Talk to Wooster
Fall 2007
Wooster in Tuscany
A unique living and learning experience created just for Wooster students
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StoryPhysical Learning
Negotiating their environment by living independently was essential to the experience, but finding apartments for 20 students was no easy task. In Italy, success does not come through phone calls and e-mails, but through building relationships. At the end of 18 months,much of it spent with on-site friendship building, George Vermander, class counselor and Hettinger’s husband, had secured four apartments. One of the goals of the trip was to submerge the students in the history of the country, and the experience began every morning, when they opened their eyes.Two of the apartments were in former palazzos (palaces), complete with ceiling frescoes, marble floors, and 400-year-old furniture. The simpler apartments included the former home of a schoolmaster and a twelfth century house with an Etruscan well in the backyard.
And how was it that such treasures were entrusted to a bunch of young Ohio
students? The basis for the trust was well-founded, say Hettinger and Vermander,
but it did not come without scrupulous preparation. The students began learning
about Sienese culture at regular meetings on campus throughout the spring
semester before they departed. They learned, for example, that when you shop
in Siena, it is not appropriate to enter a store and ask, “Where is
the pepper?” First you must greet the proprietor. And then you must
greet the other customers and inquire after their health. Only then may you
ask, “Dov’è il pepe?”
At one of their orientation classes, a pile of suitcases of different shapes, sizes, and portability awaited the students. Vermander, who had carefully filled the bags with various assortments of books, asked the students to take their suitcases on a tour of Kauke Hall and across the brick paths of the Wooster campus. “All of the bags weighed less than 50 pounds, the maximum airline baggage allowance,” said Vermander. “The class experienced how it feels to take various weights up and down stairs and over cobblestone roads.They learned that they don’t really need all the things they have in their closets.”
On the long plane ride to Rome, Hettinger recommended that her students begin to immerse themselves in the medieval mind-set by reading The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, to prepare for class work. In addition to the history course “Plague in the Towns of Tuscany,” the program also included Hettinger’s interdisciplinary course, “Mystics, Popes, and Pilgrims,” a study of how the hierarchy of the western church was challenged by Christians who believed that salvation would come by sacrificing worldly goods and through extreme physical hardship.
The medieval laboratory that awaited them was never contained by four walls. Hettinger, who has a strict personal code about not disrupting the sanctity of a church,museum, or library, gave all of her lectures outdoors—on the streets, on the steps outside of cathedrals, and in the marketplace. She gathered the students outside of a building and summarized the general concepts and questions she wanted them to look for. “Instead of a group of 20 people, pointing and staring, we had small groups, who spoke quietly and questioned deeply.Our students walked lightly on those old stone streets,” she said.
