Temperate rainforests are a poorly understood and highly valued ecosystem in the Pacific Northwest and in other parts of the world. They support a complex and interconnected web of life that encompasses a tremendous diversity of biota and ecological interactions. Specific topics to be covered this quarter will include forest nutrient cycling, epiphytes, mutualisms and the functional roles of detritus. Our focus will be on the ecology of rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula, but we will also consider their counterparts in other parts of the world.

Weekly seminars will focus on reading and understanding articles from scientific literature. We will also investigate interactions between humans and forests and consider the broader impacts of ecological research on human societies. Students will undertake organized group projects in ecology and natural history, and develop an independent study project that requires the development of research and quantitative skills. We will use the campus of the Evergreen State College as a field laboratory, and the program will take a field trip to the Olympics to study natural history and field ecological aspects of temperate rainforests.

This program will consist exclusively of participation in a faculty-directed stage production of a play chosen by the instructor. The audition, rehearsal and production work will follow an academic/professional theater model that students can expect to find in any off-Broadway or regional theater.

The play will be chosen from the realistic/avant-garde theater canon. This will allow us to work with acting and directing techniques that were specifically developed for each type of theater. For example, these techniques could include Stanislavski's sense memory, Michael Chekhov's psychological gesture, Meyerhold's biomechanics or Bogart's viewpoints. Students will experience a rigorous training in movement and vocal techniques and will learn to utilize these techniques in the performance of the play.

Participation in the production involves acting in the play; dramaturgical work; assistant directing; stage management; set, costume, lighting and sound design; set and costume construction; publicity; and all other areas related to a successful play production. While the production will be directed by the faculty, the process will be an interactive collaboration among all participants, with all students working in more than one area. For example, a student who is cast in the play may spend half to three quarters of her time in rehearsal, and the rest of the time in the shop building the set. A student who presents a portfolio of his lighting design, might become the lighting designer for the production as well as the publicity coordinator.

Students will spend the first eight to nine weeks in rehearsal, culminating in a fully mounted, site-specific production or a production in the Experimental Theater. In addition to rehearsals and production work, the program will include weekly seminars on dramaturgical matters that are closely related to the production. For example, if the production is a play by a 20th-century avant-garde writer, the seminars will deal with other plays by the same author, scholarship, the social, political, economic and cultural environment of the play, and so on. Those weekly seminars will help us to understand the world of the play, as well as the world of the author.

When confronted with abstract art, many people don't know how to think about it. Some people think it was a European avant garde invention. Others question its value and the skills of the artist. This program, geared for students with little or no art experience, will examine the sources of abstraction in Western art and broaden this into a multicultural worldview. For example, we will explore abstraction in indigenous cultural traditions.

We will study different inspirations for abstraction, such as nature, poetry, journal writing and music. We will blend studio arts-such as drawing, printmaking and book arts-with weekly readings, presentations from Northwest artists and expository writing. Students will gain a visual vocabulary for talking and writing about art. While the beginning of the quarter will be devoted to skill building, students will have the opportunity to do individual projects. The program will allow students to explore their options and interests in the visual arts.

Do you want to work on improving your critical reasoning skills? This program will focus on techniques for understanding and criticizing arguments and theories. It will emphasize a cooperative, dialogic approach to deciding what to believe. Thinking Straight will cover standard topics in informal logic, including argument reconstruction, assessment of validity and fallacies. It will also explore reasoning in several domains, which may include science, statistics, ethics, economics and history. We will apply critical reasoning techniques to a number of contemporary, contentious issues found in a variety of texts, including full books, newspaper editorials and columns, Internet documents and journal articles. We will also discuss the extent to which standards of reasoning are general and how patterns of reasoning might differ in specific domains. Students will be expected to gather both quantitative and qualitative material and make frequent presentations that clarify and assess the reasoning underlying important current issues.

Students will study multimedia and installation art from countries in the Americas, as well as the aesthetic, social, political and cultural contexts in which it is made. Two aspects will be considered in this analysis: popular and alternative expressions as forms of anti-colonial resistance and oppression expressed through many artistic forms, and the intensive use of multimedia, mainly video.

Readings in art history, history, sociopolitical and economic conditions in various communities and countries of the Americas will be required. Students will attend seminars on those subjects, as well as on films and art works we study. All students will be expected to work collaboratively with other students to design and create multimedia installations during fall and winter quarters, and to learn the skills needed to do such work. Students will also be required to develop an intellectual journal that reflects on program readings, to write regular papers, and to do research on artists and their work on topics relevant to their own work. In addition, we will take daylong field trips to museums and art events relevant to the topics being studied. Finally, a group of students will be trained and certified in professional television production to produce a weekly bilingual show Panorama Latino Americano aired through TCTV (Channel 2) in Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater, Wash.

During spring quarter, students will have the opportunity to travel to Chile to study art, politics and culture in Latin America. Production of short video and multimedia projects about the different topics studied in this program will prepare students to participate in this unique study abroad opportunity.

This program is a regular, ongoing offering designed specifically for place-bound students at one of six reservation sites: Muckleshoot, Nisqually, Port Gamble, Quinault or Skokomish. Students meet each week at their respective sites to build and sustain a learning community on the reservation. In addition, students from all sites also meet regularly for classes at the "House of Welcome," the Longhouse Education and Cultural Center, on the Evergreen campus. Reservation/Native members help to design the curriculum by considering those topics and skills that an educated member of an Indian tribe needs to know in order to contribute to his/her community. The interdisciplinary approach allows students to participate in seminars, modules and participatory research while also studying in their individual academic interest areas.

There are four rotating themes for the program. The theme for 2005-06 is health, and the program is subtitled Health of the Nations. Students will engage in work that allows them to study and index the health of Indian communities, specifically their own, as it relates to personal and community health. Students will focus on areas that include physical, spiritual/cultural and economic health, as well as other areas as determined by the stakeholders.

The tropics are the cradle of the world's biodiversity. This program will focus on Costa Rica, emphasizing biological richness, field ecology, statistical analysis of field data, conservation biology and Latin American culture. It is a successor to the Temperate Rainforests program, although Temperate Rainforests is not a prerequisite. The first seven weeks of the program will be held on the Evergreen campus, followed by a three-week field trip to Costa Rica. The on-campus portion will include lectures and labs on global patterns of biological diversity and quantification and analysis of ecological diversity, as well as an overview of major taxa of neotropical plants and insects. This material will be integrated with introductory statistics and conversational Spanish.

During the Costa Rica field trip we will visit four major field sites: coastal habitat, tropical dry forest, cloud forest and lowland rainforest. Students will learn about common plants and animals in each area, dominant landforms and ecological processes, conservation issues and current biological research activities. Students will also learn techniques of field research by participating in quantitative field labs led by both faculty and students. In the evenings there will be a series of guest lectures by research scientists. The field trip will require rigorous hiking and backpacking in remote locations.