor children at the Ed Portal interviewed for this article say they have had positive experiences with the parents and children who they work with. Still, some mentioned the need to be mindful of tensions between the University and the community.

“As mentors, we all have to be aware of what’s going on,” says Sophie Rengarajan ’10, who has been mentoring at the Education Portal since it opened. “But once we’re inside the Portal we focus on science and nothing else.”

Qi Yu ’11, who has been mentoring for four semesters, echoes these sentiments.

“I’ve always had a good experience with the people of Allston,” Yu says. “The politics really stay outside of the Ed Portal.”

Lue emphasizes that the mentoring program is the heart of the Education Portal, where Harvard undergraduates work one on one and in small groups with first through 12th graders on math, science, writing, public speaking, and provide general homework help.

“It’s mentoring, not tutoring,” says Lue, adding that it is his hope that the undergraduates continue to work with the same students and families from semester to semester.

Each of the 17 mentors spends one afternoon a week at the Portal. Collectively, they work with more 90 local children.

Much of their work revolves around a discovery-based approach towards learning, with the children and the mentors designing and executing a variety of experiments.

Education Portal Coordinator Meaghan C. Fay also emphasizes the role the mentors have in fostering excitement about college among the young students it serves.

“It’s fantastic to have Harvard students introducing these kids to the idea of college at a very early age,” Fay says.

Many Allston residents say that the Ed Portal provides a valuable service.

Guoing Yan, the mother of a six-year-old boy who is mentored in science at the, says how much she enjoys the program.

“My son looks forward to this every week,” Yan says.

—Staff writer Sofia E. Groopman can be reached a segroopm@fas.harvard.edu.