MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – The classrooms and corridors of McCardell Bicentennial Hall were packed with students, faculty, and staff, and the Great Hall was teeming with intellectual activity all-day long for Middlebury’s 11th annual Spring Student Symposium on April 21, 2017.
An estimated 285 students shared their work via oral presentations, poster sessions, and art exhibitions on the one day of the year when no classes are conducted so all members of the college community, particularly Middlebury’s 2,500 undergraduates, can share in the high caliber of research and creative work accomplished by students.
President Laurie L. Patton opened the symposium in the Great Hall, and remarked that each of the day’s presentations “began with a curious moment” that was nurtured in partnership with Middlebury’s faculty. “That curiosity about an unexplored idea then sparked inquiry, which fueled exploration [and led to] the discovery of the unknown, the disproving of assumptions, the triumph of truth, the joy of the unexpected, and the satisfaction of work well done.”
Patton, a South Asian history, culture, and religion scholar, later immersed herself in the Student Symposium by moderating an oral presentation session titled “Journeys to Buddhism,” during which four students each gave a 20-minute presentation. There was Michaela Maxwell ’17.5 on “Experiencing Womanhood as a Buddhist Nun,” Matthew Blake ’17 on “Muriel Rukeyser’s Journey to Ajanta,” Jerrica Davy ’17 on “Women and Buddhism in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale,” and Jingchen Jiang on “A Path to Heaven: Reinterpreting Two Western Wei Mogao Caves.
Slide Show
 The annual Spring Student Symposium drew audiences from across campus and the outside community to poster sessions, exhibitions, and oral presentations. |
Throughout the day there were 124 oral presentations, 63 poster exhibits, and four art exhibits, which prompted Lisa Gates, associate dean for fellowships and research, and one of the co-chairs of the event, to say: “Walking around Bicentennial Hall and Johnson during the day, and talking with students about their projects and listening to their presentations, there is a great deal of buzz everywhere, and it is the sound of people talking and learning from each other.”
In BiHall 311, during an oral presentation session titled “Evolution, in the Broadest Sense,” four students shared their widely divergent research including Milena Crnogorcevic ’17 on “The Coevolution of Post-merger Galaxies and Dust-Reddened Quasars” and Ashley Babcock ’17 on “Taking Down the Big Top: The Animal Rights Movement and the Rise and Fall of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.”
A budding astrophysicist, Crnogorcevic presented a brief lesson on the evolution of galaxies by explaining the terms “black hole,” “accretion disk,” and “quasar,” and showing how they apply to her research with Assistant Professor Eilat Glikman. Babcok, an environmental studies major, traced the interaction between the animal rights movement and the decline of “The Greatest Show on Earth,” which will close for good in May 2017. Her research, conducted with Assistant Professor Mez Baker-Bedard, focused on the “paradox” of circus elephants: how they brought fame to the circus while also making the circus a target of the animal-rights movement.
Watch a 360-degree video of scenes from the symposium (works best with Google Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge).
At another oral presentation session, 42 students in Assistant Professor Tara Affolter’s Models of Inclusive Education course participated in a 75-minute-long activity designed to engage the audience on the subject of “In Search of Inclusion in Young Adult Novels.” The class read Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Katheryn Erskine’s Mockingbird, Rodman Philbrick’s Freak the Mighty, and other novels with an eye toward “examining the meaning, nature, and consequence of disability as a social construct,” and class members talked about what they discovered from reading the literature.
The student-presenters representing the Program in Education Studies gave brief but frequent assignments to audience members in BiHall 216 – e.g., Close your eyes and try to remember what your 4th-grade classroom looked like? Describe a world where all people are the same? – and asked listeners to engage with people sitting nearby to discuss their observations. The net result seemed to raise the audience’s awareness regarding issues of accessibility and inclusion in the classroom.
Meanwhile, inside the Great Hall four women were sharing a poster session titled “Steps Toward Reproductive Justice: A Middlebury 5K.” For their final project in their Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies class, the quartet organized a five-kilometer race with the goal of expanding campus-based discussions about reproductive justice. They lined the race course with signs – “Crisis Pregnancy Centers Lie to Women,” “75% of Abortion Patients Are Below the Poverty Line,” “Federal Funds Cannot Be Used for Abortions,” “2.7 Million Children in the US Have a Parent Behind Bars,” and others – intended to provide facts and stimulate conversation.
“We found it interesting that Middlebury is such an engaged community and yet lots of people didn’t know the information we provided,” said Imogen Arzt Jones, an undergraduate exchange student. “We saw a lot of conversation coming out our event because all of the facts we presented were shocking in their own way.”
Hannah Redmon ’20 said reproductive justice is about more than birth control or access to health services. “The key takeaway for me,” she said, “is that there are so many other factors that go into reproductive justice including housing, food stamps, education, welfare, and more.”
The majority of the activity during Spring Symposium was at Bicentennial Hall, but there also were four well-attended art exhibitions in the Johnson Memorial Building: intaglio prints, advanced drawing, works from the senior independent studio, and oil painting and ceramics “Portraits of Power.”