On April 29, the NUS University Awards Ceremony included the recognition of the seven newly inducted Fellows for the NUS Teaching Academy. I was honored to be part of the group and attended the ceremony with some of the best of the NUS professors in medicine, law, arts, sciences and humanities. It was a deep honor to be part of the Teaching Academy, and I look forward to working closely with the fellows to help shape some of the NUS policies and innovations in teaching, learning and educational research. The listing of the new fellows is at this site – http://nus.edu.sg/uawards/2016/teachingnewfellow.php, and more information on the NUS teaching academy can be found at their web site at http://www.nus.edu.sg/teachingacademy/. I have already learned a lot from the many events at NUS related to Teaching and Learning, and as a Fellow I can help be even more closely connected to this dynamic university and its very interesting group of scholars!

 

On April 12 and 13, the Global Learning Council (http://www.globallearningcouncil.org/) met at the National University of Singapore. I was invited to attend, and met with leadership from Carnegie Mellon University, NUS, the World Economic Forum, and a very interesting international group with large delegations from Germany, Japan, and several other countries. The theme of the meeting was promoting Technology-Enhanced Learning in Asia – and we were offered several very good talks about the changing landscape of industry, geopolitics, and economics, and how those impacted higher education.

The meeting opened with Dr. Subra Suresh, President of Carnegie Mellon University, and Chor Chuan Tan, President of NUS giving opening talks. Then Lee Howell from the World Economic Forum gave a very interesting talk about the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” – the rise of artificial intelligence, materials science, and biotechnology – that will accelerate technologies and require new models of education. The Fourth Industrial revolution follows the earlier revolutions which gave us power from steam, production lines for Model T’s and processing in the form of computers. From the Davos World Economic Forum, which Lee Howell helps plan, came a very interesting video dramatising this Fourth Industrial Revolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZOkoRuV1R0

(from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZOkoRuV1R0)

After the talk a variety of leaders from industry and government described the skill set needed in 2020. These included skills like complex problem solving, critical thinking, people management, coordination with others, emotional intelligence, judgement, decision-making, and cognitive flexibility. The skills all can be developed from a good liberal arts education – making the Yale-NUS project seem more relevant!  The World Economic Forum provided a “Future Jobs Report” ( http://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/ ) – which outlines some of these details. The executive summary of this report is available below:

WEF_FOJ_Executive_Summary_Jobs  (executive summary of the Future of Jobs – PDF).

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Other speakers included the Singaporean Minister of Education, who described their FutureSkills initiative, and a series of speakers from Kaplan, Microsoft and the Gates Foundation. One of my favorite talks was from Kathy Takanaka, the Director of Columbia’s Teaching and Learning Center and Deputy Provost of Undergraduate Education. She described new methods of science teaching in which instructors emphasize the ways in which science probes the unknown, and the value of uncertainty, and “liminality” in science teaching. This idea of “liminality” also comes up in the educational theory of Threshold Concepts, and is a vital way to mobilize students and to create profound and deep learning.

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The meeting was inspiring, thought-provoking, and wonderfully future oriented. The NUS President, Chor Chuan Tan, is one of the board members, and currently director of the GLC. This makes for some great opportunities to get involved in this fascinating organization, and I look forward to their next meeting in Berlin!

 

From March 28-April 1, Hollywood actor and Caltech Theatre Program Director, Brian Brophy visited us at Yale-NUS. His visit was planned to create an Intercultural Theatre project, by exploring some of the cultural diversity at Yale-NUS College, and to offer a workshop on Theatre as Teaching with our Yale-NUS faculty. Brian is also my collaborator on a new play about the Life of Chandrasekhar entitled the Heart of the Stars. We met with him and his wife, and learned more about his recent work in India at the O.P. Jindal Global University.

Then with Sara Amjad of the Dean of Students office, we met with Brian and planned out the week. Brian was to create a performance with Yale-NUS students where they would enact scenes where their cultural heritage were showcased. He worked with them over several evenings, and in those workshops the students had deep discussions about their cultural backgrounds, and created sketches among themselves. On the final night a few of the top scenes were recreated for an audience, and the audience was encouraged to interact with the students, and make reflective observations on their project.

The other piece of Brian’s visit was a faculty workshop for the CTL on Theatre as Teaching. This workshop included about 15 Yale-NUS and NUS faculty, who heard from Brian about his experiences teaching, and working with the Theatre of the Oppressed in India.  Brian also tried to link different faculty together and to encourage them to use role playing and other forms of theatre in their teaching.

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One of the many joys of living in Singapore is the close proximity of some amazing countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, are all within a short hop on a discount airline. When one of those countries has a total solar eclipse in them, all the better!   This is what happened on March 9, 2016. In neighboring Indonesia, the total eclipse was passing through, making a graceful arc across the South China Sea up through Ternate. Even though this was in the middle of my Yale-NUS College semester, I was not going to pass up a total solar eclipse!  So Bidushi and I booked a short hop flight to Palembang, which was on the path of the totality.

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My friend Jay Pasachoff, a veteran eclipse observer and one of the world’s top solar astronomers, warned against this site – saying he had bad luck there on a previous eclipse. Jay, of course, was located up in Ternate with a team of photographers waiting to catch the best possible view. Bidushi and I were looking for speed – and Palembang provided it. Only about one hour away on AirAsia, and with lots of cheap and available hotels. We booked our flight and looked forward to the event!  We arrived to Palembang the day before the event; Bidushi and her friends from a local company here in Singapore known as Hiverlab (http://www.hiverlab.com/) had arranged for a fish-eye all sky camera gadget using GoPros. We tested it on the roof of our apartment before going and were all set for a great immersive VR recording of the event!

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As the eclipse day came, we got very excited. Our hotel had a nice porch where we could set up our all-sky viewing gadget, and my camera with its fancy new telephoto lens. We got up very early, and enjoyed the sunrise from the roof and eagerly awaited the eclipse!

 

     

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As the event unfolded, some clouds gathered. The cooling from the partial phase of the eclipse seemed to cause some additional clouds to condense. Despite the heavy and gathering clouds, we could see the sun begin to darken, and the partial phase deepen. The temperature dropped further, and darkness set in. Then the totality!  Despite the thick clouds, my camera was able to take a couple of good pictures through the clouds of the total eclipse.  We were thrilled – and enjoyed being enveloped into cool darkness in Indonesia, just after sunrise!

Our eclipse photos (through clouds): 

   

 

 

 

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After the eclipse we walked around Palembang. We were struck by how friendly the people were. “Hello sir” “Hello sir” said kids as they ran up to me. I felt like a rock star!  The city itself was a large sprawling industrial town. A large river ran through the town and we had a nice relaxing lunch at the river and watched the barges go by. They use the river to transport huge barges of coal and other things to various parts of Indonesia. The food was good, the people friendly – and the sun restored.

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After we returned to Singapore, Bidushi and I gave a talk to a full classroom at the Singapore Science Center on March 11. We showed the group a comparison of the eclipse as viewed from Thailand, from Singapore and from the totality. We even found a movie clip of the eclipse taken from an airplane, and from a Japanese weather satellite in space!  The students and public in the crowd seemed to really enjoy the talk, and even liked our photos through the clouds. A great experience!

 

   

During the Feb 29-March 5 visit Jenny Frederick provided an amazing workshop on how people learn at Yale-NUS College. The workshop, entitled “Teaching to Prioritize Learning” included a wonderful in situ experiment in learning, where the group was divided into two, and asked to perform a series of tasks as if in a classroom setting. The two groups were given different handouts, however, and Jenny masterfully demonstrated how the different handouts could either enhance learning or block it.  Jenny was able to show how memory can be bolstered by materials that help organize the knowledge by grouping facts together into categories. Those of our colleagues who had such handouts vastly outperformed the “control” group who were left floundering. This message was that as teachers we owe it to our students to scaffold what we do with multiple aids to their learning; and to infuse those materials we hand out with systematic and conceptual groupings that help them process the information more effectively.

Within Jenny’s talk was also a graph of how memory can be interefered with by lack of attention or just saturation from too much information. This is a part of the growing both of research that documents how lecturing will not work after a relatively short period (10-15 minutes) after which the mind is incapable of processing much of the information. Jenny advocates not only bundling concepts or facts in logical ways, but infographics and other diagrams that can aid learning.

Another point that she made was that students often have preconceptions that need to be addressed carefully in teaching. These preconceptions can lead to “confirmation bias” in which students look for patterns consistent with preconceived ideas. It is important to enable students to test patterns and evidence for themselves and to discuss what they find to help break these misconceptions whenever possible. The use of “retrieval practice” can also facilitate learning and has been shown to boost learning more than more elaborate study practices. This form of retrieval practice which uses tests that assess comprehension and requires students to make inferences also improved conceptual learning, according to a recent article by Karpicke and Blunt (2011) in an article published in Science.

Our Yale-NUS faculty really enjoyed the talk by Jenny, and were impressed to not only see some of the results of learning science put into practice, but to gather data themselves – as test subjects of a short experiment!

References

Karpicke, J.D., and Blunt, J.R., 2011, Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping, Science, 331, p. 772.

Accessible from  http://learninglab.psych.purdue.edu/downloads/2011_Karpicke_Blunt_Science.pdf

Teaching-to-prioritize-learning-Yale-NUS-Feb-2016 – Slides from Jenny’s talk

Teaching-to-prioritize-learning-Yale-NUS-Feb-2016 How-People-Learn_Activity-Handouts-Scoring-Sheet – Scoring sheet for workshop

From Feb 29-March 5, we hosted a visit by both Scott Strobel, Deputy Provost for Teaching and Learning at Yale, and Jennifer Frederick, Director of the Yale Teaching Center. During the visit, both of them visited all three Divisions at Yale-NUS College, and discussed Teaching and Learning at Yale-NUS with a wide cross section of faculty, administrators, and even some students. This post is about Scott and his presentation on “Plastic-Eating Fungi & Other Wonders Discovered by Yale Undergraduates” to the Yale-NUS College Science Division.  The talk centered on a course offered at Yale in which students study endophytes, a variety of fungus, both at New Haven in class, and in the rainforests of Ecuador. During their fieldwork they collect new endophytes, which they bring back to Yale for further study in the laboratory. The program includes a summer program where students spend the rest of the summer characterizing these new organisms, in many cases discovering new species with amazing properties (hence the title of his talk!).

Scott pointed out that the experiential nature of the course, and the type of science it covers, is an “accessible entry point for novice scientists to do original research.”  He is also conscious of the many positive features of the course – it gives students ownership, provides uncertainty about outcomes, is a “vast” area of study with multiple possible directions, has “fundable and publishable observations,” and “seamlessly ties together the teaching and research missions” of Yale College.  The course embodies a very nice mix of active learning, experiential learning, and authentic learning, with assessments that in some cases enable students to develop scientific papers, or even patents!

The subject of endophytes is new to many non-biologists. Scott explained that there are over 1 million plan associated fungi of which about 80% are unknown. The project has been described in the scientific literature (Bascom-Slack and Strobel, 2012; Strobel and Strobel, 2007).

The course begins with students choosing plants to study, and in this pursuit they engage in a bit of ethnobiology. Some plants were known by local people to kill fish, to heal snake bites, and to take care of infections. In collaboration with the Catholic University of Ecuador, Scott and his 18 students forge into the Yasuni National Forest, which has sites which offer the most biodiverse environments in South America.  Once there, after long journeys on roads built for oil exploration, they seek out the plants described by local people with bioactive properties. Many of these properties are endowed upon the plants from the little microbes living on them – the endophytes.

Scott is assisted in this course by Percy Nunez, a local guide who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the plants, and he equips the students with flash cards so they can identify the plants they are seeking. Students take samples, and within these samples are typically 25-150 microbe species – most of them completely unclassified by biology!  Scott told us that over the years, he has had about 126 undergraduates in this course, and not only do they discover new species but in some cases a new genus – averaging about one new genus per student per year!

From the plants they isolate the endophytes, and then from this they extract liquid cultures and chemical compounds. Each year he studies about 500 fungal extracts per student, and from these can come volatile antibiotics (capable of killing bacteria at a distance), also fuel additives, and a species that can degrade plastics. Perhaps this can be a solution to many of the most urgent issues facing our environment and health – all within the context of an undergraduate course!

The audience of 18 Yale-NUS faculty were very interested in the project, and our Foundations of Science course is hoping to build in this same type of discovery-based work at Yale-NUS College, and we hope to introduce students to this type of research in the coming years.

References

Bascom-Slack, CA, Arnold, EA, and Strobel, SA (2012). Student-Directed Discovery of the Plant Microbiome and its Products. Science 338:485-486

Strobel, S. A., & Strobel, G. A. (2007). Plant endophytes as a platform for discovery-based undergraduate science education. Nature chemical biology, 3(7), 356-359).

Readings related to Scott Strobel and his Endophytes course – Plastic-Eating-Fungi-Other-Wonders-Discovered-by-Yale-Undergraduate_Scott-Strobel- (includes Journal articles on the course).

After being a student again for much of Fall semester, I have graduated! This effort was to obtain a postgraduate certificate in the Scholarship of Educational Leadership (SoEL) in Curriculum and Pedagogy from the University of British Columbia (UBC). The program is organized by Harry Hubball, and has been offered across the world to groups of academics in universities in Asia, Africa, North America and Europe. The UBC program is described at this link: http://international.educ.ubc.ca/soel/. At the National University of Singapore they have had two cohorts of SoEL graduates, who are nominated by the Provost of NUS, or in my case by the Yale-NUS College. The experience included writing an SoEL portfolio, that included an educational leadership statement, a review of the SoTL literature in three different theme areas, an internal formative document assessing an area of work that I am doing at Yale-NUS College (in my case interdisciplinary science courses), and an educational research project which is presented in writing and in a presentation. My research project was to assess the Yale-NUS College Foundations of Science course, and whether it provides an authentic learning environment for students. The package of SoEL materials is sent to external reviewers from UBC, and they look over the writing and interview each of the candidates by Skype. At the end, the postgraduate certificate is awarded – a nice prize for all the hard work!  More than the certificate, the program is rewarding from the perspectives it gives on all aspects of academics, and for having a chance to work closely with some of the best academics at the National University of Singapore. Our cohort, or batch, it shown below!  I am also happy to share my Educational Leadership portfolio – the PDF file is available at this link: Bryan.Penprase.SoTL.Dossier.Jan.11.2016. I had a great experience with this course, and I am happy to answer questions for anyone interested in the program.

This was one of the highlights of the Spring Semester 2016!  At long last, gravitational waves were directly observed with the LIGO system. The detection, which was measured on 14 September 2015, was a century after Einstein predicted these waves.  The LIGO facility, run by Caltech and MIT, was over 30 years in the making. It had been through many upgrades – the last of which gave it the precision of measuring the movement of its mirrors by a small fraction of an atomic nucleus!

LIGO spans the North American continent, with a pair of interferometers in Washington State and Louisiana.  LIGO is something of a “cosmic seismograph” capable of detecting the cosmic earthquakes of black holes and neutron stars collapsing and merging together. These cataclysmic events are capable of distorting space and time in such a profound way that the shock to space and time ripples through the billions of light years of space, until every atom of every star, plant, asteroid and moon quiver under its influence!  The profound nature of this discovery cannot be understated. Even though Einstein predicted gravitational radiation back in 1915, and Taylor predicted and verified the existence of these waves through binary pulsar orbit decay in 1974 (winning a Nobel prize in 1993), this is the first time in history that humans have been able to detect this form of radiation directly.

The gravitational waves are “ripples in spacetime” that travel as distortions of space-time at the speed of light. The ripples cause a quadropole distortion in which one axis of space is compressed, while the other expands. This quadropole motion is able to be detected by the Michelson Interferometer – a pair of laser beams at 90 degrees from each other arranged to cause interference. Any displacement of one arm of the interferometer – even by a tiny fraction of the wavelength of light – can cause the interference pattern to shift. This same type of device was used by its namesake, Albert Michelson in 1887 to verify that the Earth is not moving through ether – a hypothesized absolute medium which would cause the speed of light to change in the direction of Earth’s motion. In an ironic twist of science history, this same device which inspired Albert Einstein to develop his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, with some upgrades and modern technology was able to confirm Einstein’s theory of gravitational radiation over a century later! The modern technology includes having laser beams moving through an evacuated pair of tubes at 90 degrees from each other, with a total length of over 4 km. The beams also bounce X times within each path, multiplying the sensitivity of the device by thousands of times over a simpler single pass interferometer. The LIGO device can detect distortions of space and time at a level of precision of 1 part in 10^22 – or to a fraction of 10 billion trillionths of its path length. This level of precision allows LIGO to see motions of its mirrors that are less than one thousandth the size of an atomic nucleus! This refinement is possible through the superb optics, improved electronics that can count individual photons, improved coatings, and acoustic isolation systems. The precision enables LIGO to detect these cosmic quakes throughout the universe. As such, LIGO is a new window with which to view the universe.

Gravitational waves, unlike light, pass through matter unimpeded, and are capable of being seen in all directions – regardless of the presence of mountains, the earth, or the Milky Way galaxy!  This transparency to gravitational radiation extends to the early universe. Gravity waves escape unimpeded from the interior of the Big Bang – and are capable of being detected at epochs before recombination. This means that a more advanced gravitational wave detector in principle could see back in time and directly watch the Big Bang as it happened – to the very first centuries of the universe’s 13.7 billion year history!  For now LIGO will be a premiere instrument for detecting neutron star-neutron star mergers, which also produce Gamma Ray bursts. The gravitational radiation arrives before electromagnetic light, enabling a LIGO detection to predict the eruption of a Gamma Ray Burst. This makes it better than a seismometer as LIGO can predict these quakes of the universe before they can be seen in electromagnetic light! 

Our ZTF (Zwicky Transient Facility) telescopes will be able to detect optical counterparts of many of the LIGO events – both before and after they are detected by LIGO, enabling a powerful supplement to LIGO’s technologies. It makes the ZTF project even more exciting, and having both LIGO and ZTF at Caltech makes Caltech even more of an “epicentre” of astrophysics!

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Articles on LIGO and Gravitational Wave Discovery:

http://www.nature.com/news/einstein-s-gravitational-waves-found-at-last-1.19361 – From Nature Magazine – February 2016

http://www.nature.com/news/the-black-hole-collision-that-reshaped-physics-1.19612 – From Nature Magazine – March 2016

http://www.kavlifoundation.org/how-ligo-works – How LIGO Works, From the Kavli Foundation

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Scientific Background from Caltech and ZTF collaborators

Caltech LIGO site – https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts

Materials on Gravitational Wave Detection from Varun Bhalero, IUCAA, India – http://www.gw.iucaa.in/press/

Press Conference on LIGO Gravitational Wave Discovery – https://caltech.box.com/s/wnqnbfbd7jnxvngcc3cc7k70c0mnqdeu

Talks about LIGO from Caltech announcement – http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/83643512

 

 

Our Yale-NUS College CTL hosted Deb Pires, Director of the Biology Education program at UCLA, to Yale-NUS College for a series of talks and discussions about STEM teaching. Deb is the Administrator of the UCLA Department of Life Sciences Core Education group, which works with the 17 separate departments at UCLA that are teaching some aspect of life science. She was also one of two founders of the Center for Educational Innovation in the Sciences (CEILS) and has worked for nine years at UCLA as a member of the Educational Technology committee. Deb gave two talks to our faculty, on February 4 and 5, 2016, which were well received and well attended!

The first talk was entitled “Results from Technology-Enhanced Teaching at UCLA” and discussed how UCLA has been tracking persistence in STEM fields by various demographic groups of students. They are finding very low retention in some groups, and have been working to improve their teaching and curriculum to reverse this trend. She recommended a book “Talking about Leaving – Why undergraduates leave the sciences” by Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt. To motivate the changes in the UCLA curriculum, she cited institutional research data, as well as articles by Haak et al, “Increased Structure and Active Learning Reduce the Achievement Gap in Introductory Biology” and the one by Freeman et al, “Active Learning Increases Student Performance in Science, Engineering and Math.”  In her talk she also recommended books by Wood, “Student-Centered Teaching Practices,”  and “Leaving the Lectern.”

The reforms that they are making at UCLA are described as “high structure” teaching. In this type of teaching, students from more diverse backgrounds are found to perform better than in a traditional form of teaching. The “high structure” includes a pre-class quiz to be sure students are all working on the material out of class. There are active learning activities in class, and also a post-class quiz.  Some materials from the course are also “flipped” using the Camtasia program to provide online guides to the readings that allow for the instructor to help students understand the material. To assess the learning they are using concept inventories which she called a “million dollar instrument.”  She also did a large number (40-80 hours) of student interviews to allow them to refine the course to overcome confusion within students due to unclear terminology.  An important element of the success of the UCLA program are postdoctoral fellows known as the DBER fellows. These are postodocs in biology education, who can mentor some of the senior faculty and help them prepare flipped materials.  They also can provide guidance to faculty in constructing explicit Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) which then guide the class activities, and assessments.  Getting faculty involved in the project was helped by workshops and with the reminder that contributions for this by faculty would be relevant to their tenure and promotion.

Another very interesting aspect of the UCLA effort was how they were able to incorporate observations of teaching as part of their work. Using an ipad and a program known as the “GORP tool” (which stands for General Observations Reflection Protocol), student associates would be able to catalog in real time what the professor and students are doing in a class. As they observe the class they are able to click on different icons to describe whether the professor is lecturing, asking questions, listening, circulating, or working individually with students. Likewise the students are also observed, and the program records if they are listening, asking questions, writing, discussing, or presenting something. At the end each instructor can see a very nicely produced pie chart of how class time is being used by themselves and by the students.  The combination of the intense effort on reaching students, and modifying curriuclum and pedagogy in measurable ways was very inspiring and sounded quite effective.

The second talk was about backward course design, learning objectives and how to assess students. The talk was based on the summer workshops that Jo Handelsman used to offer at the University of Wisconsin, and provided a great overview of how to develop a course. The lecture slides are available at our CTL site at this link.  Some of the figures below are also from her talk, including the very nice 3D Bloom’s taxonomy figure, developed by the Iowa State University Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching.  It was a very useful session and one that we should over to all of our incoming faculty at Yale-NUS College!

 

 

During the beginning of the 2016 Spring semester, I travelled to Borneo with 12 faculty and 20 students, mixed evenly from Yale-NUS College and the Claremont Colleges. The expedition was the culmination of over 18 months of planning and was entitled “Envirolabs Asia.” The project was funded by the Luce Foundation, and was awarded to the Claremont Colleges to facilitate interdisciplinary exploration of environmental issues facing Asia. My role was to foster the connection between Yale-NUS and the Claremont Colleges, and I led many meetings between CIPE and the Claremont Colleges between August of 2014 through January of 2015.  It was incredibly rewarding to study the group of scholars and students assembled on this trip – faculty from all five Claremont Colleges, representing the disciplines of Music, Media Studies, Biology, Environmental studies, History, Religious studies and Politics. Our team from Yale-NUS included myself, Brian McAdoo (a geologist and expert in disasters and human impacts of earthquakes), Tom White (photographer and documentary film maker), Steven Oliver (Political Scientist and expert on global affairs), Bill Piel (Biology professor and expert on spiders), and also a representative from CIPE. The 8 Yale-NUS students were selected from nominations from faculty and were dynamic, energetic, and similarly diverse in their interests. They took to the trip wonderfully and blended nicely with the 12 Claremont students.

Our trip began in Miri, which is in Serawak – on the Malaysian side of Borneo, just to the west of Brunei. Albert Park, the CMC Envirolabs PI, had arranged for a tour of the Baram River from a fellow named Charles, who has led indigenous people on several activist campaigns to stop construction of dams on the river near his home, and a musician from Kuala Lumpur named Ka Hoe Yii who has worked on compositions inspired by the rainforest in Borneo. Our trip included visits to Palm Oil plantations, stays in long houses with indigenous people (including the Baram Dam protest sites), a tour of the river areas on long boats piloted by indigenous people, visits to small villages such as Long Lama along the river threatened by the dam projects, and many chances to learn from the local people about their lifestyle and the ways in which the forest and river create the culture and livelihood that they depend upon.

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The four days in the wilderness included torrential rain, heroic 4WD multi-hour drives through logging roads, and very rustic lodgings which sometimes lacked basic amenities..  We were however rewarded with a rare glimpse inside a fascinating, warm, and beautiful culture and to see some of the complexities facing these people as well. The people would like to conserve their rivershed, but also rely on palm oil cultivation and employment at nearby logging operations for a living. The fishing and subsistence ecology of the region has already been devastated by aggressive logging which has turned the river into a chocolate milk color from sediments. Local people were then forced to find employment downstream at oil companies, or palm oil companies, or upstream at logging operations in many cases. Adding to the complication is an ambiguous indigenous claim to the land surrounding the river, based on old British maps, and weakly enforced by an indifferent Malaysian government office.

We found the time outdoors exciting and found interesting lifeforms – birds, spiders, and other insects were well represented. The stars came out on one night – which enabled a dazzling view of the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds from central borneo. We had an amazing time zooming along the rivers, floating and swimming in them, and being propelled at mind-bending speeds by the local pilots with their powerful outboard motors! Many great conversations between students, faculty and local people also revealed the interlocking complexity of the environmental, social and political issues facing the Serawak people. It was a challenging, rewarding, and exciting opportunity, and we look forward to further research and collaboration with the Claremont Colleges as part of the Envirolabs Asia effort!

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