Loring Danforth, professor of anthropology, is this year’s Kroepsch Award recipient. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Asking students to examine their own cultural investments and engage with one another is part of getting them to think like anthropologists, says Danforth, Charles A. Dana Professor of Anthropology.

When students begin to see the cultural underpinnings of their hobbies and beliefs, “that’s the most fun.”

At the same time, he says, “you get students who are insulted, offended, troubled. That can be really agonizing to work through, but it means you’re hitting on something really important and interesting.”

Danforth’s ability to work through these sometimes-visceral discussions has earned him a devoted following of students throughout his more-than 30 years of teaching at Bates.

This year, he received the college’s Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, established in 1985 by a gift from Robert Kroepsch ’33.

Watch a brief video about Loring Danforth. Produced by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Click here to view the embedded video.

His lecture, titled “#Bates2Saudi,” takes place at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, March 21, in Room 201 of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections, 70 Campus Ave.

The lecture is open to the public at no cost. Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. For more information, please call 207-786-6066.

Proposed and coordinated by Saudi native Leena Nasser ’12, Danforth’s student at the time, the excursion introduced the class to Saudi culture and included meetings with a range of activists, professionals and everyday citizens.

Leading the trip proved to be as much a learning experience for Danforth as his students.

“I was being an anthropologist myself, just taking notes furiously,” he says. At the same time, he recognized that he was “modeling for the students asking questions, doing interviews and taking notes.”

The cultural exchange did not always go smoothly. Danforth recalls an incident in which one of his non-Muslim students attempted to pick up a copy of the Q’uran, an act widely regarded as taboo in the Muslim world.

Danforth used the incident as a teaching opportunity, engaging their Saudi hosts in a debate about how non-Muslims interact with Islam’s sacred text.

Steven Kemper, chair of the Bates anthropology department, says Danforth “brought to this department a notion that anthropology, the content of the discipline, is a moral endeavor…that it is a way of treating people and caring about people.”

Danforth puts the writing on the wall for his students. Photograph by Ryan Donnell.

Nasser agrees. She says, “There is a lot of diversity” among students at Bates, “but not many classes utilize this diversity and perspective in the classroom like Professor Danforth.”

Reflecting on her experience in Danforth’s courses, Claire Jakimetz ’08 of Litchfield, Conn., says, “Every class was a dialogue — a safe, supportive environment to pose questions, dissect puzzles and offer our own explanations.”

Almost a year later, a few students from the Saudi trip continue to meet with Danforth to discuss ways they can use their experience to dispel myths about Saudi Arabia and Muslim culture more broadly.

Together, they have contributed essays and op-eds on the subject. Danforth is contemplating writing a book based on his “furious” notes and observations.

It’s an example of how Bates is the “perfect balance of teaching and scholarship,” he says. “And you need to do both really well and really seriously.”

“To have a community of people who are good scholars and care about teaching has been a blessing.”

Danforth’s lecture is co-sponsored by the Kroepsch Award Selection Committee, the college division chairs, Information & Library Services and the Dean of the Faculty’s Office.

Associate Professor of History Joseph Hall Jr., a member of the Bates College faculty since 2002, has received the college’s 2009 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

In conjunction with this honor, Hall gives a talk titled “How Maine Was Discovered” at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 25, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Co-sponsored by the Kroepsch Award Selection Committee, the college division chairs, Information and Library Services and the Dean of the Faculty’s Office, the event is open to the public at no cost.

Hall’s history courses examine Native Americans, the Colonial and Revolutionary eras, and American history from an environmental perspective.

Kroepsch recipients are chosen by past and present Bates students. In nominating him, Hall’s students praised his dedication to and grasp of his subject matter, his ability to engage students with the material and his rigorous expectations of such engagement.

“One of his favorite questions is ‘So what?’ ” said one student. “This simple question never receives a simple answer as it commands students to place their comments and perspectives into a broader context.”

“As my many conversations about history have made clear,” Hall writes on the Bates Web site, “history does not afflict everyone similarly, but at the very least, I hope that what I have to say about it encourages people to think carefully about where they are.”

Hall received his bachelor’s degree at Amherst College and his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research focuses on American Indians in the early colonial Southeast.

The late Robert H. Kroepsch established in 1985 the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Endowed Fund for an award to a member of the faculty, “in recognition of outstanding performance as a teacher during the previous 12-month period.”

The honor, which carries a $5,000 award, recognizes a faculty member’s ability to stimulate student interest in the subject, foster desire for further learning, help students understand subject matter in a broad context and encourage a high level of student performance, among other criteria.

Most students who study creative writing with Robert Farnsworth find themselves in a relationship measured in years, not semesters.

A widely published poet and member of the Bates faculty since 1990, Farnsworth sees that relationship as a two- or three-year conversation conducted through “office-hour meetings, workshop discussions, scribbling on manuscripts that students give me,” he explains.

“I try to pay close attention to what they initially feel they want to do, and what challenges can be put in front of them to widen the possibilities for their writing, to give them some opportunity to see themselves into territories that they did not know existed for them.”

Farnsworth is the right teacher for young writers still seeking their voices, says Gabe Fried ’96, winner of the 2007 Kathryn A. Morton Prize for his debut collection of poems, Making the New Lamb Take.

“Great teachers — of anything — recognize the strengths of the students in front of them,” says Fried. “Rob allowed us to explore our strengths and ambitions while making sure we could live with our shortcomings.”

This mentoring approach, aspirational and challenging, has elicited enduring appreciation from the ranks of Farnsworth proteges. In fact, support from students resulted in Farnworth’s receiving the 2008 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, an honor determined through the votes of past and present students.

The award joined a list of credentials that includes a PEN New England Discovery Award, a 2006 summer residency at the Frost Place in Franconia, N.H., and the role of featured speaker at Bates’ 2006 Convocation — again through a student vote, this time that of the departing Class of 2006.

Rob Farnsworth smiles during a poetry reading and discussion convened by chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace, part of a series exploring the role of passion and engagement. Chloe Viner ’09 of Rowley, Mass., is at left. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

The cliché is effective, acknowledging his concern for process. But after the recuperative postponement, I have to ask Farnsworth if a student of his could effectively use such a cliché, straightforward and without irony, in a piece of fiction or poetry.

No, he says, but then offers how a grad school professor at Columbia did once talk about rescuing clichés “by following them back to their literal roots. In some cases they can be excavated and played with. But that demands a willingness to play around in the sandpit that is the cliché.”

I smile; Farnsworth has reintroduced “sand” in a way that’s both sly and, importantly, instructive: the craft of writing isn’t sandbox stuff.

When I arrive in his Pettigrew office, the slightly flushed-with-fever Farnsworth is staring at his bookshelf as if trying to find a star in a suddenly jumbled sky. “I’m looking for a book,” he says to the wall. “I know what its spine looks like…but I long ago stopped trying to keep my books in alphabetical order.”

Now, most every professor has a well-used bookshelf, but you can easily imagine books leaving Farnsworth’s shelves like blocks at the beginning of a Jenga game, for reading is the cornerstone habit that Farnsworth demands from his writing students. The apprentice writer must read “omnivorously,” he says, because the motivation to write seriously should “come from wanting to participate in the spellcasting that reading makes you aware of. It should make you say, ‘I want to add my voice to that. I want to sing along with that, descant with that.’”

Craig Teicher ’01 is one of two young-alum spellcasters and former Farnsworth protégés who won first-book prizes in 2007. He received the Colorado Prize for Poetry for Brenda is in the Room and Other Poems, while Gabe Fried ’96 won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Making the New Lamb Take.

Both express an appreciation for Farnsworth that borders on wonderment. “My life as it is wouldn’t exist except for Rob,” says Fried, an editor at Persea Books in New York City.

Teicher, also an editor in New York City (at Publishers Weekly, where he’d just interviewed novelist Elizabeth Strout ’77 about her new book, Olive Kitteridge), arrived at Bates trailing a belief in the communal and communional power of poetry. “My family bottomed out a bit in high school,” he recalls. “In poetry I found companionship and something to identify with.” Farnsworth, right from his first meeting with Teicher, noticed how “earnest” his student was about “what poetry could do. He came with that inkling.” Farnsworth says that he and others were merely “operating the bellows” to fan Teicher’s creative flames.

I share the bellows quote with Teicher, who e-mails me back: “Rob’s being modest. He was my gatekeeper to the ways one could actually participate in literature.” Later, on the phone, he explains. “Here was a guy who, if I said something intelligent in class, was going to come back with something more intelligent that pushed the conversation further with other students, making it bigger and bigger.

“All of a sudden, literature was personal and exciting.”

Farnsworth, who majored in English at Brown and earned an M.F.A. at Columbia, teaches workshop courses in writing at Bates in addition to literature courses, including one on modern Irish poetry this past winter. “Rob isn’t a Ph.D. scholar kind of guy,” says Teicher. “He’s a practicing reader and writer, and you’re not going to find a guy who has, for example, an earthier, more intimate knowledge of 20th-century Irish poetry. He knows what’s in the bones of it.”

Widely published, Farnsworth is highly regarded in Maine for his many appearances as a poet, scholar, and facilitator for literary gatherings in small towns and cities.

But there’s more. Teicher and Fried especially praise the restraint in Farnsworth’s mentorship. “He was really good about being cautious and making me aware how hard it is to have a successful career as a poet,” Teicher says. “Rob understood that my college wish to be a poet was very much about my fantasy life, and he didn’t want to be a creature in my fantasy life. Once I was older, and was an adult, he was excited about treating me like one.”

Says Fried, “Rob allowed us to explore our ambitions while making sure we could live with our shortcomings.”

Farnsworth reads and discusses his poetry www.fishousepoems.org

By H. Jay Burns

Established by Robert H. Kroepsch, a 1933 graduate of Bates who received an honorary doctor of laws degree from the college in 1971, the Kroepsch Award is given to a member of the Bates faculty nominated by peers and students for outstanding teaching. In nominating Dodd for the prize, one student wrote: “She opened up my eyes to new concepts in education that I would have never anticipated; she wanted me to be sure that I was striving for excellence and not perfection, that I was learning for the intrinsic benefits and not for the extrinsic reward of high marks.”

According to Jill N. Reich, vice president of academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Bates, Dodd’s “talent and expertise as an educator are legion.” A former Maine public school teacher and principal, Dodd joined the Bates faculty in 1984, where she supervises student teachers and teaches courses such as “Gender Issues in Education” and “Redesigning the American High School.” She and nine of her Bates students co-authored “The Challenge of Changing Schools,” an essay featured in the winter 2000 Journal of Maine Education.

A Maine native, Dodd is the author of “A Parent’s Guide to Innovative Education” (Noble Press, 1992) Ð named one of the 10 best books for parents by Child Magazine in 1992 Ð and co-author of “Making Our High Schools Better: How Parents and Teachers Can Work Together” (St. Martin’s Press, 1999). A passionate beachcomber, Dodd is the author of two children’s picture books on the subject, “The Story of Sea Glass” (Down East, 1999) and “Footprints and Shadows” (Simon and Schuster, 1992), as well as other books on writing and teaching.

“Teaching is not telling,” Dodd says. “It’s designing the right context in which learning will take place.” An educator for 39 years, Dodd sees the Kroepsch Award as a formal recognition of her teaching. “It’s very moving to get a teaching award for teaching.”

Dodd earned a bachelor’s degree in history and government from the University of Maine, Orono; a master’s degree in English and American studies from California State University, Los Angeles; and a C.A.S. and Ed.D, both from the Universtiy of Maine, Orono.