the summer semester started on wednesday, spinning my head around again, but for the last time at this university (hopefully, knock on wood).
as i have written before (see here), to finish up my undergraduate degree i am taking a very intensive intersession course - undegradaduate semester in dialogue and three distance education science breadth credit.
the semester in dialogue is a very exciting course already, only after 3 days of classes.. the course lasts till the end of june and i will be wanting to share as many impressions with blog readers (and future dialoguers) as possible.
on the first day of class we did the usual - introducing ourselves, telling in each other what brings us to the course etc. one thing that made the biggest impression of me was one of the two leading professors, saying that he was teaching this course because he "wants to destroy the university as we know it". damn, how right he is! i very much share his views: there is something wrong about the way university education is done. it's a one stream communication, usually in a form of a lecture, without an in-depth regard for the student audience. professors give us tools to question them, but many hate to be questioned! such a paradox, isn't it?
the next days we spent on a retreat on an organic farm called "rolling earth" (look here for their website). it is located on the famous sunshine coast in roberts creek, bc north of vancouver. it was a fantastic idea to organize such an integration retreat because it offered a great opportunity to bond with my classmates. it also made the introduction to the course much smoother and it was done in a very interesting setting.
"rolling earth" was founded couple of years ago by joah and brett who are still living there together with their kids, a dog taro and a bunch of volunteers. they grow their own food, farm their chickens, organize educational retreats for schools and generally live a happy and seemingly peacful live in a wonderful scenery of a pine-smelling forest and chuckling creek. seriously: idylla. i wish we had more time to spend with them and chat about their drives and motives to be there and do what they do, but unfortunately we had a pretty busy dialogue schedule too.
the major thing we did in roberts creek was creating experimental group project themes. the instructors got us involved in a very profound process, without which (after jerzy grotowski) i believe, we wouldn't come to the outcome. first, we set out for a half-an-hour long walk in the forest, attempting to answer to ourselves the question: what matters most? then we collected twigs and branches to create permaculture for joah's garden and only after dinner we talked about our ideas. my big three things that went up onto the wall were: movement of body throughout the space (whether through physical activity, roaming around or traveling), experience (yes, i would spend those 100$ on a ticket anywhere rather than on expensive jeans) and life (because this is what our culture seems to be valuing most anyways). once all 70 or so ideas were on the wall it was time to have some fun around the bonfire. :-) next morning we returned to them. the instructor numbered them up and we were supposed to choose our top 5 through a blind voting. out of those 12 themes emerged. they got renumbered again and then we were supposed to choose top 3, and finally the one that really mattered most. that's how we created the themes for the group projects and the groups themselves. i ended up being in a group which originally was under a label of "healthy body - healthy mind", but once we met up with my group we changed the name to "sustainable quality of life". because of my interests in nutrition, exercise and psychological health, i am super-excited about working on setting an experiment within this theme.
what added to my experience of the roberts creek retreat was the means of transportation i got there with. since the weather forecast was supposed to be epic, a group of us decided to bike from downtown vancouver to horseshoe bay (ferry terminal), then grab a ferry to langdale and bike further along the coast to roberts creek. in total approximately 60 kilometers of biking from my house one way. yes, yes, almost 120 km in my legs.. a decent trip for the quads! :-) on the way back i got my tire flat twice, but we fixed the problem and i was able to enjoy the sunshine from the seat of my bike rolling down the hills of west vancouver, towards home..
*pictures taken by janet moore
