Once Upon a College: Letter from an Alum: Opportunity in Nicaragua

Friday, May 21, 2010

Letter from an Alum: Opportunity in Nicaragua

Hi Mick and Doug,

I was a former student at Unity and am currently volunteering at Grupo Fenix (grupofenix.org) in Nicaragua. It is a solar promotion/development group that thrives through the work of motivated volunteers, interns, students and professors. I am consistently reminded of the strong influence Unity ultimately had on me ending up here. Upcoming, and I know this is short notice and most students are gone home, but there is a Solar Culture Course (and will be many others) being held here on July 10-18. More info can be found on their website: grupofenix.org.

There are many opportunities for internships, volunteers, or student/teacher groups (who can potentially arrange private courses), to get involved. Please share this information with anyone who might be interested. We have posters and flyers that can be sent if you´d like to help spread the word for this inspiring group.

Thanks, hope all is well at the Unit--

Kyla

Contact me (mwomersley@unity.edu) for a referral.

Mick

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What this is about

A long time ago, in an educational universe far away and almost certain never to return, the professors of a certain small college experimented with experiential learning and taught their students not just to "read, write, think, and figure", but also to do practical things with that learning. Educational theory and research results from Kurt Hahn to modern scholars suggests strongly that experiential learning works better, particularly for active young people. It also matters greatly that young people have the physical and mental confidence to do something positive with their learning, particularly to make social and environmental change, in other words, to lead. This kind of confidence comes with physical challenge and being made to defend your ideas out loud, among other things. The small college was built around these ideas, deliberately, by a group of determined and innovative educators. With this success, along came the inevitable bean-counters who believed such a valuable education was way too expensive for those students. Wanting to keep more of the students' money (to pay their six figure salaries, of course), they cut the programs the first chance they got and went all-online where the teaching help is way cheaper and less demanding of budgets for tools and materials. I happen to think it was well worth the investment for any student who really engaged with the opportunity, but... bean counters gonna count beans. So the college is, for all useful purposes, gone, or at least changed beyond all recognition and not any good at teaching anyone anything practical at all. But the memories remain. And, despite the best efforts of the new administrators to erase them, so does quite a bit of open-source computer data to remind us of those memories, in the form of this and several other blogs and video pages online. In the case of this blog, the blog data were mine, not the college's, all along, even though they tried many times to get their cold dead bean-counter hands on them. So fuck 'em. Oh, and yes, this particular professor cusses more now that I don't have to worry about pointy-headed supervisors. Fuck them too. Enjoy. And remember, llegitimi non carborundum. If you're one of our former students and looking for stories you wrote or photographs or records of projects you worked on, just use the keyword search function or the chronological record to find your projects. They're all still here. Drop me a line using the comments section. I'd love to hear from you.

Once Upon a College

Friday, May 21, 2010

Letter from an Alum: Opportunity in Nicaragua

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