This program is a logical successor to the Temperate Rainforests and Tropical Rainforests programs. Students will carry out an independent scientific research project in tropical rainforest biology. Proposals for projects will have been developed during the Tropical Rainforests program, or through direct consultation with faculty. Projects will involve extensive field work and may be located in a variety of possible sites in Costa Rica. Students will gather and analyze their own data, write a technical research report, and present their results in a symposium at the end of the quarter. Students will have weekly consultation with faculty via e-mail, and will meet with faculty once early in the quarter for project development, twice during the quarter at the La Selva Biological Station, and again at the end of the quarter for final report writing and the symposium. Examples of previous studies include insect attraction to bioluminescent fungi, foraging behavior of nectar-feeding bats and the effect of canopy position on epiphyte drying rates.

Through a seriously playful reading of Ashmita Khasnabish's Jouissance as Ananda: Indian Philosophy, Feminist Theory and Literature, we will explore an unusual work of contemporary postcolonial feminist scholarship that incorporates the work of Western psychoanalytic readings of the French jouissance with traditional Hindu mythological and Tantric readings of the Sanskrit ananda. In Khasnabish's work, jouissance as corporeal and spiritual pleasure located at ego's feminine margins finds expression as ananda-the bliss that results from the transcendence of the ego.

Students will develop study projects in relationship to key elements that are referenced in this text. These include theorists (Luce Irigaray, Sri Aurobindo), novels (Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Tagore's The King of the Dark Chamber; Lispector's The Stream of Life and An Apprenticeship, or, The Book of Delights; Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices), ideas (sexual and ethnic difference; spiritual enlightenment and feminine embodiment), and practices (meditation; ecriture feminine, or the writing of the "divine feminine"; the healing arts; and social justice).

In this program, we will ask students to take a very personal stake in their educational development. This is not a program for students who are looking for an external, faculty-given pedagogical structure. Rather, students will be encouraged to assume responsibility for their entire coursework. Students will pay special attention to what individual and group work they plan on doing, how they plan to learn, how they will know they have learned it, and what difference the work will make in their lives and within their communities. Faculty and students will work together to develop habits of worthwhile community interaction in the context of the education process and liberation. The faculty are interested in providing an environment of collaboration, where faculty and students will identify topics of mutual interest and act as partners in the exploration of those topics.

This program is for students who already have a research topic in mind, as well as for those who would like to learn how to do research in a student-centered environment. Students will be introduced to research methods, ethnographic research and interviewing techniques, writing workshops, computer literacy, library workshops, educational technology and the educational philosophy that supports this program. We will explore Native American perspectives and look at issues that are particularly relevant to indigenous people of the Americas.

Students whose research could be enriched by being immersed in a foreign culture will have the opportunity to live in Peru for five weeks or more during winter quarter. Our access to rural communities in the Peruvian northern coast offers students the opportunity to experience volunteer community work by learning in a safe and healthy pueblo environment. Learning about Latin America through Peru will expand the concept of Native American and indigenous peoples.

In fall, participants will state their research questions. In late fall and winter, individually and in small study groups, students and faculty will develop the historical background for the chosen question and do the integrative review of the literature and data collection. Ongoing workshops will introduce students to the micro-skills needed for completing their project. Late winter and into spring quarter, students will write conclusions, wrap up print/nonprint projects, and prepare for a public presentation. The last part of spring will be entirely dedicated to presentations.

Students will use and explore Bloom's Taxonomy; the theory of multiple intelligence; the relationship among curriculum, assessment and instruction; expectations of an Evergreen graduate and the five foci; quantitative reasoning; self- and group-motivation; communication (to include dialogue, e-mail, resources on the Web and Web crossing). They will also develop skills in interactive Web pages, documentaries, I-movie editing, presentations using Microsoft Power Point and independent research.

Many questions have been raised about what caused the high level of devastation to New Orleans and the subsequent human tragedy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. There is also great interest in who will benefit from the reconstruction and how it will be organized. This program is designed to investigate some of these questions and to organize a college-wide spring symposium to present some answers to these questions. We'll organize our investigation in four inter-related areas.

First, we establish the setting by learning about the history of New Orleans itself, paying particular attention to how the interplay of class and race has shaped the city's socio-economic order and its residential and commercial patterns. Our goal here is to come up with an accurate portrait of how New Orleans fits into the larger U.S. and global political economy.

Next, we'll examine the present pattern of corporate and governmental interaction known as neo-liberalism. This decades-long interaction involves the pursuit of an "ownership society" through the implementation of policies such as governmental de-regulation, privatization of public services and the promotion of "personal responsibility" rather than public well being. Our goal here is to see how these policies will condition the governmental and corporate response to Katrina's devastation as well as to the reconstruction of the area. We'll strive to assess the meaning of an "ownership society" in terms of class and race by examining alternative responses that have met comparable natural disasters and reconstruction efforts in other time periods and in other countries.

In our third segment, we want to look at how the citizens of New Orleans reacted to the devastation and organized for survival both in the flood, during the relief effort and after their "rescue" and displacement to other communities. Our goal here is not just to catalog the types of responses, but also to evaluate the present state of and organizational level attained by these "evacuees" and their positions with regards to New Orleans.

Finally, we want to see how the reconstruction proposals by the various governmental and private "Katrina commissions" deal with the interaction between the needs of the evacuated citizens, i.e., redress, and the demands of financial interests, i.e. "re-development." Our goal here is to systematize our learning to prevent future disasters and to consider how to reconstruct a more just socio-economic order.

Our hope for this program is that it becomes a community of researchers jointly investigating this national tragedy and jointly organizing the spring symposium for maximum public benefit.

"O that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth!

Then with a passion would I shake the world."-Shakespeare, King John

"Do I create hurt in the world? Could even my sympathy create the appetite for it? Could people waked up to their feelings then suffer more? Maybe I should look away?"-William Stafford

What is the role of the artist in times of war? Can art help us survive military struggles, even prevent them? Or is its primary function to keep us from forgetting our own history of violence? And what are the potential consequences of such acts of remembering? Do we run the risk, as William Stafford suggests, of increasing the suffering of the victims by documenting or recreating their experiences?

This program will examine art in the broadest sense as any piece of painting, fiction, poetry, sculpture, performance, or dance created by the human imagination. But it will focus exclusively on those artworks that are produced during, or in response to, military violence. Through a close examination of several specific historical moments, we hope to develop a deeper understanding of what artists do-and what it is possible for them to do-in the face of human cruelty.

Drawing from our own areas of interest, we have isolated three instances in which artists responded with extraordinary ingenuity to military invasions and occupations. Thus, the first unit of the program focuses on the conquest of North America by European adventurers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will consider this conquest and its aftermath through the lens of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", a fictionalized response to colonialism that in turn inspired twentieth-century artists to revisit the character of Caliban. The second unit addresses the Spanish Civil War, a devastating conflict that produced some of the most celebrated artworks of the modern era, and continues to haunt its survivors and their government to this day. For even under the repression that followed the victory of Franco, artists were able to circumvent censorship in order to circulate their work. The third unit explores performance phenomena in the Americas in which strategic, ritual, or memorial reenactments of violent events preserve an important part of the cultural memory of colonized peoples, offering opportunities for reframing, remembering, and resisting continued oppression.

Our hope is that students will emerge from the program with a working knowledge of each of these important time periods, but also of the connections between them, and of the necessarily violent aftermath of European colonialization. A significant portion of our time, especially in the third unit, will be taken up with the examination of paintings and other artworks. Readings will include books such as Shakespeare's "The Tempest," García Lorca's "House of Bernarda Alba" and Alexie's "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven." We will also watch relevant films together on a regular basis

This program offers students the opportunity to explore the role of the artist from the perspectives of history, art history, and literature. But it is also designed to foster and celebrate creativity among program participants. For their final project, each student will be asked to produce an original piece-either a performance, a piece of creative writing, or a piece of visual art-that reflects his or her own thoughts about war, militarism, and revolution. (Although faculty will not offer formal instruction in these arts, they will provide support through individual meetings and critique groups during the process of developing the final project.) Both in the past and in recent history, artists have created powerful strategies for responding to injustice, and we hope students in this program will be empowered by the artworks we study as a group to produce their own language of resistance.

Three questions circumscribe the work of this curriculum: What is in the public interest and how are public and private interests balanced? How is one educated for communal and public life? What is the relationship between one's political identity and one's membership in a larger "ethnos" (a grouping based on language, ethnicity, religion and other characteristics that seem "prior" to citizenship)?

These questions arise for the individual vis-à-vis the state (a city-state, a nation-state, or an empire), and they arise for the Body Politic vis-à-vis a larger community of states, nations or empires. We will address them at both levels.

Our studies will be historical, and we will study closely the work of historians, philosophers and political theorists. We will examine, as well, how dramatists, painters and poets have represented the public and private self and how the arts shape, support or undermine public and private identities. Our approach will be cyclical, moving repeatedly, rather than quarter by quarter, through developments in Greco-Roman antiquity, then through the founding period of political liberalism (17th and 18th centuries), then through developments in recent times.

This program stresses acquiring and sharpening the tools of critical analysis, of interpretation and argumentation, both written and oral. Not only will we examine the Body Politic, but we will also be concerned with how to move it. We will emphasize learning to address the Body Politic, and learning to write and speak effectively in challenging or defending points of view on what constitutes the public interest. Writing and rewriting-both expository and interpretive-will be regular components of student work. Student work will be read both by faculty and other students. On occasion, students will be asked to argue their views orally.