Category Archives: Williston+

Naomi Darling on Sustainable (and Inspiring) Architecture

IMG_1772To kick off her talk about sustainable design, Naomi Darling showed a slide of a place all Williston Northampton students would recognize.

“That’s where we are right now, right?” said Ms. Darling as a picture of Reed Campus Center appeared.

“Pretty much everything we see has been designed,” said Ms. Darling switching to a view of the Williston pond. “It’s all part of a built environment that very much shapes our lives.”

Ms. Darling, a Five College assistant professor of sustainable architecture, was visiting Natania Hume’s Contemporary Arts and Culture class to talk about historical architecture, best sustainable practices, and some of her recent projects. To give students a basis for comparison, she showed how the Williston campus integrated aspects of other designed spaces: English gardens, the University of Virginia, and Tsinghua University in Beijing.

“Architecture embodies the aspiration and achievements of a society,” said Ms. Darling. “It is a realization of a culture, time, and place.”

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Williston Scholars: Examining the Student-Athlete

Prep schools often are known for their competitive athletic programs. At the Williston Northampton School, students have the opportunity to go beyond their own play in a course taught by History and Global Studies teacher Diane Williams. Sports Studies, one of this year’s Williston Scholars courses, encourages students to evaluate how gender, race, economics, and politics interact with the world of sports.

“Teaching this class has been a really amazing opportunity to expose student-athletes to a variety of topics related to sport, sport culture, and dominant ideologies in society,” said Diane.

Williston Scholars
With Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in such close proximity, Williston works to take advantage of the diversity and opportunities to be found on those campuses. Over two trimesters, with the help of five college and university professors and staff, Williston Scholars classes introduce students to research and writing more commonly found in higher education.

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Photographers’ Lecture Series Returns with Bill Diodato

Capturing lipstick as it drips, the gleam of broken eggs, or cockroaches swarming a sneaker-strewn table—and making them look beautiful—requires particular photography skills.

On February 19, as part of the ongoing Photographers’ Lecture Series, commercial and fine art photographer Bill Diodato named some of those skills: patience, preparation, and the ability to stay true to yourself.

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Williston’s Director of College Counseling Visits the Middle East

By Tim Cheney

I recently returned from a visit to NYU’s new college campus in Abu Dhabi.

How did I get there? A direct flight from Chicago—mine took me up over Greenland and Iceland, over the North Atlantic. We traveled across Norway and Sweden, over the Black Sea and along the border of Iraq and Iran. The final approach was over the Gulf before we landed in the capital city of the United Arab Emirates.

While I was only in the country for a few days, I was able to experience much of what NYU’s President John Sexton has called “both a repository of a great culture and a symbol of that culture’s adaptation to modernity” during my visit.

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Science and Art Observations on Smith College Field Trip

MS Field Trip Smith College
Middle School Field Trip Smith College

On Thursday, October 13, Middle School students took part in an interdisciplinary, collaborative field trip designed by teachers Jane Lucia (science) and Natania Hume (art). The trip took advantage of the wonderful resources at nearby Smith College in order to touch on the disciplines of art, science, English, and geography.

See the full gallery of photos on Flickr.

The trip began with a guided tour of the Lyman Plant House, which is a series of greenhouses containing plants from many regions and climates all over the world. In the plant house, students were given time to observe a plant of interest to them, making notes and using as many descriptive adjectives as possible. They later exchanged papers and made drawings according to each other’s descriptions.

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