Once Upon a College: Environmental Photographer of the Year

Friday, August 22, 2008

Environmental Photographer of the Year

One thing about being a human ecologist is I genuinely like humans. The diversity of human lifestyles and ecological adaptations is just gloriously complex.

This illustrative photograph caught my eye in today's paper. There are 14 more equally stunning photographs.

From The Guardian:

Environmental photographer of the year and quality of life winner:

"Happy in her own world," Abhijit Nandi, India.

‘The woman in my picture is returning home from the paddy field after a long day at work. She never thought a village woman could be the subject of a photograph, so when I told her I'd like to take a picture of her, she just laughed’

Photograph: Abhijit Nandi"

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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, August 22, 2008

Environmental Photographer of the Year

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What this is about

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