Summer
Programs Not Only About Science Anymore
For
20 years, Smith’s perennially popular
Summer Science and Engineering Program (SSEP) has hosted
about 100 high school girls each summer for intense 2-week
sessions on robotics, mechanical engineering, chemistry and
other science-related topics.
Summer on Chapin Lawn, the best place to study. |
Now, for the first time this
summer, Smith will complement the science and engineering
program, which is operated by the Center for Community Collaboration,
with three new programs that broaden the college’s
summer curricular opportunities.
Designed by Smith's own
professors and the Office of College Relations, the new academic
programs focus on sustainability, women’s history and writing
(see descriptions below.) The curricula will also give the
teenaged participants a residential learning experience.
“Smith’s summer programs give the girls who participate a chance to try out college,” said
Carol T. Christ, Smith president. “It’s wonderful to have the opportunity to
spend a number of weeks focused on a really exciting topic and get a sense as
to what it’s like to live away from home, to live in an academic and social community.”
As with the SSEP, participants
in the new programs will reside in Smith campus housing.
Evening activities may include such options as listening
to a professional storyteller perform Native American songs
and stories, attending movie nights with friends, or experiencing
the arts and culture for which Northampton is famous.
The
summer academic programs are non-credit. Participating faculty
will complete an evaluation for each student who requests
one.
Field Studies
for Sustainable Futures
Engaging with Local Food and Ecological
Design
What is green architecture?
What do we wish to sustain? What does it mean to be environmentally
responsible? Are our communities resilient? Can design be
regenerative? Can our behaviors and policies transform? What
does a transition from industrial agriculture to sustainable
local agriculture imply? How can we understand and communicate
these ideas through movement? Participant explorations will
take them to provocative landscapes, local farms and markets,
cohousing developments and "living buildings." They
will take part in exercises that reveal how environmentally
minded society is currently.
Hidden Lives: Discovering
Women’s
History
This program seeks to engage
participants in understanding women's history and also in
discovering what it was like to be a young woman in the 19th
and early 20th centuries. Such experiences will include reviewing
Sylvia Plath's and Gloria Steinem's personal papers and learning
about the time in which they lived.
Young Women’s Writing
Workshop
With
so few writing programs that cater exclusively to high school
girls, Smith's Young Women's Writing Workshop will allow
participants to explore writing in a creative and supportive
environment that fosters writing across a variety of genres.
Classes will be workshop style, which means each class will
begin with a short segment that focuses on a single lesson.
Open writing time follows. The class session ends with each
writer sharing her progress with the group. The instructors
are all published writers and poets who will focus on how
to get published. At the end of the workshop, participants
will have the start of an online writing portfolio and some
professional contacts in the literary world.
on Smith's
summer programs; also, for more information, , director of non-degree programs. |
