One of the important claims about the unique benefits of a liberal arts education at a residential college is that it prepares graduates to be both knowledgeable in a particular academic area of focus as well as be capable of contemplating and constructively engaging the bigger questions we face as individuals and as humans sharing one planet. One of those central questions is how to live a “good life.” Aristotle used the word Eudaimonia, usually translated to mean “human flourishing,” as the true goal of education. If that is true, then, as the late NYC mayor Ed Koch (1924–2013) might have asked, “How we doin’?” Did a liberal arts education inform our understanding of the “good life” and how would we know if it had?

Storytelling and storylistening are a central part of how individuals, groups, and communities engage with one another across contexts. Storytellers seek to make an impact for a particular audience - educating, persuading, connecting, advocating, sharing, entertaining, and relating. In this interactive, hands-on course, we will take an applied linguistic anthropological approach to the role of stories in contexts of change at individual, interpersonal, institutional, and global scales. We’ll work with a rich set of tools—ethical observation, conflict mapping, notetaking and notemaking, interviews, discourse analysis, and linguistic landscapes—to examine stories of change, the media through which they travel, and the cultural values, norms, and perspectives they carry. Using the framework of storyframing, storyforming, and storytelling, we will then create our own culturally-informed stories of change - guided by principles of audience design, conflict transformation, sensitivity to genre, and scale of impact. Join us -- and discover the stories that move communities, shape ideas, and spark meaningful change.

How did astronomers discover that the universe is expanding? What are dark energy and dark matter and what do they have to do with the possible fate of the universe? This introductory astronomy course will present an overview of our expanding universe including the results that led to this discovery and the implications it has on the formation and eventual fate of the universe. Topics will include examining how astronomers measure distance across space, the infamous Hubble’s Law, the age of the universe, and more. Students can anticipate lectures that mix historical results with modern astronomical discoveries to shed light on what we know and do not know about the cosmos. Students should expect to see quantitative reasoning in class, but mathematical proficiency beyond algebra is not required. Night-time observations with portable telescopes may be offered as the availability of equipment, and the weather allows.

There are over 6,000 mammal species alive today— and you are one of them! In this course, students will learn about the biological qualities that make a mammal a mammal, from the evolutionary histories locked deep in our bones and genes to the unique behaviors that mammals display across habitats around the planet. Students will have hands-on learning experiences with skull casts and will build a field-based mammal tracking skillset they can apply in their own backyard, including practicing the use of camera traps. Class discussions will center on topics of popular interest including the evolution of venom, ancient DNA and de-extinction, surviving the dinosaur mass extinction, island evolution, zoonotic disease spillover, and the La Brea Tar Pits. The class will include animal-tracking in nearby woods and participants should be able to walk up to two miles on uneven ground.

Robert Frost was, perhaps, the greatest American poet of the twentieth century, and he usually set his poems somewhere “North of Boston,” which was the title of his second book. Vermont, in particular, was a subject of his work, as he lived there for many years, with a home near the Bread Loaf campus in Ripton. His poetry can well be described as a field guide to the flora and fauna, and to the people — farmers, mostly — who live in Vermont. In this course, we’ll look at many of his key poems, from “Mending Wall” through “‘Out, Out-‘,” “The Wood-pile,” “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” “After Apple-Picking,” “Home Burial,” “Design,” and “Directive.” We will examine poems very closely, pausing to listen to his exquisite phrasing. There will be comparisons to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a major influence on Frost. In particular, we will talk about Nature (1836), a major early book by Emerson that Frost loved.

Recent Pew Polling shows that more Americans trust documentaries to tell them the truth than network news. In this course, students will learn how documentaries often blur the line as “truth-telling” artifacts, focusing on how they employ evidence, emotions, and editing to frame different versions of truth. Using scenes from Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002), and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), we will explore how documentaries play with this slipperiness—sometimes for the sake of truth and sometimes to propagandize.