A Paper Route

Like many of her fellow members in Rider’s Global Studies Society, Angelique Olmo ’12 enjoys learning about the political and social aspects of international cultures. A Political Science major in the College of Continuing Studies, Olmo is naturally drawn to the subject, but unlike many of her peers at Rider, she actually brings international and domestic policy experience to the classroom.

Olmo spent four years in the Balkans region of southeastern Europe with a non-governmental organization (NGO), working to ease interethnic confrontations by developing resources and capacities for offices devoted to the cause. Her experience abroad, combined with another five years spent working domestically with the Population Resource Center, provided Olmo with a wealth of practical skills to complement her education.

“I’ve always been oriented toward social justice, and I’m also very interested in organizational theory, so my studies are a good fit,” said Olmo, whose work with the Population Resource Center saw her travelling the county to gather and provide demographic information related to teen pregnancy, as well as to Washington, D.C., to work on issues of representation in Congress.

This past summer saw Olmo return to Europe, this time to Great Britain to deliver a paper on the development of critical thinking in young children at the annual Creative Engagements conference at Oxford University in June.

“A friend of mine from Serbia, who worked for an NGO there, told me last fall about their call for proposals, so I submitted my abstract, and it was accepted,” said Olmo, a resident of Bordentown, N.J.

Olmo’s paper, Nurturing the Good: Critical Thinking in Children, focused on children ages 2 to 5, and discussed “how to engage them and why it’s important,” she said.

“Most important to this is the social and evaluative approach to learning,” said Olmo, a proponent of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who theorized that children learn through socialization. “This is their route to cognition and language acquisition.”

Olmo, who is particularly interested in emerging democracies, says that this encompassing theory of learning and education also has an effect on political structures.

“There is a correlation between the development of children, and that of a society,” she explained. “There is a dynamic interplay between society and state, where the state represents the parents and people are the child.”

This may help explain the phenomenon of racism and classism, and ideas of the superior and inferior that create gaps between people, according to Olmo.

“We can look at a concept like cooperation, and ask, ‘What causes it? Can it be created?’” she said.

To illustrate her point, Olmo uses the example of an instruction manual to assemble a desk or a bicycle.

“There are active routes and pathways to create and nurture people to be more cooperative and understanding,” she said.

Olmo, who is scheduled to take the LSAT in December with an eye on studying constitutional law, reluctantly concedes that having practical experience applying much of the theory she now learns in class may position her somewhat uniquely among her classmates.

“I suppose it puts me in a position of leadership,” said Olmo, who serves as president of the Global Studies Society. “I am able to contribute my real-life experiences to the discussion, so it makes for an interesting dynamic.”