A semester of learning concluded with a gift of caring when two First Year Seminar (FYS) classes collaborated recently to host a dinner party for a family of 40 on behalf of their incarcerated relative. And the sentiment, “Wish you were here,” took on difficult and obvious poignancy this Christmas. Students in Professor Tori Pelz’s FYS, Jails, Justice …
Category Archives: Arts and Humanities
From Hate to Hope: The Art of Resilience
From the diametric opposites of hate to hope, the first exhibit in the DePree Art Gallery on Hope’s campus has opened the academic year with a continued, much-needed discussion about race in America. Hateful Things|Resilience provides plenty of opportunity to consider our country’s regrettable past and present in regard to race relations but also to move onto an expectant future.
One Artist, One Faculty, One Question
Four of those visiting artists sat down separately with a Hope faculty member to answer how the arts contribute to the public good. It is a question whose answer is necessary toward a better understanding of what makes the arts important in our lives and world.
One Artist, One Faculty, One Question
Numerous professional visiting artists come to campus each academic year to both display their creative talents and impart their expressive wisdom to the Hope community. They show and tell us, by virtue of their displayed talents and spoken wisdom, that the arts are important to our collective communities because they require response and engagement, making us …
New Lessons in Old Norse
Few graduate schools in the U.S. teach Old Norse, an ancient language with Germanic origins, and fewer liberal arts colleges offer it still. But this past academic year, Dr. Lee Forester brought the language of Vikings and Icelanders and even Tolkien fans to a Hope classroom, using modern techniques to teach age-old, runic vocabulary and grammar.
One Artist, One Faculty, One Question
Numerous professional visiting artists come to campus each academic year to both display their creative talents and impart their expressive wisdom to the Hope community. They show and tell us, by virtue of their displayed talents and spoken wisdom, that the arts are important to our collective communities because they require response and engagement, making us …
Boston: City of History, Archives, and GLCA Research Opportunities
The GLCA Boston Summer Seminar, created and directed by Dr. Natalie Dykstra, offers Midwest faculty and students the opportunity to find historic people and places and paper that impacts independent thinking and learning.
The First Great Inoculation Debate
One of only 60 projects selected for this year’s showcase from among several hundred highly competitive applications nationwide, “The First Inoculation Debate: A Quantitative Text Analysis of the Boston Smallpox Epidemic of 1721” by Elizabeth Ensink looks at communication practices between doctors and religious leaders when a smallpox epidemic broke out in Boston.
Breaks Away: Sylvia Kallemeyn
The New Song Movement, born out of struggle, political repression and sometimes civil wars in Central and South America, was the break-away focus of Professor Sylvia Kallemeyn, associate professor of Spanish, during her sabbatical leave from Hope in 2014-15. Through the study of the folk-inspired and socially-committed music of this era first in Ecuador and then back in the States, Kallemeyn’s goal was to make these songs more accessible to students in her Spanish language classes.
Hip Hop a Hit in Japan
This past September, Professor Crystal Frazier walked into a Tokyo dance studio to teach a distinctly American art form and immediately encountered a vibe that was uniquely Japanese. A class of 40 college students stood eagerly at the ready – respectful, disciplined, hospitable. An interpreter, earnest to translate, barely needed to speak. Hip hop would be the vehicle to move bodies and relationships across cultural lines; dance would be their universal language.