Over the past several months, Thoreau College has marked several milestones in our growth and development. As of this year, we are now able to offer transferable college credits for our summer and gap semester programs through a new partnership with Prescott College. And this summer we will be welcoming several students from Oberlin College and Stanford University to Wisconsin as interns and participants in our July Driftless Field School program through exciting new partnerships with those schools. Find out more about Thoreau College and apply to the Metamorphosis Gap Semester on our website www.thoreaucollege.org

On this episode of the podcast we meet two people who have had a big impact on the growth and development of Thoreau College while exploring our unique Scholar-in-Residence program which enables scholars (or artists) to participate in Thoreau College as teachers and mentors for up to a year at a time while working on major research and/or creative projects of their own.

Benjamin Bernard-Herman was the 2023-2024 Thoreau College Scholar-in-Residence and is currently serving as a Thoreau College Faculty member as one of the lead instructors of our 2025 Driftless Field School summer program. He is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois-Chicago whose dissertation research is focused on the spiritual and ethical beliefs and ideas that inform the lives and decisions of people engaging in small scale agriculture here in the Driftless Region, including members of the Amish community and back-to-the-land movement, and practitioners of biodynamics.

Julia Buskirk was the 2024-2024 Thoreau College Scholar-in-Residence, as well as a past participant in our Fellowship program in 2021. A native of Milwaukee and a graduate of UW-Madison, Julia has spent the past year teaching and mentoring Thoreau College students while conducting archival and oral history research for her forthcoming historical novel which is focused on agriculture and ecology here in the Driftless Region during the era of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.

Learn more about our Residency program here: https://thoreaucollege.org/residencies/

Stanton Davis is the Head of Voice and Speech at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, where he serves as speech and dialect coach for the graduate and undergraduate actors. Previously, he served in similar roles at Temple University's Theatre Department and SUNY New Paltz where he taught voice, acting, Shakespeare, dramatic literature, and stage combat.

Stanton received his MFA in acting from the University of Delaware's Professional Theatre Training Program, and his BFA from the University of Utah Actor Training Program.

Stanton has worked professionally as an actor (stage, film and TV commercials), fight choreographer, stagehand, director, stunt man, voice coach , dialect coach and education director at theatres throughout the country. Stanton is a member of the Independent Fight Director's Guild and is a certified associate teacher of Fitzmaurice Voice Work.

Professional credits include: The Shakespeare Theatre (Washington, DC) Peoples Light and Theatre, The Wilma, The Lantern, and Intrepid Theatres (in Philadelphia), Delaware Theatre Company, City Theatre of Wilmington and First State Children's Theatre (In Delaware), The Berkshire Theatre Festival, Actors Lab Arizona, Court Yard Players Touring Company, Arizona Jewish Theatre, AKA Theatre, Tucson Actors Studio, Candlelight Theatre Company (NYC), New Paltz Summer Rep, York Little Theatre, and the Arizona, Tucson, South West, Baltimore, Wisconsin, Park City, Utah, and now Viroqua Shakespeare Festivals

For this episode of the podcast I spoke with Craig Holdrege and Ryan Shea of the Nature Institute in Ghent, New York about the theory and practice of a very different way of doing science, informed and inspired by the work of the great German poet, scientist, and statesman, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In contrast to the reductionist paradigm of science as it is often practiced elsewhere today, the Goethean approach seeks a perspective on nature characterized by wholeness and interconnection through a sensitive and self-aware methodology in which the relationships between the phenomena and the observer are not forgotten. Craig was a visiting instructor at Thoreau College in 2020 and we are very excited to welcome Ryan to Wisconsin as guest instructor this coming spring during our Spring 2025 Metamorphosis Gap Semester.

Craig Holdrege is the Nature Institute’s director and spearheaded its founding in 1998. His passion is to develop what Goethe called “delicate empiricism” — an approach that learns from nature how to understand nature and is infused with a cautious and critical awareness of how intentions and habits of mind affect human understanding. Craig carries out studies of animals and plants that tell the story of these organisms as dynamic and integrated beings within the larger web of life. He has written many articles and books, including Seeing the Animal Whole—And Why It Matters, Do Frogs Come from Tadpoles? and Thinking Like a Plant. Before co-founding The Nature Institute, Craig was a high school biology teacher in Waldorf Schools, working in Germany for 12 years and then in the U.S. for nine years. Since the early 1990s, Craig has been involved in teacher training. Craig has a Ph.D. in sustainability education from Prescott College in Arizona. He completed a Masters-level, non-degree program in phenomenological science at the Science Research Laboratory at the Goetheanum, Switzerland, and has a B.A. in philosophy from Beloit College.

Ryan Shea taught at Providence College for eight years, including courses in philosophy of science, environmental philosophy, and nature writing. He has B.A. and M.A. degrees in philosophy. He brings to his work at The Nature Institute a broad knowledge of ancient philosophical biology (especially Aristotle), the scientific revolution, phenomenology, German idealism, and Goethean qualitative science. Ryan has been interested in Goethean Science since he was a teenager. He began working part-time for The Nature Institute in spring 2023 and is full-time as of September 2024. He is excited to now have the opportunity to develop Goethean practice through research and teaching. He is interested in pursuing the nature of metamorphosis in different realms of the living world, and what it means to read the “book of nature.”

Nature Institute: https://www.natureinstitute.org/

Metamorphosis Gap Semester - Spring 2025 - https://thoreaucollege.org/metamorphosis-spring/