Rebecca Chamberlain has been an exemplary addition
to the faculty team teaching the Perspectives on Ireland program. In addition
to another full-time program she has been working with the material we have
been covering. At times she might have seemed strung a little tight with the
workload, she has held up under the pressure and managed to be an excellent
seminar leader. Her style of interaction has been helpful and informative without
being overbearing or excessively outspoken, so that we ourselves did more of
the work. She has managed to contain the efforts of some of our seminar members
to digress from the materials, and yet she has allowed an openness and freedom
of expression which reflects, as Joyce says in The Dead, the most important
aspect of Irish culture, that being hospitality.
At first many of the students had a hard time connecting her academic specialty
with our program materials. She to my mind made ample connection between the
Irish and the South Sound Native American cultures. In this material she has
shared with us a functioning oral tradition, which like the Irish, they find
an important, nay an essential, part of their unique character, this being the
art of storytelling. I can still recall her making the antagonist call of Crow
in the story of Slug's husband, which she shared with us in the original Lechutse,
early on in the quarter. Rebecca offered us several texts as further reading
on this topic, one of which, The Way of the Storyteller, I have used on several
occasions to read to my daughter and niece at bedtime. Her lecture on stories
was enjoyable and allowed our entire program an opportunity to further make
connections with each other, setting the stage for our collaborative work later
in the quarter.
Her lecture on wells and springs was also a connection to another foundational
aspect of the Irish culture, the connection to one's local environment. This
sense of place was central to the Irish, for they saw no distinction between
themselves and their environment. Her discussion of the area wells and springs
showed a specific correlation between the two cultures. In fact it was Rebecca
who said it is more important for us to draw connections between the various
world cultures, in order that we break down the walls between them. This idea
of interconnection was also an aspect of her lecture on Illuminated Manuscripts.
In these texts we see how closely the Irish viewed the connection between themselves
and the other inhabitants of their environment. In fact in both cultures the
salmon is a central animal totem, representing wisdom and longevity.
Rebecca suggested an image in seminar that I used in my essays as reflective
of the turning of elements in a duality into their oppositions. The Mobieus
strip was used in relation to Condren's book The Serpent and the Goddess to
describe the turning of the matrifocal communalism of milkties into the patriarchal
kingship of blood-ties. It was an effective metaphor throughout the quarter,
as the Irish loved the idea of cutting through these types of distinctions that
separate, combining them instead. Without this image some of my own work would
have lacked an effective means of explication.
Overall I would recommend Rebecca again as an instructor, she was nurturing
and earnest as an instructor, she was nurturing and earnest towards both the
material and her students. She made wonderfully informative and connective statements
on my integrative essay and final exam. In fact she gave me one of those compliments
that touches the heart in an empowering fashion. She said in relation to my
desire to found an alternative 'Hedge' school, which would teach many of the
concepts we have worked with this quarter, that she would like to send her own
child to it. In my opinion few statements say with this kind of directness,
I like who you are and enjoy what you think.