In This Section:
Mentoring students will intellectual disabilities - Julie Wargo Aikins, psychology
Oguibe explores culture, theory in visual arts - Olu Oguibe, art & art history

Wargo Aikins studies how to bring together Best Buddies

Photo: Melissa Arbo

Julie Wargo Aikins, assistant professor of psychology

By exploring the effectiveness of an established mentoring program that aids children with intellectual disabilities, a UConn professor is illuminating a subset of child psychology that is often challenging to study.

Julie Wargo Aikins, assistant professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has spent the past two years studying participants in the Best Buddies program, an international mentoring initiative that matches students who are mentally challenged with peers outside their special education classrooms. The initiative, founded in 1989 by the Kennedy Foundation, works to introduce socialization opportunities that will help these students become more independent and feel more included in the community.

Wargo Aikins’ research represented the first time the mentoring relationship between Best Buddies participants and peers has been studied. “We designed a study to test what kind of effect it has,” says Wargo Aikins, who partnered with a Yale University professor for her research. “We were hoping to learn that these relationships are having a positive impact on people’s lives.”

   Wargo Aikins studied 30 high school students with intellectual disabilities as they interacted with their Best Buddies peer mentor and again when they interacted with a person the student considered his or her best friend. The majority of best friends were also mentally challenged. Wargo Aikins watched as the groups of students communicated, played games and participated in other daily activities. Her research yielded insight on the benefit of Best Buddies mentoring relationships.

“Mentoring relationships are different from friendships. Mentoring relationships have a level of expectation,” Wargo Aikins says. “What we found is while mentoring relationships and friendships contribute something unique, they both contribute to the students’ doing better over time — both psychologically and with their communication skills and with the way they function in their homes and in the community.”

Studying the development processes of   children with intellectual disabilities can be a difficult area of child psychology, Wargo Aikins says. Physical or communication disabilities often accompany mental disabilities that prevent researchers from communicating with and studying this population of children, she says.

Wargo Aikins’ Best Buddies research revealed an additional hurdle: Several students could not participate in the project because the students did not have best friends.

“That was one of the most profound things that we discovered,” says David Quilleon, vice present of programs for Best Buddies International. “People with intellectual disabilities are some of the most maligned and disenfranchised people in the world.”

Wargo Aikins is working to finalize the results of her Best Buddies study. In addition to her research initiatives, she also teaches a UConn introduction to psychology class and works with clinical graduate students. Interest in the field of child psychology continues to grow, she says. Her goal is to teach a seminar course on child psychopathology that explores such child disorders as depression, anxiety and aggression.

“The idea of teaching this course is very exciting,” Wargo Aikins says. “A lot of people are interested in learning about children and how things go wrong with them.”

— Peyton Woodson Cooper

Artist, historian and writer travels the world seeking new experiences

Photo: Melissa Arbo

Olu Oguibe, artist, author, poet and associate professor of art and art history, with his 2004 painting New England Summer.

The walls of Olu Oguibe’s studio are dotted with his paintings, but several canvases, rich with red and black, command a certain presence.

“They’re about prison abuse,” says Oguibe, associate professor of art and art history in the School of Fine Arts. “I’ve lived under several dictatorships, and quite a number of my friends spent time in jail. It is something that has always been a concern to me.”

Over the years, Oguibe has been involved in several campaigns on behalf of prisoners of conscience.   Another wall in his studio features portraits of Amelia Earhart, Indira Gandhi and Aretha Franklin created for a project called Women of Substance.

Born and raised in Nigeria, Oguibe joined the UConn faculty in 2003 with a joint appointment in art and art history and African American studies. He is a Renaissance man — an artist, an art historian, a critic, an art exhibition curator, a poet, a musician, and an author.

“If I’m interested in something, I do it,” he says. “I suppose you’d say I’m promiscuous in terms of experiences. If it has something to do with the intellect, I’m drawn to it.”

Oguibe, who teaches art history, painting, drawing, and theory, says his interest in African-American culture dates back to reading about it as a child in West Africa. “When I was 10 years old, I read about George Washington Carver and was blown away. I wondered how someone under the circumstances could achieve so much,” he says.

The author of several books, Oguibe’s most recent volume, The Culture Game, is a collection of essays written during the past 10 years that represent his contributions to debates on culture and theory, particularly in the visual arts. His essays explore the differences in the way Western and non-Western artists are received, the obstacles faced by non-Western and minority artists, and the nature and concerns of non-Western art.

“The Western art establishment expects [non-Western artists] to make a different kind of art,” he says. “And every 10 years, a particular gallery or museum may hold an African, Asian or Latin American exhibition and then feel no further obligation to show these artists.”

Oguibe’s works have been shown in one-person and group exhibitions in major galleries and museums around the world, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. At UConn, his work   has been part of faculty exhibitions at The William Benton Museum of Art, and last fall he had a one-person exhibition at the UConn Contemporary Art Galleries. He also has worked as an international curator and consultant on contemporary art at galleries such as the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London.

Earlier this year, Oguibe traveled widely, first to Vietnam to speak at an alternative art space in Saigon, then to Incheon, Korea, to participate in the 2005 International Ceramics Workshop and, finally, on to Mexico to create a performance for Monterrey’s Casa de la Cultura.

— Sherry Fisher