Diary of a Colloquium Professor #12

Last Thursday's class was fantastic! It was the first half of finals for this class, which is really the first of the two final meetings during which my students make final presentations. This is my favorite part of the class, because students get carte blanche to be creative and come up with any product they want to demonstrate the personal impact of their service learning and the rest of the course. My students out-did themselves and we're already halfway done.

Three students created original paintings, and they were all different:

Julian painted the world he wants to live in on the left, and the world we're in danger of living in on the right. He explained that though there are mountains, and this can't be Florida because of it, he used photos from the field trips to paint the other parts. For example, the prairie at the base of the mountain was painted from a photo of the prairie at the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. Isn't it beautiful?

Donne, who is an Art and English major, has had artist's block and hasn't done any nature painting in quite some time. She was inspired by a Great Blue Heron we saw at Corkscrew, and said Colloquium has brought back her desire to paint nature. She lives on the Estero River and is quite a lover of the natural world, but she hadn't painted any of it. She was re-inspired by the focus on her sense of place throughout the field trips and her service learning hours, helping clean up the Estero River. She sold this painting and the night she presented was the last she would see of it. I wish I could have kept it!

Mason also painted a really neat photo. He proclaimed he wasn't an artist, but he re-visited the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary on his own and took upwards of 75 photos and created a website devoted to seasonal photography at Corkscrew. He took one of the photos and put it through a filter, and then painted the filtered photo. I don't have the image to show, but it was quite something.

Alex, a relatively quiet and meditative student was clearly enjoying the field trips and the course. Though he didn't say much in class, he was always in attendance and was quite reflective in his assignments. He wrote exceptional papers, but was shy in group presentations. He got up and spoke about how much he loved working at the Campus Food Forest for his service learning hours. Then he read this original poem!

The heat on my skin, the scent in the air. The silent whisper of the breeze echoes. 

Looking for a way to disappear for a moment in a land filled with life. 

Blinded by the sun’s brightest rays, wish these moments would last a bit longer.
Now, I ask- What did you see, hear, feel yesterday or today? 

Will you say “I missed it all, or I don’t remember?” 

Open your eyes, take it all it. 

Make this world your sense of place.
Life’s a garden- dig it!

Nathan made a Colloquium Game of Life with questions about sustainability and biodiversity. I might have to bring it to class one night next semester and see how my students do with it.

Doris, who is simultaneously working on a degree and going to interior design school, built a model with green materials and sustainable design. It even had LED lights on it! She didn't post a photo yet.

There were others, and I'm looking forward to the remaining projects this week, but one of the most impressive had to be from my self-proclaimed "biophobe." You may remember me early in the semester, writing about a student who said he didn't like nature and didn't like getting in the dirt. H really came around this semester, and embraced the course and the content. He ended up being a great student. I know he hasn't changed his feelings completely, but he did say he felt more comfortable by the end of the semester than he had previously, and he did his service learning hours in the Campus Food Forest, outside, in the dirt and the heat. And he said he enjoyed it! But here's the part I love. As mentioned previously, the students have the ability to do whatever they want during this project. I give them a basic rubric and then I tell them this: If I can't tell from your presentation, what the impact of this course and your service learning has had on you, you haven't done your job. Here is what Chris presented:

In a presentation he titled Colloquium and Me, Chris took a video game he plays, in which you create settlements. I'm not too familiar with games, but it is a building game he related to a Minecraft type game. He took a settlement he had built previously and applied all of the Colloquium course concepts related to sustainability to change his settlement. He changed a generator to be solar powered, and here he added a windmill.



He had previously planted using monoculture because as he said, this one plant is the best plant in the game. But as he revised his settlement for his project, he wanted to make sure his single plant crop would not be wiped out by a pest, so he created a biodiverse crop system using other plants (below).




   

He also created a recycling plant and did other things to improve his settlement to be more sustainable. His presentation was not only visually cool, but his ability to explain all he learned through his application to the video game was outstanding. All of his classmates were impressed and so was I! It really was an opportunity for him to shine, and that's what this assignment is all about.

I've said it before and I'll say it again... I love teaching this course! I can't way to see what the rest of my students have in store this week. I will be sad to say goodbye to this group. It was such fun.