Dear Stages of Discovery students,

We hope you’re enjoying a wonderful summer and are looking forward to working together in Stages of Discovery, a challenging full-time program that will encourage you to think about art and science in new ways. We know that many of you are new to Evergreen, either as first-year or transfer students. A few of you have been at Evergreen before. We offer all of you a warm welcome to Evergreen and our program!

We imagine that you’re excited and curious about what lies ahead for us in the coming year. In this letter, we’d like to share some thoughts about upcoming work, talk about some general expectations, and provide some details about our weekly schedule of activities and our book list. We also invite you to tell us a little about yourself through an on-line questionnaire.

Our goals as we study art and science will be to examine the interactions between these disciplines and the role they play in bringing us to a fuller understanding of our place in the world. The fundamental question we plan to explore (though not necessarily to answer) is what it means for artists and scientists to participate in social change. You likely have some image of an “artist” or a “scientist” in your head based on your personal experience or on representations you’ve encountered in popular media. You might also have thought about some of the issues associated with art and science, including relevance, accessibility, and a clash between the disciplines. By looking at a set of historical case studies, this program seeks to gain a broader perspective on these and other common assumptions.

In a world full of complex problems and divergent perspectives, developing compassionate and sustainable solutions will require multiple ways of making sense of that world, and each other. We hope that studying art and science—both separately and in concert with one another—will help us formulate crucial questions about the responsibilities and opportunities we share as human beings living in the 21st century. What is at stake is the urgency of treating each other, and our common resources, more humanely in the years to come.

Stages of Discovery will involve all of us in ambitious work aimed at developing a community of learners—which means finding ways to support each other through collaborative work and critical analysis. This program, which is hands-on in every sense of the word, will function best with all hands on deck—both physically and mentally. Accordingly, we will work deliberately to foster a sense of collective responsibility towards one another. Translation: attendance and participation in each class is critical, not only for your success but for your colleagues’ learning. But we also believe that as faculty members we have a responsibility to students who are new (or nearly new) to ensure that you gain a solid footing at the College. This means we will do a lot of one-on-one work to make sure you feel supported in becoming an involved and contributing member of the program, and an active participant in your own education.

Even if you don't end up focusing on literature, physics, or music, we believe we can help you decide what it is you want to do here at Evergreen. Our program is designed to help you develop discipline and the skills in collaboration, communication, and critical thinking that will help you be successful in any field you wish to pursue. As part of our ongoing work, we will work with you to figure out how to pursue your long-term goals.

So what will we do? The program will meet four days each week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and it will be divided into several sorts of sessions: lectures, seminars, performance workshops, physics workshops, writing workshops, and film screenings.

Weekly Schedule

Our plan is to engage both physics and art experientially in our workshops. For example, we will follow Galileo’s instructions on constructing a telescope to reproduce his astronomical observations. We will also learn the basics of performance through small group work on dialogue and staging. We will supplement the learning in those sessions with important contextual materials in seminar and lecture. We will study science and art as unique disciplines, and we will explore the work of playwrights who have dramatized specific scientific concepts and historical moments. These “science plays” will allow us to integrate our studies of art and science, and help you to prepare for creating your own research-based scripts in winter quarter.

Our list of required texts is provided at the end of this letter. We are deliberately beginning with a challenging and important text right from the very beginning, namely, the writings of Galileo as collected in The Essential Galileo. If you want to spend some time with this book before the quarter starts in order to become familiar with Galileo's writing style, please feel free to do so, but don’t feel obligated.

Above all, however, we urge you: Don’t Panic. Our readings throughout the quarter will be challenging, but we will make sure to give you the tools and the time you need to tackle Galileo’s writing and all of our other difficult texts.

We want you to know that you will be challenged, but we also want to assure you that we will all work together to become the kind of readers, writers, and thinkers who do not tremble before knotty passages and dizzying ideas, and who are committed to a kind of self- and collective-transformation that will have particularly deep rewards and satisfactions. Training and practice will enable you to make sense of really hard texts and ideas, both in this program and in your future studies.

We’re eager to begin to learn more about you. We’ve prepared an on-line questionnaire (you can find the link at our website, given below). We invite you to answer our questions there.

Hopefully we’ve convinced you that what lies ahead is something that will truly take your education to a new level. The three of us feel privileged to collaboratively invent a great curriculum, and to make it all come together with your help. Meanwhile, enjoy your summer, explore our texts, keep an eye on our website (http://blogs.evergreen.edu/stagesofdiscovery/), fill out the Stages of Discovery Questionnaire (which you can find at our website), and please let us know if you have any questions about what we’re up to and how you fit into the bigger picture.

Best wishes from your faculty team,

Krishna Chowdary (chowdark@evergreen.edu)

Andrea Gullickson (gullicka@evergreen.edu)

Elizabeth Williamson (williame@evergreen.edu)

http://blogs.evergreen.edu/stagesofdiscovery/

Required Books (fall quarter)

These books will be available at the Greener Store and also from on-line sources.

• The Essential Galileo, edited and translated by Maurice A. Finocchiaro. ISBN 9780872209374.
• Relativity, The Special and General Theory, by Albert Einstein, translated by Robert W. Lawson, introduction by Roger Penrose, commentary by Robert Geroch, historical essay by David C. Cassidy. ISBN 9780131862616.
• The Tempest (The New Cambridge Shakespeare), by William Shakespeare, edited by David Lindley. ISBN 9780521293747.
• Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (The New Cambridge Shakespeare), by William Shakespeare, edited by Philip Edwards
• Life of Galileo, by Bertolt Brecht, foreward by Richard Foreman, introduction by Norman Roessler, edited with an introduction by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, translated by John Willet. ISBN 9780143105381.
• Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard. ISBN 9780571169344.
• “They Say/I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (Second Edition), by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. ISBN 9780393933611.