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Barbara Geehan
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From the President
There is an old proverb that goes:
Tell me and I will forget
Show me and I may not remember
Involve me and I will understand
Our faculty is always striving to augment the learning experience for their students. Like parents, teachers look for ways to interact with students "on their terms," amidst their interests. Those interests come and go (text messaging and YouTube are favorites right now); effective teachers reach out to engage students using their current interests. Regardless of the method, the objective is always the creation of the best environment for engaged learning.
We think our new Core Curriculum, being adopted by our faculty this fall, will promote engaged learning. One of the requirements of the new Core Curriculum is what we are calling "Experiencing the Liberal Arts in the World." It emphasizes the importance of students taking their academic knowledge out into the world to engage in the dynamic interplay between doing and reflecting. We want to encourage students, in this era of once-removed participation (text messaging and YouTube are not face-to-face communication!), to move back and forth between the observer stance and active participation.
As an example of active participation, 11 students led by anthropology/geology Visiting Professor Paul Blank traveled through Italy to Turkey and Greece this past semester. They went to experience, firsthand, the origins of Western and Eastern civilization. The students studied the trade routes, visited the Pantheon in Rome, the Duomo cathedral in Florence, and learned about the devastating impact of the plague on all of civilization in the 14th century. They even studied the Bronze Age in Crete, viewing a small disc with writing on it that, to this day, has not been deciphered.
From these experiential lessons, accompanying College staff member Mark Heidrich says the students learned that "events in the world have millennial consequences." And of course, they began to see parallel concerns today. We all live on a timeline, and while our lives are only tiny specks on that continuum, all human activity has an impact on its direction.
We are proud - and we hope that you are, too - to see our future graduates so actively engaged in the world.
- Jane Margaret O'Brien
