Culture Shift

Val Harmon '05's horizons reach from the Bronx to Carlisle and back

by Lauren DeFont

January 3, 2008

Val Harmon '05 teaches English as a Second Language at the High School for Medical Science and the Dr. Mary E. Walker Academy in the Bronx, N.Y.

Val Harmon ’05 was not your typical Dickinson student. And she knew it. She was among the first group of Posse Scholars to come to Carlisle, and while she felt like an outsider at first, she eventually found her way.

The Posse Foundation Program recruits academically qualified students from urban public high schools to attend some of the country’s best colleges and universities. Dickinson joined the initiative in 2001 and recruited its first Posse group from New York City. Since then, the college has welcomed a new Posse every year—a total of six from New York and two from Los Angeles.

“I remember coming to campus and being very intimidated because it was such a different environment,” Harmon explains. “Diversity on campus just wasn’t visible. I was very uncomfortable being the only brown person in the class, in the cafeteria. I was feeling like that sprinkle of pepper in a field of salt.”

In the midst of these cultural stressors, worldwide and personal tragedy struck in the same week.

“My first couple of months at Dickinson is also when 9/11 happened,” she recalls. “The day before 9/11, I found out that I had lost my brother.” He was shot and killed while visiting his family.

Harmon left Dickinson for a week and considered not returning. She filled out an application to transfer to New York University. But the support of her Posse, her friends and her mentor Joyce Bylander, special assistant to the president for institutional and diversity initiatives, made it impossible for her to walk away.

By the end of that first year, Harmon had a plan. A key draw to Dickinson had been the study-abroad programs, so she declared a major in sociology and a minor in Spanish and decided to travel the world.

Her first stop was Dickinson’s Crossing Borders program, which allowed her a summer in Africa and a semester at a historically black college in Louisiana.

“The Crossing Borders experience was revolutionary for me because it was a cross-cultural study, and we felt that it was a cross-cultural study,” Harmon says. “When we got to Africa, I discovered that I look very much like a West African woman. They [Africans] would yell to me in French, and I would have to say, ‘Je suis américaine!’ ”

Harmon then spent the spring semester at Xavier University in New Orleans, where she again realized that she didn’t quite fit. “I didn’t stand out so much, but I was from Dickinson, so I ‘walked Dickinson,’ and I wore a Dickinson sweatshirt, which separated me.”

As a whole, the Crossing Borders experience helped Harmon evaluate her cultural perspective.

“I was forced to ask lots of personal questions,” she says. “I was required to look at my own identity and what had shaped it. I was also asked to address certain biases that I had had against people of all shapes and sizes for different reasons. It revolutionized the way I thought.”

Harmon built on that experience when she spent her junior year in Málaga, Spain, and Querétaro, Mexico. She returned to Dickinson worldly, experienced and fluent—everything she had wanted to be. But she wasn’t the only thing that had been transformed.

“I came back to Dickinson senior year and discovered that while I was gone, things had changed,” Harmon says. “I remember writing an e-mail to President Durden and others and thanking them for working so hard on improving diversity. I remember going to a history class and finding that I wasn’t the only brown person—there were eight of us in one room! It was a huge feeling of relief.”

One of the things Harmon discovered on her travels was that she loved to teach—she tutored kids in English to earn extra money—so she applied for a New York City Teaching Fellowship at the City University of New York. The program appealed to her because it required her to attend graduate school part time and teach full time, so she would gain experience while earning her degree. She decided to pursue a degree in teaching English as a second language.

“I had spent so much time learning a second language abroad,” she says, “I figured that if anyone could understand these kids and the urgency to acquire the dominant language, it was me.”

Harmon completed her master’s in May and is a certified teacher at the High School for Medical Science and the Dr. Mary E. Walker Academy in the Bronx, where she grew up. She has good days and bad days, as most teachers do, but she is passionate about the kids and the school.

“I find that I have never been so inspired to be happy with myself and content with my own life until teaching,” Harmon says. “When you meet a child who has struggled in ways you’ve never had to or doesn’t have a family or doesn’t have a home or doesn’t have a support network—it gives me the ability to look back at the opportunities that have been graciously offered to me, and I am in a constant state of gratitude.”