“To Imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.”
–Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
In this first-year program designed for students new to Evergreen, participants will be introduced to linguistics, embodied leadership, and literary arts. What connects these three fields? Among other things, communication, community, and description. A central area of inquiry for us will center on what we can learn from comparing spoken language, written language, and body language: nonverbal communicativeness.
Through linguistics we will have the opportunity to analyze communication structurally – how does language do what it does, at the levels of word, sentence, paragraph? We will consider how communities actually interact using spoken language—with its tacit knowledge, references, and inferences—in ways that often diverge from standardized rules of grammar. As we uncover some of the hidden principles that speakers use to connect sounds (or signs) and meanings, we will explore the question: what do we know when we know a language?
Embodied leadership explores the ways in which communication operates at many levels, not just through speech but through bodily experience, gestures, emotion, and the unspoken. Developing our capacities for introspection, sensory awareness, and interoception (internally sensing the body from within) allow us to begin to track, attend to, and clarify, through description, the complexities of our experience, and to become more self-directed leaders in our communities. This element of the program will entail somatic and contemplative movement practices.
Studying literary forms heightens our understanding of the aesthetic dimensions of communication, the seriously playful and playfully serious art of cultural meaning making, by means of attention to poetics–the formal elements of literary writing, such as uses of figurative language (such as metaphor), dialogue, and description, that underly the conscious and unconscious effects of literature on communities of readers. The literary arts portion of the program will include critical thinking and writing about literature and its modes of representation, as well as trying our own hands at creative writing through poetry, fiction, and cross-genre exercises and workshops.
Students will develop literacies in a range of subjects through lectures, seminars, workshops, collaborative group work, and movement. We will also participate in all-campus lecture series. Students will be expected to work hard to reach first-year college competencies in writing, critical reading, critical thinking, and information literacy. This program will not use Canvas: students will receive hard copies of the syllabus, all readings will be in the form of books or printed handouts, and students will turn in printed, hard copies of written assignments. In-class notetaking and writing exercises will be done by handwriting in notebooks and, excepting those with accommodations, no personal devices (no phones or laptops) will be used in classes.
This program is coordinated with Greener Foundations for first-year students in fall quarter. Greener Foundations is Evergreen’s in-person introductory student success course, which provides first-year students with the skills and knowledge they need to thrive at Evergreen.
Anticipated credit equivalencies: