This yearlong interdisciplinary program explores the role of perception in our understanding of the nature of reality. Drawing from a variety of fields including psychology, sociology and the arts, we will spend the year engaging ourselves in connections between the mind, body and spirit. What can we learn from our own experiences and the experiences of others, so that we can more fully connect to our families, friends, communities, and world? How do we focus our perceptions so that we do more than simply react with fight-or-flight instincts to what we see, hear or feel? What makes one person's experience more "real" than another's? What if someone is colorblind or tone deaf? We will try to gain access to diverse answers for these questions by putting theory into practice with workshops in psychology and playing music.

During fall quarter, we will begin to explore the basics of Western psychology, cultural studies and music. We'll study perception, memory and learning from perspectives of psychology, biology and psychophysics. In winter quarter, we will expand into the science of music, psychomusicology, dreams and aspects of Asian psychology. In spring quarter, students will choose a faculty with whom to work extensively on more in-depth studies. Possible areas of exploration include Asian-American psychology, consciousness studies, ethnomusicology, transpersonal psychology and library research.

Our work will include lectures, workshops, films, seminars, student-led activities and field trips. In addition, students will work on assignments such as writing preparatory papers for seminars, doing creative work with the aim of uncovering an important insight, researching and writing significant papers in preparation for oral presentations at the end of each quarter, and doing independent research on a topic connected to the program in spring quarter.

This is a rigorous, full-time program. Students are expected to work about 50 hours each week (including class time) and will benefit most from a full year commitment. Students should be prepared to explore challenging and unfamiliar ideas in a cooperative and friendly manner. It will be a lot of work and a lot of fun.

Performance:Art will be organized as a learning and artistic community dedicated to the advanced study of experimental performance, and experimental puppet and object theatre. It will encourage the study of performance theory and practice through the creation of performance events using experimental and imaginative approaches. Participants will be encouraged to incorporate interactive technologies, media, visual arts and hybrid performance forms into their projects. Interdisciplinarity, innovation and thinking outside conventions will be highly encouraged.

The pedagogy will be organized around intense and demanding projects that will address seven parallel and integrated foci and will provide students with opportunities to integrate all the different aspects of the class. These foci are design and technical solutions, body, performance, directing/mis-en-scène, text, theory/poetics, and critical integration.

This program requires self-direction, the ability to work independently, the capacity for intensive work, effective collaboration and management skills, and a minimum of 40 hours of work per week, inclusive of class time. Intensive individual and group performance projects will be presented every week as works in progress.

This program will study the rich history of performing arts in two of the world's most ancient civilizations, China and India. These countries, located in South and East Asia, birthed the ancient philosophies of Confucianism, Taoism Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as the practices of tai-chi and yoga. They also are the home of composite art forms, such as Chinese Opera and Sanskrit dance theatre.

China nurtures an extensive repertoire of oral and performing arts built on and blending together many cultural forms of music, dance, theatre, martial arts, and story-telling. India has a rich social and political history and is the repository of the Indus Valley civilization as well as the Sanskrit legacy of art, architecture, dance, music, and theatre.

In this program we will study these philosophies as well as the practices of tai-chi, yoga, Chinese Opera and Odissi (Orissi) dance theatre, one of the branches of the ancient Sanskrit dance theatre.

This program will offer students an opportunity to study traditions of performing arts in their native contexts and in the Asian Indian and Balinese Diasporas. Studies will explore issues of dynamism and stasis in traditional arts and the relevance of new influences in existing and evolving ancient traditions. It will study issues of hybridity, borderlands, and cultural crossings, as related to the performing arts, and require students to create performances addressing these issues. Student projects will allow for exploration of issues of appropriation, cultural colonialism, and the influences of economy and globalization.

Students will have the opportunity to focus on specific traditions of puppetry and dance, using different modes of knowledge. These may include experiential modes, master classes, contextual studies and cognitive learning process such as critical readings, creative and analytical writing. Students will participate in weekly movement, Odissi dance-theater, and puppet theater workshops. The performance aspect of the program will deal with themes related to eco-feminism, politics of self-representation, immigration, national identity, hybridity, borderlands and cultural crossings. At the end of the program, students will participate in presentations of performance skills.

Have you ever wondered how living in a city changes a person's consciousness about arts and culture? What is it about urban environments that can promote open, positive and creative attitudes, or burden people with alienation and fear? How do artists grow and learn in cities? What special advantages do they enjoy, and what special problems do they face?

Themes of this program include considerations of individual and group identity, the impact on the planet's ecology of urbanization (90% of which is currently occurring in the developing world), and the phenomenon Alan Lomax called "cultural grey-out." He argued that many art forms, languages and cultures are disappearing-unless we preserve them somehow in a rapidly changing world. Students in this program may find a mission, a research project, and/or a spring internship engaged in this vital work.

As the pace of technological and social change has quickened, cities have become centers for migrants from elsewhere who come together to create new kinds of polycultural artistic forms, cuisines, communities, families and relationships. Old musics blend into new musics, dreams blend with realities, and dance is ever reinvented-all, often, in the cities.

Why is this becoming a globe of urban dwellers? How will inhabitants of cities retain their connections to the natural world and remain conscious of the need to conserve and protect it? What aspects of the interrelated history of the arts and cities offer patterns for our own creative work and our own conceptions of a better world? Thinking about cities engages interdisciplinary learning about history, urban studies, specific arts (movement, music, performance), literature, cultural studies and social movements.

In weekly workshops, we will learn to use our voices, play instruments, stretch, move, compose, choreograph, write and perform dramatic scenarios and dialogues. Students will work regularly in small groups, collaborating to create a series of original performance projects (presented in class) reflecting themes from our studies. We will do lots of writing, too, including play scripts, musical compositions, dance scenarios, expository essays, observational field notes, and research assignments using maps, tables and graphs.

In the fall, we will establish a common base of historical artists, genres, themes, styles and approaches to analyzing performances. Whether students have a little background in the arts or a lot, after this quarter's work they will have acquired new, interdisciplinary perspectives on the performing arts and culture. We will study the role of an artist's cultural time and place in their work, and how cities developed historically. We'll examine contemporary cities in both the industrialized and developing world. For example, we might examine various versions of the Orpheus myth, including contemporary performances set in Paris, New York and Rio de Janeiro.

In the winter, we'll dive into serious studies of the myths and realities of life in Chicago and New York, via evocative works of art and ethnographic studies. We will study the arts and cultures of successive waves of migrants to North America. In addition to discussing exceptional artists, we'll be discussing the role of music and dance in people's everyday lives: in childhood, lifecycle rituals, work, play, worship and politics.

In the spring, all students will be expected to pursue an arts and/or community internship, a major research project and continuing studies of artworks chosen by students as well as the faculty. Group or individual research might involve comparing the modern histories of Beijing and Shanghai, or Chicago and Berlin, or closer to home, examining the needs of Seattle and Portland.

This program offers performance students the opportunity to study in one of three performance disciplines during two consecutive quarters, honing discipline specific skills. Students will select one of three tracks for intensive work. The Experimental Theatre track will offer students an opportunity to intensely develop technique that will enable them to create avant-garde theatre original work and text-based projects. The Experimental Puppet and Object Theatre track will offer students the opportunity to develop innovative performance approaches through a plan of study organized around parallel class components including body, text, performance, technique, theory, critiques, and seminar readings on contemporary and avant-garde performance. Students choosing the Orissi Dance Theatre track will study traditional Sanskrit dance theater and music, in order to create contemporary works on the theme of Art for Social Change.

All three tracks will depart from traditional performance skills and vocabulary to develop innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to performance, and will have specific readings. The three tracks will meet weekly in joint interactive performance seminars.

Students will choose which track they wish to follow, and register for that track. The CRNs are as follows:

Experimental Theater: freshmen CRN: 10585; sophomore to senior CRN: 10586

Experimental Puppet and Object Theatre: freshmen CRN: 10587; sophomore to senior CRN: 10588

Orissi Dance Theatre: freshmen CRN: 10589; sophomore to senior CRN: 10590

This program welcomes enthusiastic and motivated students ready to do intensive work. Students should be prepared to apply their interest across the three tracks, and to invest long, wonderful fun hours outside of scheduled class times to rehearse and prepare for their performance projects. Fall quarter will culminate with in-class performances, and winter quarter with a public performance at the discretion of the faculty.

The 20th century has brought about a revolution in our understanding of the physical universe. We have been forced to revise the way we think about even such basic concepts as space and time and causality, and about the properties of matter. An important part of this revolution has been the surprising discovery of fundamental ways in which our knowledge of the material world is ultimately limited. These limitations are not the result of surmountable shortcomings in human understanding but are more deeply rooted in the nature of the universe itself. In this program, we will examine the mental world created by the physicist to make sense out of our experience of the material world around us, and to try and understand the nature of physical reality. We will ask and explore answers to the twin questions of epistemology: What can we know? How can we know it? Starting with the Presocratic philosophers, we will continue through each of the major developments of 20th-century physics, including the theories of relativity, quantum theory, deterministic chaos, and modern cosmology. We will examine the nature and the origins of the limits that each imposes on our ultimate knowledge of the world.

No mathematical prerequisites are assumed. Mathematical thinking will be developed within the context of the other ideas as needed for our purposes. The only prerequisites are curiosity about the natural world and a willingness to read and think and write about challenging texts and ideas. We will read primary texts, such as works by the Presocratics, Plato, Lucretius, Galileo, Newton and Einstein, plus selected contemporary writings on physics. In addition to the other texts, a book-length manuscript has been written for this program, and will serve as an extended outline and guide to the works and ideas that we will read and discuss. Fall quarter will concentrate on the period up to the beginning of the 20th century; winter quarter will cover developments during the 20th century.

Newspaper articles are full of assertions about what it means to remove a dam and restore a river, but in fact the issue is amazingly complex. What is the science involved in such a project? How does dam removal impact public policy? What are the economic consequences of such a move? These questions and others will be explored in our program.

This one-quarter introductory program will focus on the physics, economics and politics of river restoration. It will examine the construction and removal of dams, energy generation and use, and fluid dynamics. We will also explore the economic and political issues of construction and dam removal. In addition we will look at societal impacts from many different perspectives, incorporating the viewpoints of groups such as farmers, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, energy producers, and the fishing industry.

We will approach our learning through a variety of modes including hands-on physics labs, lectures, workshops, some group work, field trips and weekly seminars on a variety of related topics.

How do plants and plant communities function? How do plants differ in function above ground and below ground? We will closely examine the ecology and physiology of plants and current methods in plant ecology. Our studies will be divided between those that focus on individual plants, on the interactions among plants and with the abiotic environment. Topics will include plant anatomy, physiology, competition ecology, plant water use, photosynthesis, plant growth and form, plant rooting, and the potential effects of large scale disturbances such as global warming on plant communities. We will apply what we learn about plant ecology to better understand current research in the broader field of ecology in general. Our readings will be divided between current widely used texts in plant physiology and ecology and current research papers from technical journals. Day trips, workshops, labs and a multiple-day field-trip will allow us to observe field research on plant physiology, restoration, the plant ecology of diverse environments, as well as conduct student-driven research on plant ecology and physiology.

Communication skills will be emphasized, particularly reading scientific articles and writing for scientific audiences. We will also practice skills for communicating to a broader public using non-fiction and technical writing found in major botanical journals.

We will have one major field and several minor (one-day) field trips. The major field trip will be from March 8th-16th and will take place in a mountainous section of the Sonoran desert. Your field trip cost will cover camping, food, transportation and permits while at the site. YOU WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR TRANSPORTATION TO THE SITE (Phoenix, AZ Airport). This will be an extended camping trip with extensive hiking through steep terrain. Please discuss this with the faculty IMMEDIATELY if you are unable to attend.

In this full time, all-level program we will read, study and play with seven Shakespearean dramas as well as two written by his contemporaries. Some people read Shakespeare in search of truth, others read him for sheer entertainment. Some people say his works are subversive and use his works to foment change, while others argue that he bolsters stability. Some people make fun of Shakespeare and others are awed by him. Shakespeare is used by comedians, by politicians, by historians and by literary critics. He inspires actors, filmmakers, poets, musicians and authors. Cultures outside of England adapt his plays to their benefit. What makes Shakespeare so useful, so appealing and so popular across the globe and across time? These are some of the issues that we will address in this program. But we will also pay close attention to Shakespeare's poetry, his imagery and his dramatic techniques through close readings and through short performances of his plays. And we will look at his plays in their literary and historical context.

We have organized the reading around accumulating themes beginning with gender relations in Taming of the Shrew, a contentious and difficult play which Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness will help us explicate. Many of the same issues arise in Much Ado about Nothing and Troilus and Cressida, though Troilus also raises problems about commerce and politics. These reappear in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, plays that also open up questions about religion in the context of the meaning of justice. In Othello, Shakespeare adds race to the mix of sex and jealousy, while John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, by raising the question of incest, pushes matters to an extreme. All comes together in that most open-ended of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet, the most imitated, most adapted, most USED of any of the plays. We will study the many ways in which Hamlet has been portrayed on the stage, in film, and in other creative modes from Shakespeare's time to our own, in England and abroad. In short, we will end our study playing with Hamlet.

This program will involve serious study and a heavy time commitment. The week will be structured around lectures, seminars, workshops, film showings and student performances. Students will be expected to read the plays at least twice, read a series of critical essays, prepare response writings for each seminar, write formal essays, and perform short scenes each week in performance workshops.

Students can expect to develop skills in critical thinking, literary and historical analysis, film studies, performance and writing. They can also expect to learn how to make the most of Shakespeare and to enjoy his plays.

For more information about this program, feel free to email Nancy Taylor, taylorn@evergreen.edu. First year students, especially, should consult with the faculty before registering.

To what extent is political power created, transmitted and/or resisted through language? How do poetry and fiction negotiate with power, reinforcing it or changing its flow? How do linguistic conventions shape political and economic policies, and how can they be challenged? This two-quarter program will examine these and other questions as it explores the function of the written word as a masking agent and a mediator of history, power and violence in a variety of different genres and political contexts.

Poetics and Power will include an examination of 20th-century poetry and poetics in the shadow of world wars, genocide and decolonization, beginning with the visionary poetics of Arthur Rimbaud and critical responses by Paul Celan and Theodore Adorno. We will address the strategies of avant-garde and radical poetics and evaluate several contemporary approaches, including the contemporary "Poets Against the War" project. We will examine realist and anti-representational forms of fiction for their political effects, including the writings of Franz Kafka, J. M. Coetzee and Arundhati Roy. We will also examine how political events and public policies are constituted by various postcolonial discourses, including how "Orientalist" representations of the Middle East as backwards and violent shape U. S. foreign policy, and how the discourse of "underdevelopment" has guided Western economic policies towards the Third World.

The work of the program will be analytical as well as creative. In addition to intensive reading and theoretical analysis, students will be expected to experiment in creating poetry, prose poetry, metafiction and nonfiction.

The goal of Poetry New York will be to immerse students in an intense and various writing community, both as writers of poetry themselves and as critical writers. It is hoped that this daily contact with practicing writers, poets, translators, and publishers will advance each student's writing horizons and range of reading possibilities, demystifying the practice and profession of writing while inspiring students to advance in their own art.

This field study program features an immersion in New York City's poetry, literary and publishing worlds. We will spend two weeks on campus preparing for our trip by way of various readings in New York's literary history and in The New York School of Poets. The program will then fly to New York City for six weeks, where we will take up classroom residency at The Bowery Poetry Club, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. By arrangement with the Club we will use its space as a classroom for daily meetings, as a venue for our own readings and as locale for attending readings. The Bowery Poetry Club is a caf, classroom and stage space that currently serves as the center for numerous literary scenes in NYC, including those of an experimental tradition, a spoken word and performance tradition, and various ethnically identified writing scenes.

Students will pursue their own writing, write critical pieces on the poetry they hear, read, interview poets they meet, and be required to attend at least one event a day (or night) across the city: The Bowery Poetry Club, The St. Marks Poetry Project, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Public Library, and so on, are all options for students to pursue their writing. Local projects might include working on poems to appear in public spaces in the city, working collaboratively on translations of poets in town writing in other languages, or compiling a journal of field notes. Field trips will also be arranged to the offices of various publishers of the instructor's acquaintance to study, close up, the way in which literature is made. Some of these publishers might include: New Directions Publishing Company, The New York Review Of Books, Archipelago Books, Seven Stories Press, etc.

The final two weeks of the quarter will be spent back on campus in Olympia, debriefing, finishing poems and essays, and producing an anthology of our work.

This program focuses on the issue of power in American society. In our analysis, we will investigate the nature of economic, political, social, military, ideological and interpersonal power. The interrelationship of these dimensions will be our primary area of study. We will explore these themes through lectures, films, seminars, a journal and writing short papers.

The analysis will be guided by the following questions, as well as others that may emerge from our discussions: What is meant by the term "power"? Are there different kinds of power? How are they interrelated? Who has power in American society? Who is relatively powerless? Why? How is power accumulated? What resources are involved? How is power utilized and with what impact on various sectors of the population? What characterizes the struggle for power? How does domestic power relate to international power? How is international power used? How are people affected by the current power structure? What responsibilities do citizens have to alter the structure of power? What alternative structures are possible, probable, necessary or desirable?

In this period of war and economic, social and political crisis, a good deal of our study will focus on international relations in a systematic and intellectual manner. This is a serious class for serious people. There will be a good deal of reading and some weeks will be more complex than others. Please be prepared to work hard and to challenge your and others' thinking.

Students who are looking for political economy and social change content may want to take this program and then take the spring program, Political Economy and Social Movements.

Political Economy and Social Movements is designed to introduce students to major concepts in neoclassical economics, Marxism and anarchism, and to provide a foundation for more advanced work in political economy and the social sciences. A central goal of this program is to gain a clear understanding of how the U. S. economy has been organized and reorganized over time, how it has been controlled and who has benefited from it, the nature of racism and sexism, and how social movements, particularly those based on race, class and gender, have resisted and shaped its direction.

We will examine the historical construction of the U. S. political economy, the role social movements have played in its development and the future possibilities for social justice. We will also examine the current and future direction of U. S. society, and how various social movements are responding to the changing global order, nationally and globally. We'll look at key issues and economic trends and how they are being addressed in the context of the 2008 Presidential elections.

In particular, our work will center on the interrelationship between the U. S. economy and the changing global system. We will study the causes and consequences of the growing globalization of capital, the role of institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization, the meaning of various trade agreements and the resistance and alternative models being organized by international social movements and nation states, with particular attention paid to Latin America. Films will be shown throughout the program and there will be a substantial amount of reading in a variety of genres. There will be workshops throughout the program in economics and organizing for social change. Students will write a series of short, primarily analytical papers.

We will begin our study by exploring the power of dialogue, i. e. , the personal skills and the world views that might (were we ready, willing and able) maximize our own contributions to dialogue. Then we will explore the limitations of dialogue (and the attractiveness of alternatives to it) that are manifest in the deep gulfs in the United States and in world society, particularly between (1) the religious right and the secular left, and (2) Palestine and Israel.

While a major focus of the program is on the more or less genuine dialogues of our times, these dialogues are being approached not as exhaustive studies of, e. g. , racism or anti-Semitism, but as case studies for understanding the power and limitations of dialogue. Each student will sense over the course of the program that he/she can internalize the dialogical skills as add-ons to one's already existing strategies of survival, and/or as the adoption of fundamentally de-polarizing habits of mind and heart now widely seen as vital to a pluralistic age in need of a more functional understanding of our differences.

This program might well be described as a 10-week experiment in respectful or compassionate listening. Such an experiment is one of a few crucial prerequisites to both assessing the power and limitations of dialogue and to improving our own dialogical skills. The core of this program centers around the learning and the application of concepts central to the attempts to understand persons and groups quite different from us. This program demands an unusual amount of collaborative work, even by Evergreen's standards. Given the nature of the program, students will do a lot of work in small groups and be expected to participate in conversations with classmates and others with whom they would not normally converse. These expectations are crystallized in the program's very unusual Program Covenant.

"Each of us already lives in a community-an overlapping biological, ecological, social, and ethereal community. It is up to us to choose what to contribute, what niches to fill, and what actions to take."-H.C. Flores, Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community

Drawing upon tools and ideas from anthropology, philosophy, developmental psychology, botany, and ecology, this program will examine several important questions including: What is community? Why do communities matter? What links exist between human and non-human communities? How do we understand people and places through the lens of their communities? How do we join and support existing communities? How do we create and nurture new communities? How do communities endure and transform over generations? And what actual and potential relationships can be found between diversity, sustainability, and community?

Our classroom work will be deeply rooted in first-hand observation and interaction with the towns, cities, forests and gardens that form the living network of which our college is a part. An important aspect of our work will be listening for the wisdom of the people, animals, and plants that have made these places their homes. We will learn to attend to the sustaining rhythms of life as well as the disruptions and challenges that call for critical analysis and compassionate action.

Activities will include lectures, workshops, seminars, readings, writing, journaling, field work of various kinds, and internship opportunities. As a central case study, the Evergreen Welcome House Ethnobotanical Garden, will provide an opportunity for hands-on participatory learning. Students will also be expected to take significant responsibility for building a healthy learning community within the program. Through these activities, students will develop skills in interpersonal communication, ethnographic method, nature journaling, horticulture, and community organizing and development. We will sharpen our capacities for both critical reasoning and insightfulness as we seek to understand the divergent values and visions that motivate growth, change, and sometimes produce conflict within and between communities. We can expect to be changed ourselves as we learn to support change around us through meaningful engagement with our world.

During fall, students will identify, observe and begin to understand communities of which they are part. In winter, students will begin to build relationships with community-based organizations and agencies, considering and analyzing elements of successful community development. By spring, students will be undertaking internships, making substantial and meaningful contributions within the fabric of local communities, as we "grow our home." Internship opportunities could include work in schools, gardens, social service agencies and social change organizations, among others.

This class looks in some depth at the concept and reality of protected areas in the United States and internationally. The central focus of the class will be to develop a supported answer to the question "In what senses are these areas protected?" We will explore the question from a number of perspectives such as for whom, by whom, for what purposes, in what ways, for how long and in the face of what threats and/or challenges. Other variables will include biodiversity and conservation, indigenous rights, the science required for protecting essential habitat, relevant laws such as the Endangered Species Act that protected areas support, the tension between access and protecting natural resources, use patterns within and/or near protected areas, governance, and the roles of domestic and international organizations and agencies that work with protected areas. We will look at both terrestrial and marine protected areas.

By the completion of the course students will gain an introduction to a range of issues for domestic and international protected areas. They will learn how to find information about protected areas and related issues and which agencies and organizations are involved with protected area interests. Students will share their new knowledge through seminars, presentations, and research and will evaluate that learning at the end of the quarter. At least 4 quarter hours credit will be upper division science with the possibility of more depending on research projects chosen by the student.

This program integrates the theoretical and practical aspects of small-scale organic farming in the Pacific Northwest throughout the spring, summer and fall quarters. Each week includes eight hours of classroom instruction and twenty hours of hands-on work at Evergreen's Organic Farm. This program is designed to compliment the broader and ecological systems focus of the Ecological Agriculture program.

Students will explore basic farm management, which will include seasonal crop production, nutrient management, animal husbandry, irrigation, plant breeding for seed production, weed and pest control, as well as direct and wholesale marketing. Working with state-of-the-art facilities, this program will introduce students to vermiculture, composting and biodiesel production. These topics will provide a framework and foundation for more specific concepts to be explored each season.

In spring, the program will focus on soils, practical horticulture, greenhouse management, crop rotation and equipment maintenance. In summer, students will explore their personal agricultural interests through a research project. The program will also visit a wide range of diverse alternative and conventional organic farms. Summer topics will include reproductive crop biology, fruit production and food preservation, as well as outbuilding construction, with basic workshops on plumbing and electricity.

In fall, we will focus on winter crop production, cover crops, entomology and plant pathology, genetics and seed saving, compost biology, food storage and farm business planning.

After completing the Practice of Sustainable Agriculture program, students will have an understanding of a whole systems approach to small-scale sustainable farm management in the Pacific Northwest.