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News and Notes from Around the Campus V erity A hlin ’ 1 6
Students watch Wooly & the Mammoth at concert hosted by student organization Doing It Live.
“Doing It Live!” Strikes a Chord at MHC Once a month, the Blanchard Great Room becomes a concert venue. Local bands serenade a crowd of Mount Holyoke music lovers, Five College fans, and unsuspecting Blanchard goers who wander in curiously after dinner. Doing It Live! is the new student organization orchestrating these concerts and rocking campus. As a firstie, Anna Berlin ’15 was disappointed she couldn’t find any live music organizations. Inspired by the vibrant surrounding music scene, she and fellow first-years founded Doing It Live! By the end of this academic year, the group of music buffs will have hosted ten concerts in three semesters. Doing It Live! always includes female artists in their lineup. Their mission is to pull Mount Holyoke women out of the audience and onto the stage. Berlin and the Doing It Live! team plan to create “not just a listening musical community on our campus, but one that creates music too,” she says.
Students teach philosophy to second-graders Have you ever asked a child why the sky is blue, or why people dream? If you have, you know that children often give comical yet oddly profound answers. Philosophy professor Thomas Wartenberg and his Philosophy for Children class set out to explore the answers that children give to thought-provoking questions, traveling to the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Excellence in Springfield, Massachusetts, to teach philosophy to second graders. During the lessons MHC students read a children’s book or showed a piece of art and posed questions, such as “What makes art good?” Such questions helped steer the youngsters into a conversation about different concepts and beliefs. “They’re learning how to really reason and think deeply about different sorts of questions,” Professor Wartenberg told New England Public Radio. The second-graders weren’t the only ones learning; Wartenberg’s students found that—contrary to popularly held assumptions by psychologists—young children are able to “think outside of themselves” and perceive things objectively. The project won an award from the American Philosophical Association/Philosophy Documentation Center for innovation in philosophy programs. See Wartenberg’s book Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy Through Children’s Literature (R&L Education) for more about this project.
Professor Lois A. Brown Contributes Expertise to PBS’s The Abolitionists Lois A. Brown, Elizabeth Small Professor of English, contributed her expertise to the making of the widely acclaimed PBS documentary
The Abolitionists. It revisits a crucial turning point in American history with a mix of beautifully reenacted scenes from the lives of key activists and commentary from expert historians. Although they hailed from widely different backgrounds, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, and Angelina Grimké were united by their shared belief in the injustice of slavery. The drama weaves a true tale of how America was torn apart and reassembled to become the nation we know today. In a behind-the-scenes PBS interview, “Historians on The Abolitionists,” Professor Brown says, “When we find out more about who those abolitionists are, we realize we are them, they are us…Ordinary folks have really effected extraordinary change.”
Feel-good Facebook page combats bullying, spreads the love Unfortunately, cyberbullying is not just an issue faced by preteens or high school students; it has also trickled onto the Mount Holyoke campus. But when Susanna Holmstrom ’14 found negative comments made about her online, she fought back—nicely. Holmstrom created a Facebook page for MHC students
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to anonymously post compliments to one another. So far, the page has more than 1,000 likes, and hundreds of posts, such as “To the exhausted, lovely student in Rao’s tonight who prepared me a tea even though I was a couple of dollars short. I wish you the best of luck on your exams, and I so appreciate your generosity and
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kindness toward others,” or “To the wonderful, kind anonymous alumna who sent me a care package just because we happened to share the same post box number in Blanch—thank you. I’m stunned speechless by your thoughtfulness.” See more compliments at facebook.com/MHCompliments.
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