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Cross-listings:ENVI 24/REL 24
Description: In February of 1927 anthropologist Franz Boas asked folklorist Zora Neale Hurston to identify an ideal location in which to study and collect data about "Negro culture in the South." Hurston's reply, without hesitation, was the central and gulf coast of Florida because she believed there, "it was possible for [her] to get a cross section of the Negro South in one state." Hurston traveled directly to Eatonville, the town she eventually claimed as her birth home, and for over a decade, utilized the information she collected as the backdrop to her fiction as well as her nonfiction explorations of Black religion. Taking Hurston's lead, this course will utilize Florida's gulf coast as the backdrop to exploring the diverse manifestations of modern black religious expression. Because of its diverse geographical, political structures, populations, and economy, Florida has historically been characterized as a "new South" with distinctive cultural expressions. With this history in mind, this course will address four critical questions: (1) What is Black religion?; (2) What are the distinctive aspects of southern expressions of Black Protestant religion; (3) How do Black communities see themeselves in relation to broader social concerns? and (4) How, if at all, is religious expression in Florida unique? To answer these questions, we will travel to Florida's west coast and visit three different church communities to understand Black Protestant religon as currently expressed in the 'New South' including a small mainstream denominational church in Talleveast Florida; a Pentecostal-Holiness church in St. Petersburg, Florida; and a mega-church in Eaton, Florida. In addition to learning about Black religion along the western coast of Florida through participant observation, students will visit and tour local historical sites significant to Black religious experiences, and will meet with local acadmics, archivists, and leaders. A 200-page course packet will contextualize the trip.
Preference will be given to majors and concentrators in Africana Studies, Religion, and Environmental Studies. Priority will also be given to students with a background in ethnographic methods.
Method of evaluation/requirements: based on an electronic field journal, participation in weekly colloquies, and an oral presentation
Prerequisites: none; not open to first-year students
Enrollment limit: 8
Selection process: application essays and interviews
Cost to student: $3,362
Meeting time: TBA
Instructor(s): Rhon Manigault-Bryant, James Manigault-Bryant
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Description: Interested in learning first-hand about Taiwanese culture and becoming acquainted with what has been called the "Taiwan (economic and political) miracle"? Want to improve your knowledge of Mandarin, the language with the largest number of native speakers in the world? Then join us on this 23-day study tour to Taiwan, Republic of China. We'll spend the first two weeks in Taipei, the capital city, where 3 hours of Mandarin language classes at levels from beginning to advanced will be scheduled each morning at the Mandarin Center of National Taiwan Normal University. After class we'll meet as a group for lunch and discussion. Activities with Taiwanese university students and visits to cultural and economic sites of interest will be scheduled for some afternoons and Saturdays, with other afternoons, evenings, and Sundays free for self-study and individual exploration. During the last week, we'll travel to central and southern Taiwan, staying at small hotels and youth hostels. Two orientation sessions will be conducted on campus in the fall to help participants prepare for their experience.
Method of evaluation/requirements: evaluation will be based on satisfactory completion of the language course, a 10-page paper on a topic related to Taiwan, and active participation in all scheduled activities
Prerequisites: none; not open to first-year students
Enrollment limit: 10
Selection process: statement of rationale and goals for wishing to participate; CHIN and ASST majors and intended majors who have no previous experience in Taiwan may receive preference
Cost to student: $3,800
Meeting time: TBA
Instructor(s): Cornelius Kubler
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Description: Kyoto, the former imperial capital of Japan has 1200 years of history. It is called Japan's cultural treasure house. The purpose of this travel course is to explore the cultural history of Kyoto and how traditional craftsmanship is perpetuated and transformed in a modern era as the city of Kyoto developed. Students will visit Kyoto artisans at their studio and through a discourse with thriving artists, they will arrive at their own conclusion about what it means to sustain tradition while pursuing modernization and innovation.
The first week of the course is conducted on campus. Students will intensively study the cultural history of Kyoto with readings, films and discussion. Also in pairs, they will conduct research on one selected area of Kyoto craftsmanship to acquire in-depth knowledge. Each pair will be responsible to educate the entire group for the onsite visit in Kyoto. Then, for the second and third week, the class will travel to Kyoto. We will first visit historic sites to learn the context of how craftsmanship developed from courtly culture in the Heian period, samurai tradition in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, religious ceremonies and Noh Theater and tea ceremonies. After and during these excursions, we will visit four artisan studios. They are a sacred mirror maker who could be the last of his kind, a textile weaver, a Noh mask maker, a sculptor of Buddhist statues. Some of these artisans are perpetuating hundreds of years of family tradition. Some started out as an apprentice and established his/her own studio. Students will also have hands on experiences at some studios.
Students are expected to participate in all the scheduled activities, post a daily journal on the course website and share daily reflections. At the end of the Kyoto visit, students will summarize their reflections and present their views on Japanese traditional and modern craftsmanship to the local community and the Kyoto artisans at a public forum.
Method of evaluation/requirements: final project; post daily blog to the course website and a public PowerPoint presentation in Kyoto
Prerequisites: at least one course in ASST or JAPN; not open to first-year students
Enrollment limit: 8
Selection process: personal statements
Cost to student: $3,635
Meeting time: TBA
Instructor(s): Kasumi Yamamoto
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Description: This course will give students an in-depth view of the inner workings of journalism today. It will feature the perspectives of several Williams alumni who work in a broad spectrum of today's media universe, including print, broadcast, and new media. Our guests will help students workshop their ideas for a feature-length piece of journalism they're expected to create during the month. They will discuss the reporting skills to use, as well as their own experiences. In addition to reading the work of guests, there may be required texts about issues and methods related to journalism. Students will be expected to complete several small reporting and writing exercises, as well as one feature-length news story on a topic chosen at the beginning of the course. There will be a week-long trip to New York for field work and to visit various newsrooms. In previous years, organizations visited have included CNN, the New York Times, the Columbia School of Journalism, ABC News, Bloomberg News, BuzzFeed News, ProPublica, the Wall Street Journal and APM Marketplace.
Method of evaluation/requirements: 10-page paper
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment limit: 12
Selection process: preference will be given to students with a demonstrated interest in journalism or media (as explained in a statement of interest), with a priority given to upperclassmen
Cost to student: $923
Meeting time: TBA
Instructor(s): Christopher MarciszChristopher Marcisz is a freelance writer and editor based in Williamstown. He was a reporter (and later editor) at the Berkshire Eagle. Previously he worked in Washington covering national energy policy, wrote about sports in Moscow, and worked on the international desk at Newsweek. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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Cross-listings: BIOL 25
Description: This Winter Study Period course engages students with the diversity of agricultural practices in California on farms ranging from winter fruit and vegetable production, to orchards and vineyards, to livestock and dairy, to eggs along the Central Coast through hands-on experiences on a variety of farms.
This is a Winter Study 2019 field course on Sustainable Agriculture in California, a field experience conducted primarily on-site for the month of January. For some participants, the WSP field course will segue from the seminar BIOL/ENVI 422--The Ecology of Sustainable Agriculture to be taught in Fall 2018 by H.W. Art. Preference for the WSP will be given to students who have previously taken BIOL 422. The WSP course will be limited to 8 students. This project is a replication of a WSP course HW Art taught in 2013 and again 2016, a travel WSP experiential course in which 7-8 students gained hands-on knowledge about agricultural systems by working on 8 farms and vineyards on the Central Coast of California. We concluded the month by participating in the Ecological Farming (EcoFarm) Conference. Sarah Gardner will be co-teaching the course with Prof. Art for pedagogical and practical reasons, including here experience in agriculture and her continuing this WSP periodically in the future.
The learning-through-working experience is designed to both de-mystify and de-romanticize agriculture by having the students gain a fuller sense of the realities of producing food by working shoulder-to-shoulder with farmers and laborers. Art's previous experience is that the investments of time, labor, thought, and sweat by engaging in actual farming practice creates a depth of understanding not possible in the classroom. In addition to assigned texts, we also will be reading books individually and take turns reporting back to the group in the evenings, a bit like story-telling in the oral tradition. The final product will be a collaborative journal written by the class.
Method of evaluation/requirements: 10-page paper; synthetic journal of field experiences to be produced by the group
Prerequisites: none, but see preferences for over-enrollment; not open to first-year students
Enrollment limit: 8
Selection process: preference to senior Biology and Environmental Studies majors/concentrators who have taken The Ecology of Sustainable Agriculture and/or other food and agriculture courses; then by essay
Cost to student: $0
Meeting time: all day off campus, but starts on campus
Instructor(s): Henry Art, Sarah Gardner
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Cross-listings: ENVI 26
Description: The goal in this course is to provide an opportunity for students to develop an intimate understanding of 19th century Mystic through lived experience. To appreciate a culture or a community so different from what we live and experience today, you must also understand the ways in which its residents shaped their world, specifically, the crafts they plied. There are few opportunities in life when this understanding can be delivered through lived experience. This will be one of them. Taking advantage of the extraordinary resources of Williams-Mystic, the coastal and ocean studies campus of Williams College located at the Mystic Seaport in Mystic, CT, this winter-study course, taught at Williams-Mystic, aims to: 1) provide rich hands-on participatory experiences that authentically mirror 19th century maritime craft and culture; and 2) offers learners a rare opportunity to delve deeply into the mindset of 19th century maritime culture by creating an authentic artifact that reflects understanding of the values and mores of this time period.
Method of evaluation/requirements: performance-based evaluation using exemplars, experts and authentic audience; final paper or project
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment limit: 12
Selection process: by application
Cost to student: $1,500
Meeting time: daily from Jan 3-Jan 14
Instructor(s): Thomas Van Winkle along with a number of instructors including some employed by the Mystic Seaport who specialize in chanteys, shipsmithing, ship Carving, scrimshaw, canvasworks, and boatbuilding
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Description: This travel course will focus on creative work inspired by the history and culture of Native American Indians of Southern Florida. We will discuss the history and culture of Native Americans in the area, focusing mostly on the Calusa, their society, politics, system of government, trading customs, and religion. We will also talk about their construction of canal systems, and their architecture and engineering. Students will arrive to their own conclusion about the impact of Native Americans in our culture. They will also use their experiences during field trips, workshops, lectures, and group discussions as a source of inspiration for their creative work in one or more of the following fields: music composition, visual arts (video, photography), literature, poetry, and theater. They will create their projects individually or could form teams to create interdisciplinary works. If team work is selected for the creation of a project there will be a limit of one student per discipline in each team.
We will visit archaeological and historical sites, Research Centers, and Museums focused in the History and Culture of Native American Indians of South West Florida. We will attend lectures offered by archaelogists, and will participate in the process of screening, cataloging, and analysis of samples extracted from the shell mounds of Useppa Island and Pineland at the Randell Reaserch Center of the University of Florida. Calusa artifacts made with ceramic materials, wood carving, and painting, are recognized worldwide as remarkable examples of Native American artistic achievement. Samples of their art found during excavations in SW FL are part of exhibitions in the Historical Museums that we will visit. Students will learn about music inspired by precolombian native american instruments and art.
We will discuss information and will visit the estuaries that sustained the world of the Calusas.
Method of evaluation/requirements: 10-page paper; creative project, and travel journal
Prerequisites: none; not open to first-year students
Enrollment limit: 7
Selection process: priority given to students interested in creating original work in response to field trips and visits to Research Centers and Museums (musical, photography and/ or video, literary, poetry, theater)
Cost to student: $1,995
Meeting time: TBA
Instructor(s): Ileana Perez Velazquez
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Description: We will spend around ten days in Nicaragua, chiefly in the Atlantic Coast Autonomous Regions. Almost all of the days in those regions will be spent in clinics, where students-in conjunction with optometrists who volunteer their time for the trip-will administer eye exams, write prescriptions, and distribute glasses. While in Nicaragua, the students will keep detailed journals that they will complete following their return to Williamstown. They will interact with Nicaraguans during the eye clinics, and will have opportunities for speaking with them during evenings. Students will also be required to attend organizational and training meetings and to complete a number of relevant readings prior to the trip.
Method of evaluation/requirements: performance in eye clinics, journal
Prerequisites: none; not open to first-year students
Enrollment limit: 12
Selection process: application essays
Cost to student: $3,700
Meeting time: TBA
Instructor(s): Alan White
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Description: This course will explore access to and reliance on public health services, NGOs, and education in a rural Indian social context. As one of the fasted growing and most populated countries in the world, India has the potential to have an enormous global impact. However, the country's future in entirely dependent upon the health of its population, specifically its most vulnerable--and most vital--members: women and children. To understand how public health and education policy can be formed and changed to address inequity and sociocultural biases, students will learn about the context of India and how local, national, and global actors currently interact with social systems. The course will begin with an orientation and introductory lectures in New Delhi. Then students will travel to rural Uttar Pradesh (UP) for 10 days for seminars with local experts and field trips to community health centers, schools, and villages. Following their trip to UP, students will travel to Rajasthan to meet NGO workers in Jaipur. The course will include an introduction to fieldwork methods and an interview project on a topic chosen by the student addressing development in India. This course will be run in partnership with the Foundation for Public Health, Education, and Development (http://fphed.org/). A UP-based organization with its own campus, FPHED's board collectively has decades of experience hosting study abroad programs, including biannual semester-long programs with the School for International Training. FPHED will assist in making all accommodations and travel arrangements, as well as making local connections with experts and translators for students.
Method of evaluation/requirements: 5-page paper
2- to 3-page paper
Other: Students will be required to keep a private daily journal.
Prerequisites: none; not open to first-year students
Enrollment limit: 8
Selection process: Public Health students get preference, then by seniority
Cost to student: $2800, which includes all transportation, lodging, meals, lectures, and research materials
Meeting time: TBA
Instructor(s): Elizabeth Curtis
Ms. Curtis graduated from Williams College in Spring of 2017 with a degree in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a Concentration in Public Health. With the support of a Fulbright-Nehru student researcher fellowship, she is currently conducting community-based participatory research with FPHED on reproductive health programs in rural UP. She has spent a cumulative 11 months to-date studying and researching reproductive health in rural India.
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Description: This course delves into the theory and practice of both Hindu and Buddhist yoga in their land of origin, India. In the first half, we stay in the North Indian town of Rishikesh, one of the main centers of Hindu yoga today, located on the banks of the Ganges River. There we practice yoga and meditation daily, study yoga philosophy, and visit leading yoga centers. In addition we volunteer daily at Mother Miracle Community Development Program, where a K-12 school is dedicated to teaching exceptionally intelligent poor children. In the second part of the course, we travel to South India and stay at Sera Je Monastic University, the largest center of Tibetan Buddhist monastic learning in India. There we continue our daily practice of yoga and meditation, and study with a Tibetan monastic scholar the theory of Tibetan Buddhism. In the afternoons students volunteer with Tibetan students and visit Tibetan service organizations in the area. In this way we gain a solid overview of the practice of yoga and meditation in India. We come to appreciate and learn from the people upholding the living traditions of yoga, as well as helping these people to strengthen the education that will allow them to interact with the global world.
Required Reading: The Path to Enlightenment by The Dalai Lama; Yoga and the Luminous: Patanjali's Spiritual Path to Freedom by Christopher Key Chapple; selected articles about yoga and contemporary yoga exchanges.
Method of evaluation/requirements: 10-page paper; daily journal
Prerequisites: none; not open to first-year students
Enrollment limit: 10
Selection process: interview
Cost to student: $3,327
Meeting time: TBA
Instructor(s): Georges Dreyfus, Natasha JudsonTasha Judson, M.Ed., is a certified alignment oriented Hatha yoga teacher and authorized meditation teacher. She has directed Tasha Yoga studio in Williamstown since 2003.
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Cross-listings: SPEC 25
Description: Williams has a unique program in the Republic of Georgia, which offers students the opportunity to engage in three-week-long internships in a wide variety of fields. Our students have helped in humanitarian relief organizations like Save the Children, interned in journalism at The Georgian Times, taught unemployed women computer skills at The Rustavi Project, documented wildlife, studied with a Georgian photographer, done rounds at the Institute of Cardiology, and learned about transitional economies at the Georgian National Bank. In addition to working in their chosen fields, students experience Georgian culture through museum visits, concerts, lectures, meetings with Georgian students, and excursions. Visit the sacred eleventh-century Cathedral of Sveti-tskhoveli and the twentieth-century Stalin Museum, take the ancient Georgian Military Highway to ski in the Caucasus Range, see the birthplace of the wine grape in Kakheti and the region where Jason sought the Golden Fleece. Participants are housed in pairs with English-speaking families in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital city. At the end of the course, students will write a 10-page paper assessing their internship experience.
Method of evaluation/requirements: 10-page paper
Prerequisites: none; knowledge of Russian or Georgian is not required; not open to first-year students
Enrollment limit: 8
Selection process: interested students must attend an informational meeting and submit a short essay about their interest in the course
Cost to student: $2,785
Meeting time: TBA
Instructor(s): Vladimir IvantsovVladimir Ivantsov holds a PhD in Russian Studies from McGill University (Canada). Prior to coming to Williams, he taught at McGill University and St. Petersburg State University (Russia). His research interests cover a broad spectrum of topics, including Dostoevsky, existentialism, and rock and pop culture. He published a book on the contemporary Russian writer Vladimir Makanin.
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Description: This class will take a group of 6 students to Senegal to learn about successes and challenges in grassroots organizing, with a focus on the interrelated areas of public health--especially HIV and AIDS--women's rights, and economic empowerment, including through cooperatives.
We will build on established relationships in Senegal, where the instructor has taken several groups of students since 2006. That country has many lessons to teach, as a majority Muslim culture with a female Prime Minister where women have created and continue to build cooperatively owned enterprises, a West African country that has consistently kept the rate of HIV prevalence under 1%, and a diverse culture with a democratic tradition of tolerance, even celebration of ethnic difference.
Our hosts, ACI's Baobab Center, have a strong record of working with visiting scholars and students to teach them local languages and orient them to Senegalese culture, as well as a deep and well-respected history of capacity-building work with local groups working on HIV, public health, women's rights, and LGBTQ issues.
We will spend our first week in Dakar, the capital, with students doing homestays with Senegalese families. We will attend Wolof classes and lectures on local issues as well as visiting NGOs. In our second week we will move inland to the town of Kaolack, where we will be hosted by the Association pour la Promotion de la Femme Sénégalaise, a 30-year-old group with an extensive record of empowerment of village women through strategies ranging from small-scale credit to popular education and theater.
Requirements: Before we leave campus each student will choose a particular focus for the trip, and do preliminary research to inform their visit--including comparative material about the US. Upon our return to campus we will meet to discuss our findings, and students will write 10-page papers drawing upon existing research as well as our conversations and experiences in Senegal.
Method of evaluation/requirements: 10-page paper
Prerequisites: none; not open to first-year students
Enrollment limit: 6
Selection process: preference will be given to students with skills in French and a demonstrated interest in public health and/or women's economic empowerment
Cost to student: $3,892
Meeting time: TBA
Instructor(s): Kiaran Honderich
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Description: This course will provide an opportunity for immersion in the life of a preschool community in the Bronx. Future of America Learning Center (FALC) is a nationally-accredited program that is recognized for its quality and standard of excellence in the field of Early Childhood Education. Students from varied educational institutions, teachers and instructional coaches are recommended by the Department of Education to visit FALC’s classrooms to observe, experience and learn about the Plant-a-Dream curriculum. Winter Study students will actively participate in the daily classroom activities with the children in order to develop a sense of best practices in Early Childhood Education. Students will live with families whose children are in the program, in the model of Gaudino’s experiential learning, to access a deeper sense of context and a better understanding of the issues facing children and families from this community. Opportunities for dialogue between families, staff, and students, will also be central to the learning experience. Furthermore, our mentors will guide students in robust self-reflection, as well as inquiry into the environment in which they are immersed, and the personal meaning derived from these experiences.
In 2015, FALC was selected as a Pre-K Showcase School, allowing it to serve as a model for other preschools and to collaborate with other institutions of higher learning, such as Bank Street College of Education and Lehman College with regard to “best practices.” Its curriculum is designed to support children’s resilience, and connect them with their community, as well as the real and natural world. Utilizing Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, along with other developmental assessment tools, the children’s individual learning styles, skill sets, and interests are identified, with teachers tailoring instruction to meet the individual learning profiles through a rich and diverse content, and addressing the children’s academic, socio-emotional, and cultural needs. Students will select one of three classes of which they will be a part for the length of the course. In addition to their daily participation in the classroom, they will join teachers in regular preparatory time and team meetings. They will also join in weekly staff meetings, led by the Education Director, with whom they will have weekly mentoring sessions, in addition to twice-weekly mentoring sessions with two Williams alumni now working in the field of Education and Psychology.
The Mentoring Team: Ken Kessel, Williams '74, LCSW, specializes in Infant Mental Health and works as a Mental Health Consultant in federal Head Start preschool programs in the Bronx. He has also has served as a consultant to preschools in North Carolina and the East Coast Migrant Head Start Project as they were developing their mental health standards. A graduate of NYU School of Social Work in 1983, he has worked as a clinician in inpatient and outpatient mental health, foster care, substance abuse, medical settings, international youth programs, geriatrics, has taught graduate courses at NYU and has presented at conferences at NASW, NY Zero to Three, Westchester and Kisumu and Masoga Village, Kenya.
Bonnie Lou R. Mallonga is the Chief Operating Officer of FALC. With prior experience in psychometrics and counseling psychology, Dr. Mallonga was trained at the Washington Montessori Institute and is a current trainer in this educational model. She has presented both here and abroad on such as teacher mentoring, child advocacy, and organizational development, holding to the belief that a high quality teaching staff and best practices are critical for the complete development of the young child.
Randy Thomas, Williams ’73, Ph.D., was a student of Professor Gaudino, who participated in his Williams-at-Home program, living and working with families in the Deep South, Appalachia, Iowa and Detroit, a formative experience that lead to his training and education in the field of clinical psychology. As the current Chairperson of the Board of Directors of the Gaudino Fund, he is devoting himself to the development of educational opportunities which continue Gaudino’s pedagogical legacy, providing students with alternative perspectives on the learning process.
Introduction to families and orientation to school Jan 3-6; On-site Jan 7-23; Reflections and Farewell Activities , Jan 24-25.
Method of evaluation/requirements: 5-page summary paper, daily journal
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment limit: 4
Selection process: ?
Cost to student: $0
Meeting time: TBA
Instructor(s): Randall Thomas
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Description: This course is designed to give students insight into how technology start-ups work and well as a chance to practice their problem-solving skills and gain deeper insight into the customer discovery process. The course will start in Williamstown with a review of idea development tools used in today's start-up environment, particularly those pioneered by Stanford d.School such as the Lean Start-up method, Business Model Canvas and Design Thinking. Reading will include The Lean Start-up by Eric Ries, Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Edward deBono's Thinking Course as well as articles and podcasts.
The class will be split into three teams of four students and paired with a Bay Area start-up looking to enter a new market, a new customer segment or are considering certain product modifications. The student teams will work on identifying customer needs, qualifying customer feedback and making recommendations to management. The class will tap into the strong Bay Area alumni network which will allow for visits to several different start-ups and fast-growing tech companies and compare how they approach their markets. The final project will be a ten-minute presentation to management.
Student should submit a short statement of why they would like to participate and what they expect to learn.
Method of evaluation/requirements: 5-page paper; final project; short summaries of customer interactions
Prerequisites: none; not open to first-year students
Enrollment limit: 12
Selection process: preference will be given to students with a demonstrated interest in entrepreneurship
Cost to student: $2,800
Meeting time: TBA
Instructor(s): Tonio PalmerEntrepreneur-in-Residence at Williams
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