Josephine Rodgers

This is an extremely high value course at Middlebury, and needed too. Unlike peer institutions, Middlebury does not have a Native American studies program, and Rogers and Jacobs (this course was co-taught) created an incredible curriculum for this winter term class that paired with the sculpture making class. Rogers worked in curation at Yale (she now curates the MAC and is bringing in native art to the college like pieces of Jacob's collection) and used those connections to bring in incredible guest lecturers for our class. Over Zoom, we had 2+ hour lectures with Native American contemporary artist Eric-Paul Riege, a curator of Native American art at Canada's National Museum of Art, and a totem poll artist from the PNW that were incredibly valuable and memorable, especially because we were able to ask direct questions to them. She also coordinated a workshop with local basket and bead weavers, had us visit the Henry Sheldon Museum, and required us to go to the Middlebury Museum of Art to learn about Jacob's work and the rest of the collection. Every reading was valuable and interesting, and you could borrow the hard copies of the books during class. She would pass around gallery books about the exhibitions we were discussing so that you could page through them during class. It was very engaging material and I benefitted from the frequent group discussions to go deeper with the material that was new to me. The projects were easy, fairly graded, and meaningful. This is an excellent J Term class (it only met 3 times a week, so 5 day weekend!) but I hope that Roger's curriculum can be taken seriously by the Middlebury administration and we offered in the regular academic year, because it was so high value. Thank you!!

This is an extremely high value course at Middlebury, and needed too. Unlike peer institutions, Middlebury does not have a Native American studies program, and Rogers and Jacobs (this course was co-taught) created an incredible curriculum for this winter term class that paired with the sculpture making class. Rogers worked in curatio …Read more