Sabbaticals Enrich Professors' Teaching
Professor Heidi Snow and Associate Professor Ellen Sprague returned from fall-semester sabbaticals with new insights to inform their teaching. Sprague, an associate professor of writing in the College’s Center for Teaching and Learning, spent the first part of the semester studying the Slovene language as a gateway to a better understanding of the culture and history of the region. Dr. Snow spent most of the semester in England’s Lake District researching something completely different from what she first set out to discover.
Sabbaticals at Principia College differ significantly from those at large research universities where professors divide their time between teaching and research. “We are a teaching institution, and the vast majority of our time is spent teaching, so our research is generally done during breaks or on sabbatical,” says Dr. Snow. “Whenever I’m thinking about research, one of the points that’s foremost in my mind is how it’s going to affect and help my teaching.”
Mining for Literary Understanding
At first, Dr. Heidi Snow expected to dig deeply into the religious views of Dorothy Wordsworth (sister of England’s famous Lake District poet William Wordsworth) for her fall-semester sabbatical in the United Kingdom. Before she even got on a plane, however, she knew that she “wanted to deepen my understanding of the environmental issues and literature that I cover on the Lake District Study Abroad program.”
On earlier trips, Dr. Snow and her students were surprised by the environmental degradation they saw in the bucolic Lake District—some of which stemmed from centuries of mining in the area. Like any good detective, Dr. Snow allowed the evidence to guide her research. She began with general research at the British Library on Renaissance mining. Next, by combing through dusty lease agreements and law books that simply aren’t available anywhere else, Dr. Snow uncovered surprising attitudes about the environment and the effects of early industrialization from the Renaissance to the mid-19th century. For example, German copper miners brought into the Lake District by Queen Elizabeth I during the Renaissance “believed that minerals could be farmed like plants and regrow.”
“As early as 1680, local tenant farmers and a landowner brought a lawsuit against a mine because the run-off from the mines was affecting their crops. The farmers won the lawsuit and the mining company had to pay some part of their losses. For the 1680s, that seems pretty good,” Dr. Snow says. Further research into mining leases and law books from Wordsworth’s time (1770–1850) “help explain his poetry. Poetry [together with] these documents … open up windows into how these people were thinking.”
Dr. Snow’s work on William Wordsworth and religion is so well respected that the BBC interviewed her as a part of a panel of Wordsworth experts. You can hear the interview online.
Understanding a People Through Their Language
Sprague wears many hats at the College—she teaches creative and academic writing, world literature, and education courses, as well as teaching writing tutors and leading the Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina Study Abroad program. This coming summer will be her third time leading a study-abroad program in the region comprising the former Yugoslavia.
Sprague packed a lot into five weeks of research. She returned in October 2021 with a deeper understanding of the culture of Slovenia through “intensive one-on-one Slovene language training with a teacher at the University of Ljubljana’s Center for Slovene as a Second/Foreign Language,” she said in a post-trip report. “I found the study reinforced what I knew, enlightened me regarding how this Slavic language works, and invigorated me in my sharing of the language with my students.”
Sprague faced new challenges on this trip: Covid restrictions and general unrest in the country (including her first brush with tear gas) made it difficult to meet in person with new people. Her travels, however, brought her closer to a local Slovene family she had met on earlier trips. Sprague expects that the formal language study and what she learned in conversations with her Slovene friends will help her guide her students to overcome “the limitations of understanding literature without understanding the culture.”