Lifelong Learner Seminars

Wednesdays, September 23, 30

Leader: Birgitta R. Meade, science educator, past adjunct faculty, Luther College

Description:

Beneath the hills, valleys, and streams of Winneshiek County lies an extraordinary geologic story.  This course examines the hidden landscape beneath our feet, beginning with the remarkable discovery of the Decorah Impact Structure. Participants will follow the scientific detective story that unfolded over nearly two decades as researchers pieced together multiple lines of evidence to reveal one of Iowa’s most significant geologic discoveries. We’ll also explore the world-famous Winneshiek Lagerstätte containing exceptionally preserved fossils—including Pentecopterus decorahensis, the oldest known giant sea scorpion. During the second session, we’ll discover how the county’s unique geology continues to influence everyday life by controlling groundwater movement, the quality of private wells and municipal water supplies, the flow of springs and trout streams, and the health of the Upper Iowa River. No background in geology is required—only curiosity about the place we call home. Through maps, fossils, photographs, and stories of scientific discovery, participants will gain a new appreciation for the hidden history beneath Winneshiek County and the ways it continues to shape the landscape today.

Birgitta Meade is a science educator with a lifelong interest in natural history. A former teacher at North Winneshiek School and adjunct instructor at Luther College, she has extensive experience in place-based science education and has collaborated with educators, conservation organizations, and community groups throughout the region. She enjoys sharing stories that connect science, landscape, and local history with audiences of all backgrounds.

Wednesdays, October 28, Nov 4,11,18

Leader: Laird Edman, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Northwestern College, IA

Description:

Why do people believe in god(s)? Why are those beliefs and behaviors that we call “religious” so very common in every culture in history?  People have answered this question in very many ways, from our fear of death and the unknown, or our need to find ways to bind communities together, to our innate sense that there is a creator out there that we need to worship. This class will explore a relatively new approach to this question called the Cognitive Science of Religion. Specifically, we will dig into the mental mechanisms involved in how children come to believe, for it appears that children are primed for belief. It’s how our minds work.

We will read Justin Barrett’s book, Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief and use the book as a jumping off place to discuss the ways human minds tend toward religious beliefs. Through lecture and conversation we will consider ritual, funeral rites, after-life beliefs, and our tendency to sense invisible beings. This is fascinating material and it is my hope we can have some fun digging into it.

Laird Edman is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Northwestern College in Iowa. Edman’s primary work and writing over the past 15 years has been in the cognitive science of religion, including a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Religion. He received the Teaching Excellence award from Northwestern in 2008 and 2017, and he also holds Teacher of the Year awards from Waldorf University and the Honors Program at Iowa State University. Edman was a visiting scholar in Science and Religion: Scholarship & Christianity at Oxford University in 2015-16, doing research on cognitive and psychological issues related to worship and discipleship. He is currently finishing a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust focused on the pro-social effects of religious ritual. When he’s not working on that, he spends his time floating down the Upper Iowa, dancing to the Footnotes, or having a little Fika with his grandkids.

Wednesdays, February 3, 10, 17, 24

Leader: David Faldet, Emeritus Professor of English, Luther College

Description:

In this course we will read Bernadine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other as a case study of the intersection of race, gender, class, sexuality, and national identity in twenty-first century Britain.  Evaristo’s book is comprised of 12 stories of women whose lives all interconnect, though not always in ways they know or understand – until all is revealed in the final chapter.  Most have Afro-Caribbean roots, but in other ways they diverge, including one character who chooses to live gender neutral. 

As background to the novel, in each session we will see videos on identity and race by British journalist Afua Hirsch, on immigration since 1950, and also compare the queen’s Christmas broadcast of 1957 vs. the broadcast of 2020.  We will look at poems or brief prose excerpts by a range of British colonial and post-colonial writers from the last 175 years confronting the conflicting forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, and national identity.  We will also discuss brief introductions to identity studies and postcolonial theory (including reflection on America’s literature as a case study in postcolonial writing).  

David Faldet’s graduate training focused on British literature.  He taught English, Paideia, and environmental studies at Luther College for over thirty years.  Periodic stints in Nottingham, England (student in 1977-78, co-director ‘93-94, ‘00-01, ‘15-16, spring 2019) and leading or co-leading eight January term trips to the UK and Ireland have deepened his interest in the way the United Kingdom since WW2 has dealt with changing racial and ethnic makeup, globalization, a decline in its international power, independence movements in its colonies, modernization, and the devolution of its own governance.  For your information, David suffers gladly from a lingering case of Anglophilia.

Wednesdays, March 17, 24, 31, April 7

Nancy K. Barry, Emerita Professor of English, Luther College

Description:

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was originally published in The New Yorker magazine in June, 1962. It was then slated to be the Book of the Month Club entry for October of that same year, so the book was widely read and recognized upon its publication. What no one could have anticipated was the wide-spread reaction to its claims, both positive and negative. Carson took the title of the book from a poem by John Keats—“The sedge is wither’d from the lake, and no birds sing.” For Keats, it was a lament about love and physical decay. For Carson, it was a warning and forecast about the ramifications of the increased, some would say wanton, use of pesticides on any and all of American landscapes.

We will spend the month reading this nonfiction classic, and watching sections from an American Experience film about Rachel Carson. Included in our discussions will be first and foremost an analysis of Carson’s blend of scientific reasoning and imagistic rendering of the deleterious effect of these modern chemicals upon the landscape and its various species. According to Paul Brooks, her editor at Houghton Mifflin and biographer, when Carson started to work on the book in 1958, she was already a “world-famous writer,” due to the bestselling works The Sea Around Us and its companion volume, The Edge of the Sea. During WW II, Carson worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service, and had become alarmed by the extensive and expanding use of DDT and other pesticides in the “agricultural control programs.” She tried to sell an article to magazines about this cause and effect, but magazine publishers were afraid to threaten their advertising sponsors. Publishing her argument as a book would relieve her from having to assuage the back-talk from the chemical industry. Carson was modest about her accomplishment in Silent Spring, which she dedicated to Albert Schweitzer, but few could have anticipated how far-reaching and expansive this lyrical, humane volume would become. It’s credited now with kick-starting what in the Sixties became known as the “Environmental Movement.” We will study the book first, and then take on the kinds of arguments the “nay sayers” used to discredit her and its pages. For example, the US Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Benson wrote: “Why [would] a spinster with no children [be] so concerned about genetics? She was probably a communist.”

Whether you’ve read the book before or simply heard about it as an “important book,” this reading group will give you patient study in a nonfiction classic, from which our discussions will range, as did Carson’s influence, far and wide.

Nancy K. Barry taught at Luther College, in the English and Paideia departments from 1990-2021. She taught Silent Spring in a senior seminar on “Classic American Nonfiction.” She also taught creative nonfiction writing. As a writing workshop leader, she taught for years at the University of Iowa’s “Summer Writing Festival,” and is the author of a one-woman play, “Lessons from Cancer College.”