Earlham College | News from Public Affairs

The bulk of Earlham's New Zealand Semester will be spent in Christchurch.

The bulk of Earlham's New Zealand Semester will be spent in the area of Christchurch on the country's southernmost main island, "taking advantage of the resources of the University of Canterbury as well as the remarkable surrounding natural environments," reports inaugural program leader Jay Roberts, director of Earlham's Wilderness Program. (Photo courtesy of Virtual New Zealand)

It seems almost unthinkable though, strangely, that will be exactly the case for Earlham College instructor Jay Roberts this year. He's making the "sacrifice" in order to help extend Earlham's international reach and make more varied learning experiences available to students.

It's not just that Roberts — director of wilderness programs at Earlham — and his traveling companion, Professor of Biology Bill Buskirk, will be away from home during the holidays. For them, literally, there will be no Christmas Day.

The pair departs Los Angeles on Dec. 24, Christmas Eve, for New Zealand, where Roberts will co-lead with his wife Marcie a new environmental program starting with the Spring Semester of 2008. He and Buskirk will begin laying preliminary groundwork for the program after arriving in Christchurch 16 time zones later, on Dec. 26.

"Because we cross the international dateline, there's no Dec. 25 for us," explains Roberts, who admits the idea of skipping over the entire day "feels a little funny." With Marcie, formerly director of the College's Bonner Scholars Program (and now coordinator of Earlham's Ball Venture Fund grant for Islamic Studies), he'll return to the island nation next summer to continue making preparations for the 18-20 students already being recruited for the program.

Jay Roberts, wilderness director and instructor in educational programs, will "skip over" Christmas Day this year while en route to New Zealand, where the College will offer a new environmental studies semester beginning in the spring of 2008.

As suggested by the globe-spanning trip, the upcoming launch of the New Zealand semester abroad represents another "big leap" for Earlham both geographically and in terms of the curriculum, Roberts says. The program supplants the College's long-running Southwest Field Studies (SWFS), first offered in 1974.

Although many Earlham students through the years have benefited from their experience in SWFS, lately centered in and around Arizona, the wilderness director and instructor in education programs reveals it's been getting increasingly difficult to entice both students and potential faculty co-leaders to sign up.

A variety of factors account for the fall off in interest, the relative "age" of the program among them, says Roberts. Although a much more determinant factor, he believes, is the in-house competition coming from the College's ever-more successful International Programs Office (IPO).

"It's pretty understandable at this point," Roberts says, "when you see students able to choose between a semester in Spain, let's say, and Arizona, or between Southwest Field Studies and three or four months in Kenya or Tanzania … more of them are naturally going to be interested in studying abroad. And so, that's what makes the opportunity now to take students to New Zealand especially exciting for us."

To go along with the dramatic change in scenery for the program, Roberts also is hoping to affect a new view of environmental studies, which he says commonly are but should not always be considered in terms of environmental science.

"We're really hoping to attract more students to this interdisciplinary program by showing them the multiple ways to look at environmentalism," offers Roberts, currently a doctoral-degree candidate at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. During the first of two "pilot" years for the New Zealand Program, he will direct a five-credit faculty seminar — "Environment, Culture and Curriculum" — examining the "intersections of the ways we organize our schooling, our embedded cultural norms and values, and how that affects our relationships to the natural world."

"As they say [in the environmental community], 'There are no real environmental problems, per se, only problems with how people behave in the environment. We have to understand that better, and I think a program like ours that combines the natural sciences with the humanities and the social sciences allows many students to engage in environmentalism wherever their interest really is.

"We're trying to be holistic in our approach," adds Roberts, suggesting that New Zealand's unique case studies of environmental policy and land management should be of interest to students in a variety of majors — whether it be the recent boom in eco-tourism spawned by the release of the Lord of the Rings trilogy filmed on location there (business and non-profit management; economics) or the "model" relationship between the majority descendants of New Zealand's European settlers and the indigenous Maori people (History; Sociology/Anthropology).

Completing the 16-credit New Zealand program are two, four-hour courses in the natural history of the South Pacific country (to be taught by local university faculty) and its cultural ecology, as well as a five-credit field study seminar directed by Marcie Roberts and meant to connect students even more directly with their new environment and the people in it through work experiences and service learning opportunities.

While certainly prominent, the New Zealand Program is only one of several new off-campus study sites debuting soon for Earlham, 2006 recipient of the Senator Paul Simon Award from NAFSA: Association of International Educators, which also celebrates 50 years of international programs in 2006-07.

Also "down under," the College expects to inaugurate a new Australia May Term next spring. "Art, Culture and Ecology of Aboriginal Australians" will be led first by Professor of Biology Brent Smith and Assistant Professor of Art History Julie May. Nearly twice as many students as the program can accommodate turned out for May's information/organization session in late September.

According to Director of International Programs Patty Lamson, standing-room only crowds also showed up for many other recent presentations about the College's myriad international offerings, including Professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies Chris Swafford's brief on another new May Term ("Andalusia Then and Now") and study site — Morocco — and her own meeting (with husband Howard Lamson, professor of Spanish) about the language intensive Mexico May Term.

"I get a sense of real excitement," says Lamson about continuing efforts at internationalizing Earlham, where already more than 70 percent of students participate in at least one off-campus study program before graduation. Those numbers are "trending up," she feels, but concedes it is hard to be quantitative because of variances in the number of programs offered year-to-year and other factors.

Still, Lamson emphasizes, "We just added New Zealand because we'd seen a lot of student interest, which is why we're also offering Australia.

"These are new areas for us and that brings a lot of new challenges, but also a lot of new opportunities, especially for students. I think they appreciate that."

It would seem so. Taking into account relatively higher airline fares to New Zealand and Australia and the developed economies found once there, costs for those programs are somewhat higher than other semester programs or May Terms at Earlham. But, Lamson says she's seen no slackening of interest on the part of students and anticipates "very strong" registration for both.

Contact:
Kevin Burke, director of media relations
765/983-1323 — E-Mail Kevin