Pamplin Society of Fellows

Hey everyone out there in the blogosphere! This will be my first blog-type post on the internet since livejournal became passé (2004). So, I’d like to talk about Teacher of the Year 2010. In the fall, I became involved with the group in the Society that was responsible for helping to choose the Teacher of the Year at Lewis & Clark. We collect letters from the entire student body and with their guidance, choose what Lewis & Clark students believe to be the best teacher at the school.

I truly believe that this is one of the most important functions that the society performs and its both a privilege and a responsibility to be part of the Teacher of the Year committee. We’ve spent a lot of time revising our protocol for selecting the winner and we think that we have nearly perfected the selection process. Yet, without Lewis & Clark’s student’s letters, it will all be for naught! So please, if you’re reading this, and have had a teacher who has made an incredible impact on your education, send in a letter. Recognize your favorite professor! They like it when you do, I promise.

For the criteria that submissions will be graded on, check out this site: http://www.pamplinfellows.org/toty/criteria/

I’m really excited to read everyone’s letters. Well that’s my plug for Teacher of the Year submissions. Hope everyone has been having a great semester so far, Spring is just around the corner! I’m stoked.

Please turn in your letters to Alison Walcott — awalcott (at) lclark.edu

Learn more about the criteria here.

Lately, I have been becoming familiar with streets in neighborhoods I’ve never walked, navigating regions of a country I’ve never known. In the weeks following the earthquake in Haiti, an organization called Ushahidi has been collecting, translating, evaluating, and mapping thousand of SMS text messages from those in need. Needing volunteers to map messages twenty-four house a day in wake of the crisis, the students of Lewis & Clark college were asked fill a gap not covered by those on the East coast or in Geneva. On the night pictured in this photo, over forty students from the Undergraduate, Graduate, and Law Schools were packed into the Pamplin room to be trained in message mapping. Over the course of the week, many more came to be trained, including some faculty members.

While the training room was full of long faces, dampened by the tragedy, it was also an inspiring scene. The overwhelming student response to the crisis was one of the largest gatherings of the institution-wide community that I have ever been a part of. This project, I think, is perfect for students. We have time to share, technological savvy, and a desire to share our compassion. I am continually amazed by the wonders of technology. Between our Skype chat, cinematically titled the “Portland Situation Room,” online mapping resources, and Google Earth, we were able to be part of a chain which facilitates meaningful aid in Haiti. Maybe someday I will walk the streets whose satellite images I have surveyed. In the meantime, I and many other faithful volunteers will continue tracing them from our own homes, hoping to support Haitians in rebuilding theirs.

Maddie Cole

Exploring Tughlaqabad with Sunil

“How was India?” my friends and classmates ask as they pass me in the hallways of Howard. After hearing that same question five times in row, I have developed a standard response: “It was chaotic, it was frustrating, it was hard, but–so far–it is the best thing I have done in my life.”

This fall semester, I spent three and half months traveling and studying abroad in India with twenty-four of my classmates. While we were there, we learned about Indian history and culture as well as the country’s modern-day social and environmental issues through field trips, lectures and independent projects. We lived in about five of India’s major metropolises and several other small and rural villages; however, the bulk of the program was centered in Delhi and Varanasi. The contrast between the culture and infrastructure between these two cities is quite astonishing, as one is a developing economic and political capital while the other is a handicraft center and key pilgrimage site for Hindus. We were able to explore the unique features of both places with help from University of London professor, Sunil Kumar and his sister Nita Kumar of the Nirman School. Sunil and Nita provided with us endless opportunities to look at the various cultures and subcultures of these two cities, such as the Sufi community in Delhi and the the silk weavers district in Varanasi.

I consider my month in Varanasi the most rewarding experience of the India program because it was where I did my home stay and independent research. In Varanasi, I spent a week living in a neighborhood called Kabir Choura with Mr. Kanhaiya Lal Mishra, his wife Mala, sons Aman and Dirage and daughter Chinkee. The Mishras are a family of musicians and dancers; Kanhaiya is a professor of music at Benaras Hindu University while his oldest son is a professional tabla player. The Mishras are also devout Hindus; therefore, I was not only able to experience Diwali (the festival of lights) in a major Hindu pilgrimage center but also through traditional Hindu activities and customs.

Saree wearing workshop for Diwali

Like most other Hindus in Varanasi, my host family adores Mother Ganga: the holy river that flows along the edge of the city. According to Hindu mythology, Gangaji was formed from the hair of Lord Shiva and can remove sins, dispense life and provide salvation for the deceased. However, Gangaji also suffers from a vast amount of pollution due to point source and non-point source human activities. Due to my interest in waste management and religion, I decided to do my independent research in Varanasi on the connections between Hindu ideas on the human-nature relationship and actual observed environmental practices towards the Ganga River. For three weeks, I surveyed Hindu residents about their feelings towards Gangaji and then talked to professors and researchers about the objective facts on Ganga pollution. My main contact was with the Sankat Mochan Foundation, an organization founded by Varanasi’s high priest and former civil engineer, Professor Veer Bhadra Mishra that combines science and faith to raise awareness of pollution in the Ganga River. During my time spent with Professor Mishra–more commonly known as Mahantji–and his colleague R.K. Mishra, I learned about a great deal about Hindu philosophy and the difficulties that they faced in motivating local residents to protect Gangaji. Some of my most memorable moments from the trip were spent at Tulsi ghat with Mahantji in his room overlooking the Ganga River.

At the banks of the Ganga River

Making an earthen bund at Young India Project

Aside from Varanasi, another noteworthy part of the program was when we stayed with the Young India Project in Penukonda. YIP is an organization started by Mr. Narinder Bedi that aims to educate rural workers about their rights to work. For about a week, we lived on Mr. Bedi’s farm, learned about India’s National Employment Guarantee Act, talked to city officials and union workers and even spent a whole day doing manual labor to earn barely fifty cents each. The entire experience was humbling and eyeopening; a week that will forever remain in my everyday thoughts.

Three and a half months ago, I did not expect that the people I met and the places I saw in India would make such a large imprint in my life. Now, as a I re-enter my fast-paced and quiet lifestyle in Portland, I am constantly reminded of India, and most of all, how fortunate I am to have the opportunities that I do here at Lewis & Clark.

-Emily Nguyen ‘11

As we are all gearing up for finals, I hope everyone is keeping in mind the relaxing time ahead. I know that the thought of winter break is definitely helping me get through this last stretch of the semester. With only one more week to go, I thought now would be a good time to reflect on and share some of the highlights of my first semester.

Just as a brief introduction: I’m Nikki, one of the 2009 inductees and I am a double major in history and art history with special interests in the American West, Native Americans and beautiful paintings. This semester I took History 336: Wilderness and the American West, Biology 100: Perspectives in Biology, History 300: Historical Materials, Art 207: Pre-Columbian Art, and P.E. 101: Yoga (which I highly recommend!).

Now that everyone has a bit of context, I’ll go back and pick out a few things (both big and small) that in some way or another made this semester unique.

#1 Joining the Pamplin Society…

…which I honestly did not know existed until I received my nomination letter. Being inducted was a great honor and I had the opportunity to meet some truly talented and fascinating people. At the same time, the fact that I didn’t know about the Society, or that there was a connection between the Society and the Teacher of the Year Award, has gotten me thinking about ways to make the Society more visible on campus. Nothing brilliant has struck me yet, but as I am on the Service Committee, I hope to find more ways for the Society to connect with both the LC community and the greater Portland area.

#2 Visiting the Dovecote café for the first time!

This probably doesn’t seem particularly special, but I seriously did not visit it at all during my freshman year. Thanks to the lab section of Biology 100 for getting me over to that part of campus.

#3 Being a New Student Orientation (NSO) leader

I guess this would be more of a pre-semester experience, but I am still including it because it was so eye-opening. When I signed up at the end of last semester, I did so because I wanted to experience NSO from a non-freshman perspective. Wow! Certainly as a freshman it seemed to me that a lot of work went into crafting NSO, but I didn’t quite appreciate it until this past August. I was a “floater” NSO leader (meaning that I didn’t have a little group of freshmen attached to me), which allowed me to help out with a bunch of different tasks. Everything from supervising dorm check-ins to guiding parents to being traumatized by exploding balloons to hanging fifty feet in the air during our ropes course…and the list goes on. In spite of the diverse range of activities, they all had one thing in common: AWESOMENESS! For anyone who has a few extra weeks in August and is looking for a fun leadership experience with a great group of people, I definitely recommend the role of NSO student leader.

#4 Doing the epic Historical Materials project AND being invited to dessert at Professor Beckham’s house!

Any history majors who read this probably saw this one coming. For those unfamiliar with Materials, each of us chooses a primary document and writes a set of annotations, an introduction, and a conclusion to clarify or supplement its content for the reader. We had the entire semester to do this project and near the end of the process, Professor Beckham invited our class to his house for marionberries and vanilla ice cream. YUM! A definite semester highlight. For my project, I chose an interview conducted in 1995 with the contemporary Native American artist Fritz Scholder for the Oral History Project of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. Scholder was only one-quarter Native American, but his abstract and unidealized representations of contemporary Native American life gained him credit as one of the founders of the New Indian Art Movement. I found Scholder’s name while randomly browsing through the online interview transcripts on the Smithsonian site, but credit goes to Professor Beckham for suggesting that I pursue an artist for my project topic, as a way of combining my interests in history and art history. While I gained massive amounts of knowledge about contemporary art and artists in the course of my research, the greatest takeaway for me will be a reconsideration of the ways in which non-Native Americans view Native Americans and their culture. I’ll be going to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota this summer to volunteer for a week; until then, I’ll be thinking a great deal about what I learned from my project.

That concludes the little snapshot of my life this semester. I hope I didn’t bore anyone too badly. Since I heard from several sources that one purpose of the blog is for people to find out more about the Pamplin Fellows, I wrote with that goal in mind.

I hope everyone pulls through the end of the semester and enjoys a relaxing month off.

Happy Holidays!

-Nikki

We are pleased to welcome to our Society the 2009 inductees Laura Bogar, Katherine Erlich, Zach Holz, Warren Kluber, Diane Murray, Nicole Myoraku, and Analise Rodenberg.

Want to learn a bit about our new fellows? Visit this press release for a slideshow!

This past Sunday, I, along with my fellow Fellows Nikki Myoraku (’12) and Warren Kluber (’12), volunteered with the Albertina Kerr Center, a non-profit group dedicated to helping children and adults with developmental disabilities. The Center helps to integrate people with developmental disabilities into their communities, both vocationally and recreationally. This is a cause that is especially close to my heart because I have grown up with two brothers with developmental disabilities, and I have seen how they and other people with developmental disabilities are often isolated from their communities, so it is pretty amazing to see an organization so dedicated to helping people like this!

As a part of our commitment to service, we decided to spend the afternoon helping out Albertina Kerr in any way that they needed. It turns out that they are currently promoting a new campaign, Army of Angels, which is an attempt to build a larger community of dedicated volunteers in the Portland area. Many of the people who receive the Center’s services are younger, so they are hoping to reach out to a new young generation of volunteers who can better relate to and with the Center’s clients (sounds kind of like us!). We helped out by putting up posters for the Army of Angels campaign in the NE Alberta and Mississippi neighborhoods. Luckily, it was a sunny day, so we were able to get in some sightseeing and exercise along with our volunteering.

This is our lovely volunteer team (minus me). From left: Warren, Nikki, and fellow volunteer Yoko

This is Nikki doing some intense postering!

Our handiwork in action!

This activity was just one of the many exciting events we’ve been up to in Service committee this semester! We have also sponsored an Ivy Pull at Tryon Creek, and this upcoming Sunday we will be cooking dinner for volunteer medical workers at the Wallace Medical Center. I hope that you enjoyed my account of our excursion, and hopefully soon we will have pictures of the delicious dinner we’re cooking!

-Lili Pill-Kahan (’11)

Talk about a hectic (yet wonderful) spring semester! From my 18-credit course load to the Environmental Affairs Symposium to preparation for a semester abroad in India next spring, this semester has presented me with a vast amount of challenging and inspiring experiences.

I am currently taking a fascinating Environmental Studies topics course called Ecotopia/Ecopocalypse with a post-doctoral fellow from UCSB named Dr. Evan Berry. Evan and my Environmental Studies core professor, Jim Proctor, did a research project called “Ecotopia Revisited” last summer regarding the connections between utopias/dystopias and environmental attitudes. Evan’s class, Ecotopia/Ecopocalypse, has mainly been a seminar, where we spend most of our time discussing elements within the works of utopian/dystopian literature and their implications in modern day society. This class has acted as an incredible resource for me during the planning of my Environmental Studies concentration because it is not just about literature, but about how literature can help us to make sense of the world we live in. Ecotopia/Ecopocalypse has helped me particularly to organize my interests in the social and ethical elements of environmental behavior. Early in March, I officially proposed my Environmental Studies concentration on “Community, Individuals and the Connected Environment,” in which I hope to explore both the theoretical and practical relationships between community life and the individual member’s felt connections to their environment at various temporal and spatial scales. It is quite amazing to see how my ENVS peers have synthesized their ideas and passions into these major concentrations, I definitely recommend looking at our proposal page if you are ever in the need of inspiration.

Meeting the wonderful Dr. Vandana Shiva, founder of the Navdanya Farm. (Rosanne and I on the right).

This semester, my good friend Rosanne Wielemaker and I have also been planning an independent study project to do while we’re in India next fall. We’re interested in studying the various factors that influence municipal waste management in the cities of Delhi, Vrindavan and Varanasi. During the process of drafting our independent study proposal, we even had the chance to meet the influential ecofeminist and environmental activist, Dr. Vandana Shiva who helped to inspire us towards this project.

Rosie(anne) and I have also been working hard with our fellow ENVS major Molly Elder on organizing next fall’s Environmental Affairs Symposium. Coincidentally, all three of us will be overseas next fall (Molly will be in China) and will have to experience our Symposium handiwork via internet podcasts. The Symposium theme next year is “Re-Imagining the Good Life” and will focus what the re-imagining the good life means in thinking about the environmental crisies of today. The official blurbs that we have been working and information related to the Symposium are on the ENVS website, but will be updated within the next few weeks. I am especially excited about this Symposium topic because I feel that our world is in dire need of inspiration and hope in order to move towards effective environmental action.

Although this semester has deprived me of much sleep and free time, I am very excited for my busy schedule this summer. Before officially taking off to Delhi on August 31st, I will have the honor of working with Dr. Daena Goldsmith and Dr. Deborah Heath on their “Local/Global Networks: Wine & Foie Gras” project for 10 weeks as a Mellon Research assistant. In addition to researching wine and foie gras networks, I will also (hopefully) be making up for my lack of speaking French this semester and for that I am terribly glad!

On April 15th Reiko Hillyer was selected as Teacher of the Year:

First round letters were reviewed and the finalists for Teacher of the Year 2009 were selected. They are:

• Reiko Hillyer- Department of History
• Matthieu Ralliard- Hispanic Studies Department
• James Proctor- Environmental Studies Department
• Matthew Robins- Theater Department

Letters of support are being accepted until Friday, April 3rd. Please send your letters to awalcott@lclark.edu

Please come to the Teacher of the Year Award ceremony on Wednesday, April 15th at 3:30 in Smith Hall. This is a time to recognize the achievements of these professors and to announce the winner of the award.