Thursday, April 24, 2014

What is your context?


In March I visited the Red Cross Nordic United WorldCollege.  RCN-UWC is an international boarding school with students aged 16-20 from over seventy different countries.  When I was there, the school was celebrating Las Americas, during which Americans, from Canada to Argentina, share aspects of their culture.  




As I wandered through the afternoon bazaar, where I tried Paraguayan sweet bread and learned U.S. history trivia, a young man stopped me.  “Are you…why…how did…I heard someone was here interviewing….” he trailed off.
 
“What is your context?” he finally asked decisively. 

Overlapping with my visit were job interviews for a Swedish literature teaching position.  On my first day on campus, a blonde woman had been spotted with members of the faculty.  She was rumored to be very pretty.   I am not blonde, which, no doubt, was the source of the young man’s confusion.  He had struggled with the question, but he probably had no inkling of the tailspin he had induced as I tried to think of an answer.

            What is my context? 

I’ve written elsewhere on the meaning of context to historians.  Generally, we give two definitions to the term.  We use the first definition to describe our process.  By weaving together our sources – letters, diaries, watch chains, declassified government documents, ship manifests – we create a world for our readers so that they see the times we are describing from the inside.

            What is my context?

I hastened to explain to the young man that I was a graduate of the United World Colleges myself.  I attended the sister school in the United States.  Both schools are parts of a global consortium – there are fourteen schools in all today – that seek to foster international peace, understanding, and sustainability through education.  UWC was far and away the best educational experience of my entire life, and I was in a state of excited delight virtually every minute of my time RCN-UWC.

The schools were founded by Kurt Hahn, a German educational experimenter who was also instrumental in the founding of Outward Bound.  Along with Lord Mountbatten and others, Hahn founded the first UWC in Wales in 1962.  The school and its descendents encourage outdoor exploration and experiential adventures – like Las Americas.  All follow the International Baccalaureate curriculum, which requires service activities and other involvement in the community. 

Most UWCs are located in remote and stunning natural locations.  RCN-UWC, near the tiny town of Flekke in fjord country, is no exception.  




When I mentioned it to one teacher in Oslo, she said that she would love to bring students from her own school there, but she added: “It’s easier to take them to London.”  UWC-USA is located in Montezuma, New Mexico, a town so small that even many New Mexicans do not know it.  The isolation and surrounding beauty in both places make for inviting environments to explore with newfound friends.  


I have long thought that the UWC movement would make an excellent environmental history topic.  Hahn’s story alone – he was expelled from Germany when he spoke openly against Hitler and the Nazis; he decried many of modern life’s traits, from easy distraction to sedentary indoor life; and he influenced multiple educational movements – invites an environmental history inquiry.
  
I shared virtually none of this when I gave my answer.  I said: “I went to the UWC in the U.S. almost 25 years ago.”   

The second definition of context is more like the setting for a play.  To contextualize is to set the stage for the events that we are describing.  To “take something out of context” when reading literature is to misunderstand the meaning of the text itself.  To “take something out of context” when describing history is to engage in anachronism.  It is to misunderstand the time itself.

What is my context?

Having covered how I knew about the school, I still hadn’t explained to the young man just what I was doing there.  So I hastened to add a quick description of Norway’s Fulbright Roving Scholar program.  Like the UWCs, the Fulbright program was an educational response to the fractures of World War II.  By fostering scholarly exchange the program sought and seeks to foster international understanding as well.  But only Norway has the Roving Scholar program that this year has taken me and two other Rovers across Norway -- from Kristiansand to Svaalbard – to visit secondary schools.  I was suffused with nostalgia during my visit to RCN-UWC, but I couldn’t avoid thinking about the school as a school, just like I’ve done on other campuses in Norway.  I kept saying that I felt like I was 17 and 42 at the same time.

Nor could I quite turn off my historian’s mind or, at least, the guilty feeling that I should keep my critical faculties about me.  “There is no perfect time and place.” I tell my students firmly.  “Things haven’t just gotten worse and worse.  Things don’t just get better and better.”  I found it hard to observe this injunction at RCN-UWC.  Students seemed to come from a greater variety of economic backgrounds than my classmates and I did a quarter century ago.  The student body included a larger number of refugees, and there was more attention refugees’ status globally (Not least because IB now includes a geography course).  And it was hard to believe that I had ever had such energy.  After classes concluded on Thursday, students headed to their activities, and, as far as I could tell, pretty much taught themselves for another three hours.  This was before practice for the Las Americas show and dinner and homework.  Some students travel regularly to Bergen – over a two-hour journey -- to study Mandarin as a third or fourth language. 

I did notice that there was less outdoor activity than at my school back in the day.  UWC-USA has a search and rescue team.  Many of the other UWCs have similar service activities that take their students outside, but RCN-UWC does not (The school does have a Red Cross rehabilitation center at which many of the students volunteer).  Although the campus has ready access to Norway’s well-maintained trail network, one avid hiker told me that most students do not head out to the hills often.  And there was much conversation about the food.  Norway’s northern climate, the school’s remote location, and, I imagine, the hunger of two hundred teenagers, makes for a cafeteria budget challenge, especially when balancing the dietary needs of representatives of dozens of cultures and political positions.  Variety and vegetarian options were slim.  That said, the day rooms smelled just like they did in my day.  Food may have globalized, but the smell of noodles, stir fry, and cinnamon toast appears to have remained a constant.  “Each historical moment is unique!” I tell my students back at SLU.  But maybe some things are universal. (Below: shoe dryers and dorm art)





I did not make this young man, perhaps interested in Swedish literature, listen to my entire reverie.  Rather, I said something like my standard: “I’m here as part of a scholarly exchange program called Fulbright that takes me to secondary schools all over Norway.”



As I struggled to be just a bit more critical in the days during and following my visit, I mentioned my challenge to a variety of teachers and students.   They brought my attention back to a few issues.  As the UWC movement persists, there is the danger that it will merely reproduce itself, rather than grow and change.  A number of students asked if my son would attend UWC, and though I answered that the decision was his, it will be hard not to hide my enthusiasm for the UWC movement as he grows older.  How many other potential “legacy” students are out there?  And is UWC best for them or for folks for whom the experience will be brand new?  Students from socially conservative communities often struggle when they return home, and their reverse culture shock can restrict their opportunities as much as their education broadened it. 

I had heard such criticisms when I was a student, but the reservation that caused me the greatest doubt was new: carbon footprint.  I’ve visited around thirty towns and cities this year, most by plane, and that doesn’t count family holiday trips to Rome and Paris or a guest lecture in Budapest.  One convocation at one UWC probably repeats that experience at least a hundredfold.  Can the globe sustain it? 

 “Of course!" I would have proclaimed when I was a UWC student.  We still need international peace and understanding.  Whatever challenges the world faces, we will solve them!  The world needs UWC! 


Now, my body sore from a day sitting on a plane and my voice hoarse from a day of teaching, I feel less confident.  Do I need this kind of travel?  Does the world? My context has changed and the world’s has too.   And yet I came back from RCN-UWC glowing.  For days, I couldn’t stop telling people about the school.  Alongside all I’ve learned from my Fulbright Fellowship, it’s impossible to look away from UWC’s value.  Education is the most comprehensive and direct route to international understanding.  UWC students may now chatter with their families on laptops instead of hovering near the pay phone in the hall, but we still need human connection to grow and learn.  I write in a different world context than when I was a student, but the world still needs UWC.



Wednesday, April 2, 2014

It's not the end of the world

Way back in the fall I overlapped with one of my fellow rovers in the southern part of the country.  In addition to the opportunity to observe her teach, which was a fabulous learning experience for me, we also had a chance to explore the area a bit together.  A teacher had suggested that we go to Verdens Ende – the End of the World.  We set off after classes had concluded in the late afternoon and arrived almost at dusk to an unearthly landscape.   The area is well named indeed.

    





I had plenty of time to write a blog entry about the end of the world, but somehow the place never seemed to fit into the themes and concerns that I was exploring.  The area was certainly naturally beautiful.  The experience of getting directions from one Norwegian after another as Sarah cheerfully asked: “We’re trying to get to the end of the world?” seemed to be perfect fodder for a traveler’s journal, but the experience sat, waiting, I think, for more perspective.

My last school visit in December was to Bardufoss, my northernmost visit scheduled to date.  Since it looked like our best chance to see the Northern Lights, my family came with me.  I had not paid much attention to the calendar of Oslo events when I was scheduling, but as the date neared, I realized that the visit overlapped with the Nobel Prize ceremony.  Other Fulbrighters were attending the ceremony, and, although I wasn’t one of the lucky ones with a ticket, I had wanted to participate in a candlelit vigil outside the Peace Center celebrating the recipients of the prize.  But…the Northern Lights!  With my family!  At the top of the world!  It seemed like the supreme environmental history dilemma – the choice between the pinnacle of human culture – a scheduled, certain celebration of the best of human ingenuity and compassion -- and the pinnacle of nature – the sublime touch of the universe on the skin of the Earth’s atmosphere.    

    So we headed out each night we were in Bardufoss, fleeing the surprisingly large amount of urban light to maybe, maybe see the Northern Lights.  Our first night was clear: good conditions!  We had been reading the Golden Compass as a family, and I imagined our dæmons running alongside the car, wolves or foxes maybe, tossing the snow with delight.  My husband and I stretched and stretched our son’s bedtime, peering into the darkness.  We were reminded of the skies over Zuni Pueblo and of adventures from long before our son was born.  We were on top of the world!  






But we did not see the Northern Lights.  The next night was cloudy.  The night after we returned too late for the candlelit vigil.  “Well,” I consoled myself, “It’s not the end of the world.”

Almost a month later, on the last day of the calendar year, we were outside Rome at the site of Ostia Antica, an ancient Roman sea port.  But the area is seaside no longer.  Centuries of silting have moved the coast and, lucky for us, preserved the town.  I do not think that it is only historians who marvel at places so old and so well preserved.  The streets were narrow; the painting of a café menu still covered a wall; the mosaics advertising port town necessities and amenities were still clear.  




As an environmental historian, I often reflect on humans’ tiny position in the wider sweep of the universe and its past.  But as a historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I rarely reflect on the wider sweep of human history and the simultaneous proximity and distance of those parts of human culture that I consider so very modern, like cities.  Visiting, as we did, on New Year’s Eve, made the experience all the more powerful.  When did the residents of Ostia realize that their town was on the decline?  A particularly decadent evening?  A notable sacking by pirates?  Did people only slow drift away or did if feel like the end of the world?


With only three months before our departure from Norway, every moment begins to have more meaning.  “This might be my last time on this train…on this bus…looking at this view….” More than once I have wondered on this adventure, “How much better can life be? Can happiness have a limit?”  Back when Sarah and I hopped from one rock to another at Verdens Ende, I thought I was sure to come back.   “Maybe in the summer,” I mused, “with my family.”  Now the time goes so fast.  There is so much that we will never see.  But it’s not the end of the world.


The view through the window


Historians of the American West and the environment have often commented on how people experience the landscape and nature through windows.  

The window of the train car framed the landscape for tourists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Early automobile tourists shaped their journey not just through their choice of destination but also through the direction in which they pointed their cars.  Yosemite Park designers appear to have designed automobile routes so that tourists could see the valley from the same angles as did early photographers of region. Even those with a unique eye used the windshield to focus their vision.  When she moved permanently to Abiquiu, New Mexico, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe specially designed the passenger seat of her car as a rotating easel so that she could paint from the driver’s seat.  Perhaps not surprisingly, New Mexico was also the place where O’Keeffe had learned to drive.

We have been without a car here, but bus windows, ferry windows, and train windows have framed many a picture when the beauty of the Norwegian scenery tempted us to record it.  Most of our pictures are marred by rain drops and the blur of snow, but here are a few of the images we have tried to capture or, perhaps, been encouraged to record, through the frame of the window.

From the train between Oslo and Bergen in October:





From the ferry between Oslo and Nesodden in December:


:

From the train between Tynset and Oslo in January:





From the train to Verdal, a small town north of Trondheim -- a landscape that I found lovely but that residents called "eerie."  When I visited in late January, fires plagued the area, and I found no snow.





From a hotel room in Ålesund in February:



And, finally, from a ferry and a bus in the fjord country of western Norway between Flekke and Bergen in March:








 


Here's the kicker


            As Norway prepared for the winter Olympics, I had the opportunity to visit a school in Tynset, in the heart of the country, an area that produces some of the nation’s best skiers because it receives so much snow.

            Snow fell almost continuously while I was there, and I was lucky enough also to visit Røros, an old copper mining town and now a UNESCO world heritage site famous for its hospitality to tourists.  Røros reminded me of Madrid, New Mexico; Durango, CO; and Bisbee, AZ.  Like former mining towns in the United States, the community is tiny, chock full of shops, artist studios and galleries, but also intensely aware of its mining past.  





The town delights in its tourist industry, yet seems to feel the pressure to keep the charm coming.  After all, this is a community where the riches ran out once before.  To this Santa Fe girl, the town seems to be doing a splendid job.  I was disappointed that I arrived after the shops had closed and that I had to leave before catching dinner in one of the lovely (and, like many others in Norway, expensive) restaurants.  It was delightful, though, to tour the town with one of Tynset’s teachers at the blue hour, the peculiarly beautiful dusk of Norwegian winter.  And while many scholars have written of the particular jeopardy of a community living in thrall to tourism, I do hope that the visitors keep coming.
            
What I loved most about Røros and Tynset, however, was the spark.  A teacher translated the term “spark” as “the kicker.”  Advertised as kick sleds in the US, sparks carry students, teachers, the elderly, parents, and their children.  They can be equipped with seats for babies, baskets for carrying goods from the grocery store, but many people just put a backpack on the front seat.
  



I’ve seen kick sleds before in Bodø and Bardufoss, but Tynset prides itself on possessing the largest kicker in the world – they recently built a new spark to beat a rival town in Finland for the honor.  I was so taken with the winter weather and the spark that I began plotting on getting one for myself.  My birthday was just a month off and it seemed a perfect Norwegian souvenir.  They were even on sale when I priced them in Oslo.  But….

Here’s the kicker: 

We had too little snow in Oslo to really justify the purchase (thus the sale), and once I added the price of shipping, I found it would be easier and more affordable to buy one in the United States where, actually, quite a few companies manufacture them too.  The irony that St. Louis had received more snow this winter than Oslo did was not lost on me either. 


So I’m waiting. I love the idea of sledding down to my local café for my morning coffee on my spark -- even if next year’s winter brings the snow back to Oslo.