Author: YSNews

“Trifles” in the Foundry Theater

Hannah Craig and Parker Phelan, two students in Geneva Gano’s “Introduction to Drama” literature class at Antioch College, will be the first to perform a play in the recently renovated Foundry Theater.

The two students worked with Gano, Gabrielle Civil, associate professor of performance, and other theater staff to design a minimal set and to truncate and adapt Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” for a two-person performance. They are both excited and nervous to be a part of the first play put on by students in the theater space since the college’s closure in 2008.

“It’s scary to be the first student performance. We want to make a good first impression,” said Craig. “But it’s also really exciting.”

The one-time-only performance will be held in the experimental theater at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 18 and is open to the public.

A multi-lens look at water needs

The Water Crisis in Turkey.

Women and Water: Personal Explorations of Impact.

Compost Toilet Construction: a Feasibility Report.

The Weaponization of Water.

Impacts of Antioch College Water Damage.

Social, Cultural and Environmental Aspects of Lake Management.

These are a few of the presentations that villagers are invited to attend this Saturday, Sept. 13, from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at McGregor Hall during the Antioch College Water Symposium. The event is free and open to the community. For a complete list of presentation times and locations, go online to antiochcollege.org.

The symposium consists of 26 presentations made by 74 Antioch College students who in recent months took part in the college’s Global Seminar on Water. The course was team-led by instructor of cooperative education Brooke Bryan and writing instructor Robin Littell.

“Antioch College students in the Global Seminar on Water offer to look into our most pressing water issue and seek to address local, regional, national and global water crisis with innovative solutions,” according to seminar leaders in the class syllabus.

The current global challenges regarding water use and accessibility make it a natural topic for Antioch College students, according to Littell.

“The college’s focus on and commitment to sustainability demands that we engage those that can drive conversations that both inform us and serve as avenues for our students to affect change in the world,” she wrote in an email.

And it’s important to include the wider Yellow Springs community in the conversation, according to seminar leader Bryan.

“It provides a high stakes environment for our independent research because we are accountable to our peers in the community and imagining an audience beyond the classroom helps us learn how to locate our work when dealing with complicated, interconnected issues like water,” she wrote. “It also helps us forward our social justice and sustainability missions because we are able to catalyze important conversations in our community.”

The water course was the most recent Global Seminar, an Antioch College class that offers students an interdisciplinary look at issues critical to sustainability and social justice issues, including water, energy, food, governance, health and education, according to Global Education Dean Hassan Rahmanian, who oversees the seminars. In their course of study, students are required to take four Global Seminars.

The seminars “introduce students to multiple ways in which a selected problem area/theme can be approached, understood and investigated,” Rahmanian wrote in an email.

The interdisciplinary approach was meaningful to student Perin Ellsworth-Heller.

“This has been a really eye-opening experience/class in the sense that it covered water not only from a scientific and environmental point of view but also from a philosophical and humanistic perspective,” he wrote in an email. “I feel like the class has given me a cross-disciplinary look at a subject that is incredibly relevant to the modern world. I am now more convinced than ever that the only reasonable solutions to the world’s water problems will arise from a combination of many different ways of thinking.”

Many of the previous global seminars introduced students to a variety of perspectives on the topic, and the water seminar continued that tradition. The class included 17 speakers, including Allen Hunt, Wright State professor of geology and physics; Antioch University Midwest anthropologist Jim Malarkey; Rahmanian, speaking from a political perspective; activist Maya Nye, on the environmental crisis in the Appalachian hills; WYSO Environmental Reporter Lewis Wallace on “Pressures on the Great Lakes,” University of Dayton philosopher Bill Marvin on “Ethics, Technology, Water and Community” and Sarah Hippensteel of the Miami Conservancy District on getting engaged with regional policy.

The variety of speakers offer the opportunity for “a slightly different dynamic in the classroom,” according to Bryan. “Through the multimedia presentations, we glimpsed into the lives of squatters in Peru, women water carriers in West Africa who became permit-holding water managers in their community, Russian conservationists and Americans rethinking their relationship to the tap.”

Student Maya Canaztuj took the water seminar after working a co-op as a seasonal hydrologist with the Cleveland Metroparks.

“This job sparked my love for water, and I knew this class would be a great opportunity to learn more,” she wrote in an email. “The lectures have been great with so many knowledgeable people. My main gain was meeting the speakers, getting more information about their jobs and making those connections that could possibly be useful in the future.”

And for student Julia Bates, the seminar didn’t so much open her eyes to new problems, since her parents both grew up living next to polluted bodies of water, as it sparked new energy to tackle a critical issue.

“Seeing what others have done and are doing does give me hope,” Bates wrote.

Small Wind Turbine Design and Construction Workshop

Dan Bartmann, co-author of Homebrew Wind Power: A hands-on guide to harnessing the wind, will be leading a five-day workshop, Sept 23-27, for Antioch College students and community wind power enthusiasts. They will learn how to make a relatively quiet and durable 10 feet diameter wind turbine from scratch. This design is ideal for those who are interested in building their own wind power systems from scratch for fun, to save money, or for generating power in the developing world.

Through a combination of lecture and hands-on work, participants will learn the theory behind and how to build each component of the turbine, as well as final assembly and testing of the finished product. Students will develop knowledge and skills in basic electricity, wood working, metal working, resin casting, and a variety of other skills needed to fabricate the three-phase axial flux alternators, wooden blades, and the metal frame for the wind turbines. In addition, students will gain an understanding of wind energy, wind turbine design, towers, wind site assessment, and the basic physics of how the energy in moving air is turned into electricity.

Learn more about the course description here.

The price of the workshop through Buckville Energy is $800. A half-price rebate is available. For more information or to register for the course, contact bsanborn {at} antiochcollege(.)org

Buckville Energy is an IREC Accredited Continuing Education Provider(tm)

Who Should Attend?
· Students of environmental studies interested in learning more about wind turbines
· Educators wishing to learn more about this exciting field, and/or design their own multi-disciplinary curriculum
· Individuals interested in building their own turbines
· Individuals interested in working in the wind energy field
· Engineers interested in learning about wind turbine design and construction
· Aid workers in developing countries

Learn more about Buckville Energy and Dan Bartmann.

Adoff to read at Antioch College’s Local Writers Series

Nationally celebrated poet and children’s author Arnold Adoff will be reading at Antioch College’s Local Writers Series on September 11, 2014 at Antioch’s Coretta Scott King Center at 7 p.m.

Adoff was born and raised in New York City. He studied history and contemporary political science at City College and Columbia University and moved from the groves of academe to the jazz clubs of the Village where he eventually became the “manager” of extraordinary bassist and composer, Charles Mingus.

Adoff married the African American novelist and folklorist, Virginia Hamilton, who brought him to Yellow Springs in 1969. Since 1968, Adoff has published over 40 books for young readers and their older allies, including anthologies of African American literature and illustrated picture books.

Adoff describes his poetry as “shaped colloquial speech,” and will be reading from his latest award-winning collection Roots and Blues: A Celebration.

This event is free and open to the public. Please join us for this rare opportunity to engage with Adoff about his craft and process to “living and writing outside the lines.”

For more information on this and other Local Writers series, contact Jennifer Berman at jberman {at} antiochcollege(.)org .

Learn seed-saving during a tomato walk at Antioch

Antioch College students will share seed-saving techniques for tomatoes during a Tomato Walk at 10 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 6, on the Antioch farm.

It is the first of several planned events during which students will share what they learned from their summer field trip to the Land Institute, Seed Saver’s Exchange Conference and Whiterock Conservancy. Other events planned for the fall and winter are a Seed School and a pollinator symposium to promote “pollinator pathways” through Yellow Springs.

This summer a small group of students who volunteer, work and co-op at the farm or on Antioch food policy traveled to Iowa and Kansas to hear from leaders in the sustainable agriculture movement about some of its most promising developments. Antioch Instructor of Cooperative Education Beth Bridgeman called the field trip “transformative” as students learned the latest research on how to save seeds, perennialize calorie crops like wheat and sorghum and restore prairie lands.

“It is a much bigger picture than organic, local or ecological agriculture,” Bridgeman said.
Antiochfarm2

Seed Saver’s Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, the largest non-governmental seed bank in the United States, collects, grows and shares heirloom seeds and plants, some of which are endangered. Saving seeds was practiced for millennia until the advent of industrial agriculture and commercial seed companies, which greatly reduced crop genetic diversity. According to the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 plant species today are threatened with extinction. But local seeds adapted to local environmental conditions grow best here, and should be carefully selected and passed on, Bridgeman said.

“We save the seed that works best in our area, so we’re not using a seed from Siberia,” explained Bridgeman. “And we are recapturing the seeds that used to work well here.”

To undertake a seed-saving project in Yellow Springs where local seeds would be collected, stored, and exchanged, Antioch would have to collaborate with Yellow Springs area gardeners and farmers, students emphasized. Antioch students could help find and document heirloom varieties now in use while teaching local gardeners how to properly save seed, which can be tricky, involving particular isolation, propagation and storage techniques. Students envision an educational event, or seed school here, with the ultimate goal of starting a seed library at Antioch.

Students were also inspired by the work at the Whiterock Conservancy in Coon Rapids, Iowa. There an Antioch alum donated 5,500 acres now being restored to prairie and oak savannah, which once comprised 15 percent of the Iowa landscape, according to Bridgeman. Finally, the students visited Wes Jackson’s Land Institute in Salina, Kan., which has been engaged in experimental research into perennial polycultures for decades.

Read the Sept. 5 issue of the News for the full story.

Filmmaker to present master class, Nixon film

Documentary filmmaker Brian Frye will give two presentations, both free and open to the public, on Thursday, Aug. 14, at Antioch College.

Frye first will unpack his filmmaking process in a 6:30 p.m. master class that will feature short films made by him and others who inspire him. The class will be conducted in room 113 of McGregor Hall.

Then, at 9 p.m., he will present a screening of the multiple-award-winning documentary “Our Nixon” on the lawn of the campus “horseshoe,” in front of the main administration building. The movie, which portrays “Nixon’s peculiar place in the American psyche,” includes Super 8 film footage shot by top White House staffers.