date last updated: 22 March 2003
Creative Spirit and the Wild
Type of Course:
Online with beginning and ending residencies at Vermont College
Credits: 3 Graduate, Undergraduate,
or CEU
Course Number: INTS-577-O
Track: Spirit of Place
Faculty: Leslie Van Gelder,
Ph.D. (click for a
brief biography)
Time:
Spring 2003
Residencies: Opening Residency 5-6
April 2003, Closing Residency 28-29 June 2003,
at
Vermont College,
Union Institute and University, Montpelier (click for further information on
this site)
Registration Dates: Registration deadline 17 March 2003
Course
Dates: 5 April-29 June 2003
Costs: Graduate or Undergraduate Credit
tuition $1010.00, CEU tuition $910.00.
Learners are also responsible for their travel, room, and board for
Residencies, reading materials, internet and computer expenses
Prerequisites: Undergraduate degree for pursuing Graduate
Credits
Course Description:
It is that except by the measure of wildness, we shall never really know the nature of a place, and without a sense of place we shall never really make a poem, and without a poem we shall never be fully human.
Paul
Gruchow, from The Necessity of Empty Places
One of the great misquotes of the environmental movement comes from Henry David Thoreau’s essay, ‘Walking,’ where some claim he wrote, ‘In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World.’ Thoreau did not write wilderness, he wrote wildness. Is there an essential difference? Why is wildness the preservation of the world? In this course we explore the intersection between our external landscapes and our creative inscape to see how the wildness of the natural world functions both outside and within us.
Course Objectives and Outcomes:
Before the course begins, participants will do the required readings and submit a three to five page paper described below to the instructor by email attachment. Throughout the course, participants will work on an individual project for presentation during the last three weeks. The course begins and ends with residency weekends in Vermont where learners will shape their individual research questions and form a trusting community with whom they will share their work.
The online portion of the course will follow a weekly calendar with the following structure:
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Weekly readings will be posted each Friday for the following week. Total weekly reading will be between 20 and 60 pages and will be available electronically. Participants are expected to read and be prepared to comment.
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Discussions on the readings will take place from 8 am (East Coast USA time) Tuesday to 5 pm Friday. The discussions will not be simultaneous but all participants are expected to participate weekly and to have posted by 5 pm Wednesday.
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Cyber-office hours will be held on Thursdays. This is a good opportunity to ask questions about individual research projects. While learners don’t have to ‘stop by’ on Thursdays (questions can be emailed during the week), all of the week’s one-on-one emails will be answered by Thursday night.
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On Fridays, participants will post a reflection piece on how the reading and weekly discussion has related to their own personal question. Other participants will be encouraged (but not required!) to comment on reflections. Individual comments from the instructor will be sent privately.
During the first 7 weeks of the course, readings will prompt the discussions. During the last three weeks, learners’ projects will become the weekly focus. All projects will be due at the end of the sixth week, and will be posted during the span of the last three weeks of the course. The object of these presentations is to share with the learning community the ideas that learners are shaping through their individual interests in the subject. Projects can take the form of formal papers, creative works, web sites, power points, video clips, or any form of media which can be shown via the internet, but must be of an appropriate level work.
Assessment:
To receive Graduate or Undergraduate Credit for the course, a learner must complete the pre-course readings, attend the beginning and ending residencies, read the weekly readings, participate in the weekly discussions, weekly write a reflection, submit preliminary and post-course reflection papers, and present a final project. There are no letter grades for this course, only satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Graduate Credit requires a higher standard of work than does Undergraduate Credit. The relative weights that the elements of the course contribute to the final assessment are as follows: Preliminary paper 10%, Residencies 20%, Weekly readings, discussions, and reflections 30%, Final project 30%, and Post-course paper 10%.
To receive Continuing Education Units for the course, learners must complete the pre-course and weekly readings, and participate in the weekly discussions. They may also attend the beginning and ending residencies and present a final project, but should not submit papers or reflection pieces to the instructor. There are no CEU letter grades for this course, only satisfactory or unsatisfactory. The relative weights that the elements of the course contribute to the final assessment are as follows: Weekly readings and discussions 100%.
Credit learners may request narrative evaluations for transcripts or learning plans/agreements.
Syllabus (subject to change):
Week 1: What is the Difference between Wilderness and the Wild?
Many different writers have looked at the words wilderness and wildness from different points of view. To begin our course we will survey some of the key arguments in the field to see where we stand on the notions of what it means to be wild.
Texts: Henry David Thoreau, Jack Turner, Gary Snyder, Paul Gruchow, Wallace Stegner
Week 2: Silence and Contemplation: The Concepts of Emptiness and Fullness in the Natural World
One definition of wilderness is that it is a place where human language is not the dominant voice. In this week’s readings we will look at the role of silence and stillness in the wildness of the imagination.
Texts: Terry Tempest Williams, Ursula Le Guin, Peter London, Paul Gruchow, Gretel Erlich
Week 3: The Creative Universe, the Creative Mind
Contemporary scientists find great resonance in the ways in which the human mind is organized and the creative structuring of the world. In this week’s readings we explore the intersection of the human mind and the natural world to see if we are participating in a creative universe or if we are merely creative beings all on our own.
Texts: Thomas Berry, F. David Peat, Leonard Shlain, Edith Cobb
Week 4: The Gift of Language: Poetry and Metaphor
To return from the wild we must be able to tell our stories of our experiences. How does language help us to understand the creative process and how can we be creative with or without words? This week we take a foray into the role of language, most especially metaphor, in shaping our experiences and perception.
Texts: Simon Ortiz, Lewis Hyde, Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, N. Scott Momaday
Week 5: Chaos, Novelty, and Play
Creativity is fuelled by some of the essential elements of the world. In this week’s readings we look at the intersection of chaos theory, novelty and play on the ways in which creativity function. We will be visited by guest writer Patricia Monaghan who will talk with us about her work in Dancing With Chaos, a work of poetry which unites quantum physics and the spirit.
Texts: James Carse, Joseph Meeker, Patricia Monaghan, F. David Peat and John Briggs
Week 6: Creating Places for Possibility: The Storied Landscape
In understanding our relationship with place, we often come to see the stories embedded in a place, our own stories as well as others. This week’s reading and activities will involve finding our own storied landscapes and seeing if we can become quiet enough to hear the stories that already reside there.
Texts: Henry David Thoreau, Barry Lopez, Stephen Trimble
Week 7: Notions of Time in a Creative Universe
As we look at the way in which time unfolds we come to see different views of how we might perceive the creative spirit at work. In this week’s readings we look at a series of writers who have dealt specifically with the cosmological question of the intersection between creativity and spirituality in view of the framework of time.
Texts: Madeline L’Engle, Vine Deloria, Barry Lopez
Week 8: Learner Presentations
Week 9: Learner Presentations
Week 10: Learner Presentations
Requirements:
Prior to Opening Residency:
Learners will complete the required readings in advance of the residency weekend. Each Graduate and Undergraduate Credit learner should submit a three to five page paper by email to the instructor focusing on their sense of the nature of creativity both personally and within the context of the readings.
During the Online Course:
Learners are expected to complete the weekly readings and participate in the discussions. Each week, Graduate and Undergraduate Credit learners must complete a reflection piece by Friday. All Graduate and Undergraduate Credit learners must submit a project by the end of the sixth week of the course which will be used in the final three weeks of presentations.
Following Closing Residency:
Graduate and Undergraduate Credit learners are to complete a three to five page reflection essay, within ten days of the closing residency, discussing changes and thoughts regarding the process of the course as it relates to their own thinking about their research and lives.
Credit will only be given for learners who successfully complete all aspects of the course.
Required Texts:
Monaghan, Patricia. Dancing with Chaos. Ireland: Salmon Publishing, 2002.
Peat, F. David. Blackfoot Physics: A Journey into the Native American Universe. London: Fourth Estate, 1994.
Plus, one from Group A and one from Group B:
Group A
Carse, James. Finite and Infinite Games. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986.
London, Peter. No More Secondhand Art. Boston: Shambhala Books, 1991.
Nelson, G. Lynn. Writing and Being: Taking Back Our Lives through the Power of Language. San Diego: Lura Media, 1994.
Group B
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990.
Turner, Jack. The Abstract Wild. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996.
Supplemental Resources:
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Briggs, John and Peat, F. David. Seven Life Lessons of Chaos: Spiritual Wisdom from the Science of Change. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
Bohm, David. On Creativity. London: Routledge, 1998.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996.
Cobb, Edith. The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. New York: Touchstone Books, 1995.
Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.
Lopez, Barry. Crossing Open Ground. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1988.
Meeker, Joseph. The Comedy of Survival. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997.
Nabhan, Gary Paul and Trimble, Stephen. The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Oelschlager, Max. The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
Shlain, Leonard. Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Time, Space and Light. New York: William Morrow, 1991.
Swimme, Brian and Berry, Thomas. The Universe Story. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992.
Equipment and Facilities:
This course will be led on the eCollege system through Union Institute and University. Learners are expected to have access to the internet and, installed on their computers, the latest (free) versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and an unzip program.