April 22, 2002

Catawba Honors Course Blends Biogeography and Literature of Islands  

They swam at night in Bioluminescent Bay amid sparkling, fluorescent waters, actually experienced Fern Gully and its 500 different types of ferns, learned about the religion of the Rastafarians by talking to their boat captain, and ate jerk chicken purchased from a roadside stand in the small village of Priory. For eight Honors students from Catawba College, these experiences were their sensory impressions of Jamaica and the culmination of a semester spent in the classroom studying “The Biogeography and Literature of Islands.” 

It would be safe to call this Honors course which Drs. Janice Fuller and Steve Coggin taught this spring at Catawba ‘a stretch,’ but it ended up being one that really worked, according to them and their students. The class sought to blend two disciplines, biology and English, and a small group of excellent students, some of whom are working toward a degree in one these areas. A weeklong trip to Jamaica during Catawba’s spring break was what actually allowed the classroom theories to meld with island reality.

“When we read, trying to make the connection between the two (biology and English) in relation to islands was a stretch,” Antonia Bowden, a sophomore from Burlington, N.C. majoring in English, explains, “ but the trip helped tie the two disciplines together.”

The group stayed at Hofstra University’s marine lab in a group of spartan cottages on Jamaica’s north shore, apart from the tourist accommodations which are typical of this area. The week-long trip was intense, with the days’activities beginning at 6:30 a.m. and wrapping up at 7 p.m.

“I’ve learned the importance of blending disciplines and that all disciplines really blend together in a way,” says Angie Stancar, a senior English major from Sanford. “Being out on the island cemented the idea of blending. It’s a cliché to say it, but so much learning occurs outside of the classroom.”

In the classroom, from the discipline of biology they learned about extinctions on various islands, natural selection, fragmentation of habitat, gigantism, adaptive radiation, genetic drift and the founder effect. While reading and discussing the literature of islands, they mulled over the self-sufficiency of islanders, the vulnerability of islands to conquest, and the paradox that islands could be both bleak and desolate, but also mysterious and magical. The course reading requirements were extensive and included “A High Wind in Jamaica” by R. Hughes, Melville’s “The Encantadas,” Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Walcott’s “Omeros,” and Quammen’s “The Song of the Dodo.” 

“It’s gotten all of us out of our comfort zone and expanded our minds,” contends senior Mary Hill, a senior English major from Salisbury. Dr. Fuller, Catawba’s Writer-In-Residence and a Professor of English, concurs with Hill’s assessment saying: “I’ll say it got us out of our comfort zone – I was out there snorkeling when I can barely swim.” 

Fuller feels that teaching the course has given her “a whole new language” to use in her poetry, already resulting in one poem crafted out of the Jamaican experience and entitled “Love in the Collection Tank.”

The donkey dung cucumber hungers for love.
Holothuria mexicana—he drags with him
his deep creases, his rose-colored sole,
vainly searching the four corners 
for the pale anemone of his dreams.

He is scorned by the inflated sea biscuit,
so vain about her aboral surface petals.
The blunt-spined star is too brittle, 
too needy, circling all invertebrates 
with her five-fold love.

He escapes thankless entanglements
with one disingenuous alga after another:
padina brown, halimeda, 
copiosa sargassum. He slips through 
the serrated strap alga unscathed.

But, oh, the variable sea urchin—
dangerous, changeable. Lytechinus variegatus.
She’s got it all. Radial symmetry.
Calcareous and beautiful, she lets him wrap 
his whole length around her, impales 

his warty dorsum with her restless spines.
He dreams of one day laying his twenty-two
tentacles against her tender podia.
But for now it is enough—
one barbed heart against another.

Outside these four glass walls, the fire coral waits.

Coggin and the students laugh as they recall Fuller’s literary and romantic way of approaching the very scientific collection tank. He says that what was actually occurring in the tank was that one animal was cleaning algae off of another. Fuller saw it rather as a loving dance of interdependence between the two creatures.

For Coggin, the course fulfilled his desire “to do something totally different. I didn’t want to teach a straight biology course,” he explains. “I was seeking to challenge my students, and I believe I have. In this course, the students have struggled successfully and so have I.”

Several of the students say that they will never take a traditional vacation again, instead they will try to experience the places they visit. “It made me not want to experience just the commercial cultures anymore in my future travels,” Stancar explains.

“Bioluminescent Bay was my Kodak moment,” freshman Kevin Favorite laughs, “because you couldn’t get a Kodak shot of it.” The Bay’s glow-in-the-dark quality, he says, is unique. It occurs in the waters off Jamaica’s north coast because salt and fresh water meet.

The bay actually inspired Coggin to try his hand at some nature writing while on the trip. Following is an excerpt from his selection entitled “A Light in Biobay:”

Captain Jerry kills the outboard of his 20-foot skiff. The captain is a Rasta with his dreads tucked under his red, black and green knit cap. His boat, the Martha Brae, is in the middle of a mangrove-lined bay on the north coast of Jamaica. The boat drifts under stars, planets, the Milky Way that shine with a clarity that baffles city dwellers. But the big show is in the brackish water. The Captain points out schools of mullet swimming past, their wake glowing blue. A stingray flies through the water with cold vortices of light spinning off its fins. Captain Jerry invites the 25 tourists on his boat to enter the water of Bioluminescent Bay.

Biobay is five feet deep, underlain with a thick layer of mud.
As the half-dozen swimmers slide into the water light erupts
around them. Every stroke produces a soft blue submarine
glow. The tourists laugh with delight, splash and dunk each
other all in a blue halo. After 10 minutes the swimmers emerge and the most remarkable scene unfolds. Clinging to their skin and hair and swimsuit are pinpoints of blue phosphor that glow, brighten then fade. 

It seems that all members of the group who took this week-long trip are able to recall with clarity that which was memorable to them individually.

“When we walked through a Jamaican village, I got to see island self-sufficiency first-hand,” senior biology major Rebecca Barbalich of Salisbury remembers. “Now when I travel, it will be a different type of trip. I want to see the birds in an area, and meet the people and make the time to go snorkeling.”

Recounting a Rastafarian lesson she learned in Jamaica, freshman Melanie Goergmaier from Groebezell, Germany explains, “Your personality is more important that what you own. You are a Rastafarian in your heart, your blood and your mind.”

Fuller and Coggin would like to plan future classes which will provide for their students much that the Rastafarian faith does for its believers – lessons that are carried in the mind, the heart and the blood. It is not simply lessons in the classroom, but rather inter-disciplinary classroom lessons with real-world applications which intrigue both of them.

“Team teaching epitomizes the liberal arts’ mission,” Fuller says. “This collaboration made us break out of all our paradigms.”

Photos by
Dr. Steve Coggin