The Evergreen State College: Coming into Interdisciplinary Studies

 This weekend, I went to the beach to clear my mind. It turns out that when you are at the beach, you don't stop thinking; you just think differently. Your mind is at leisure to wander. The sky, the pelicans, the sand, the shells - I saw what was there.

I remembered learning how to "see" - my first explorations into interdisciplinarity at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where I earned my undergraduate degree in a loosely-defined field of studies (languages, literatures, cultures?) in 1991. Evergreen provides a radical form of education, one that, from the first introductory two-quarter-long "program" (a set of courses encompassing four fields, co-taught by four professors in lectures and seminars), emphasizes connections and interrelations of disciplines. It also puts the student in control of his or her studies, something I appreciated. It was transformative: for the first time in many years, education and learning made sense to me. It was actually a lucky hit - I had no idea just how different Evergreen was from other colleges.

In the Spring of 1990, I signed up for a program titled "Seeing What's There" co-taught by my mentor Pete Sinclair (Chaucerian, writer, former mountaineer and Ranger) and his colleague Mark Levinsky (philosopher). On weekends, we traveled across the state of Washington and saw what was there. We climbed Mt. St. Helens; we hiked along a Pacific Ocean beach; we drove far into the desert of Eastern Washington. We kept very uptight naturalist's field journals according to a strict method established by Joseph Grinnell. (I still have mine.) We listened to and read poets and prose writers who wrote about landscapes. We drew, took photos, and wrote. Some of us wrote poetry and some of us wrote essays. On travel weekends in the field, we worked silently between 9 and 3. We also camped and got the vans stuck in the sand. We saw cranes - actually, we did not see them, they did not come, but we waited for them, in complete silence, for hours. There was a seriousness to the whole undertaking, an attentiveness, that was beyond structured formal education.

Upon completion of the course, I received, among other credits, two credit hours in "seeing." I am immensely proud of these credits. I learned how to see something: the variety of landscapes, the geography, the danger and pleasure in nature, the relevance of experiencing and valuing an environment, the relationship between experienced nature and written, or examined, filtered and processed, nature. I learned how difficult it is to approximate experience in writing, and I learned how to keep trying. There was, of course, group work: Janet Graham was my camping partner. We all formally presented our work at the end of the course.

My two years at Evergreen, spent on Chaucer, writing, Russian literature and culture and history (I failed the language part), on myths, on Alaskan studies (you had to be there), and on more reading and writing, prepared me perhaps better for graduate studies than a traditional course list might have. (For one thing, I would not have lasted.) I learned how to think, how to observe and analyze, how to evaluate what I saw, and how to choose and ask questions. I learned how to go after answers.

Learning is about connections, it is about relevance, and it is about seeing and experience. At Evergreen, I had the luxury of combining these pieces and earn a college degree in the process. At Coker, we can have a little bit of that, too, by offering an option to intentionally make those connections, give students the chance to engage and take charge of their education a little more. Who knows what that individual voyage will be about.

(If you look closely, you can see it's the same backpack. Someone designed it incredibly well - perhaps someone who knew about chemistry and materials and about outdoor adventure. Some interdisciplinarian, perhaps, who knew how to apply science to life.)