Viewbook 2006

The Block Plan is the cornerstone of our academic program and has been for 35 years because it evolves constantly and reinvents itself consistently. Not only does the Block Plan allow students and faculty to immerse themselves in a subject, it also invites classes to do creative, hands-on learning. Sometimes students convene at midnight in the observatory or at 7 p.m. to critique a film; some blocks take place in fast food restaurants to study labor conditions and some take place in a parking lot to study installation art. The Block Plan enables classes to settle in and read one author for three and a half weeks or schedule visits to museums, corporate offices, or charter schools every day in search of artifacts, experts, and education. Whether students stay in the classroom or venture beyond, the Block Plan supports intensive engagement and substantive learning.

Course Examples

Contemporary Educational Issues The Anthropology of Food

Combine the flexibility of the Block Plan with the complexities of a small city and the vast natural laboratory of the Rocky Mountain region and Southwest, and you have limitless opportunities for field study. Professors often hold classes off campus – for a day, a week, sometimes for an entire block. This is another one of the principal benefits of the Block Plan. If there's an exhibit that ties into your Romanticism block, you can go; if you need to be in the mountains to study alpine vegetation, that's where you'll be.

Drama students go to London to attend plays
Arts students go to New York City to visit galleries, museums, and auction houses
Physics students fly to the San Juan Islands to study whale vocalization
Religion classes travel to visit a Carmelite nunnery and a Shinto temple

Field Study Examples

The Harlem Renaissance Tropical and Mayan Cultural Ecology

Colorado College has developed a program designed to introduce students to the Block Plan through First-year Experience courses (FYEs), which consist of a two-block course or two one-block courses. Courses are offered in almost every department. In particular, First-year Experience courses provide the occasion for developing curiosity, wonder, and bold and creative thinking. They also develop analytic thinking and effective expression. Previous FYE courses include:

The Reinvention of the Greeks: Identity,
Freedom and Authority
Spirit and Nature: Religion and Science
Calculus and the Liberal Arts

First-year Outdoor Orientation Trips

The First-year Outdoor Orientation Trips (FOOT) provide an excellent introduction to the western wilderness. Each trip offers students a chance to relax with a small group of people, experience the beautiful scenery, tell stories, and reflect on coming to Colorado College. Trip leaders are members of the Outdoor Recreation Committee, and are professionally trained and certified in Wilderness First Aid and CPR. Beginner trips are two or three days of trail travel with a maximum of five miles of hiking per day. There are also intermediate and advanced trips offered for students with more trail experience and knowledge. Recent FOOT Trips have been to the Sangre de Cristo Range, the San Juan Mountains, and the Maroon Bells near Aspen.

Independent Student Research and Faculty Support

One of the primary benefits of the Block Plan is the concentrated amount of time that students spend interacting with faculty members. Genuine appreciation and understanding is a positive result of this time spent together and, in many cases, these relationships also result in collaborative work. Last year alone there were 750 independent studies designed by students that were approved and completed. Colorado College also creates opportunities for students to pursue more costly independent research and every year, four or five juniors receive $2,500 grants to fund summer projects.

Paul Myrow and Becky Zentmyer

Last summer, transfer student Becky Zentmyer '05 accompanied Professor Paul Myrow to Tibet to try to confirm a Chinese paleontologist's finding that the "yellow band" about 16,000 feet up the slopes of Mount Everest is Cambrian. Together, they researched the paleogeography of the Himalayas as recorded in their Cambrian fossils. "We're trying to reconstruct India's position relative to Antarctica, Asia, and Africa about 500 million years ago," Myrow says. "In the field, we work side by side all day, collecting data, making measurements, describing structures, and I take the notes – as opposed to sending them out to do the work, letting them flail, visiting them once in a while, and ending up with work that's not publishable. By the time they finish, they're maybe 75 percent as capable of reading the rocks as I am. "I would never think of doing research without students," says Myrow. "The act of collaboration is all that much better if you're doing it face to face, responding to each other, coming up with ideas together. Geology is a very collaborative science."