(10/25/12 5:09pm)
Last Sunday Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts hosted the family concert Symphony of Whales.
The concert combined recited narration with the music of a splendid string quartet, and the musicians (members of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra: Sofia Hirsch, David Gusakov, Hilary Hatch and Dieuwke Davydov) celebrated the fall season by wearing Halloween costumes, which the audience had been encouraged in advance to wear.
Symphony of Whales is a children’s book written by Steve Schirch.
The book itself tells the story of Glashka, a girl with an innate ability to listen to whales, specifically a whale named Narna.
The particular gifts leads Glashka to discover that thousands of whales have been trapped within an inlet as ice quickly freezes over the water that the school of whales need to survive.
The performance consisted of highlights from the story read aloud and decorated with music at key moments.
The children in the audience were amazed by the sound of the violas, violins and cellos, and one got the impression this was their first encounter with the stringed instruments.
After the concert, eight-year-old Sasha Myers seemed very excited about the concert, even though he missed some parts of the story.
“I haven’t read the book, but I know it is about whales and people that want them to be free,” he said.
His mother, Tammy Newmark, said she read about the event in a local newspaper and decided to come with her two young children.
“There are a lot of things to do with kids around here,” she said. “It’s not the first time we’ve come to Middlebury College to enjoy some of its activities.”
The musicians started the concert by introducing themselves by the names of the characters they represented.
Cleopatra and a clown played the violins, while an outlandish witch played the viola and a pirate performed the cello.
The performance opened with familiar excerpts from Peter and the Wolf and the score from the Harry Potter movies.
Children had trouble taking their eyes off the instruments during these fun pieces: the combination of familiar melodies and the musicians’ often jocular manner created a light atmosphere.
The most enjoyable part of the concert for the children, however, occurred when the performers talked to the audience about the instruments and their playing techniques.
A costume parade followed in which all the smaller guests in the audience marched timidly across the stage, some taking their time as they waved to their parents, others running away in what must have been excited panic from all the commotion on stage.
Near the end of the concert, the parents still seemed engaged, but by that point the children had begun to squirm in their seats, look at the ceiling or count their fingers repeatedly as they waited for the performance to end — some who fell asleep woke up startled when instruments played accented notes over the words.
When the performance finally ended, the families shuffled out of the building into the late afternoon glow of autumn, dressed unabashedly in their costumes and fully ready for Halloween.
(10/03/12 9:39pm)
Environmental issues are currently a hot topic, and Professor of Psychology Michelle McCauley has taken the issue to heart through her research in her conservation psychology lab.
For the past decade McCauley has been researching how underlying psychological needs and motivations relate to pro-environmental behavior.
“Many people thought that, if you just give people the science, there will be bliss and people will change their behaviors, but, no, it hasn’t happened,” said McCauley.
“One of the areas that I’m involved with right now is looking at environmental behavior and how we can understand or predict and encourage stronger environmental values,” she said.
In practice, this might look like a meticulous breakdown of how pro-environmental campaigns, like Less Meat Mondays, go about communicating their agendas, and whether or not these initiatives are provoking the desired response.
Yet McCauley notes there is great variability in pro-environmental values and subsequent behaviors, despite what science reveals. The fact is that those who care about the environment are more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviors, regardless of others’ opinions.
As McCauley puts it: “I have autonomy, and I own it.”
The concept of autonomy falls under Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which McCauley is using as a lens for her research.
Thesis student Olivia Blahut ’13 explained this concept further.
“Humans operate optimally when they’ve had their needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness met,” said Blahut. “And basically, once those three things are met in your life, then the things that you aspire to do are more intrinsically motivated … [and are] usually things that are a bit more noble.”
In the past four years, students have been working with McCauley in an effort to examine the extent to which personal well-being, as described in SDT, relates to participation in pro-environmental behavior. In particular, McCauley has expressed interest in relatedness, which describes one’s satisfaction in connections to others.
One student’s experiment looked at participant’s choices when provided with social normative information about pro-environmental behavior. This design was much akin to that of market researching, where companies measure the likelihood a person will buy a product once they learn that other people have it.
Interestingly, the experiment found a need for relatedness to be a better predictor of choice, even though it was not part of the manipulation.
This finding has been consistent with student surveys of the community.
“Often people who have need for relatedness, in particular, but also the other psychological needs not met, compensate,” said McCauley. “They end up with more of an extrinsic motivation. So things like status and materialism become a bigger part of a person’s personality. And those are things that correlate negatively with environmental behavior.”
Although her thesis is still in the beginning stages of development, Blahut plans to build on these results by studying the relationship between psychological need satisfaction and willingness to cooperate, particularly for the sake of the common good.
Danielle Baker ’13 is taking a different approach for her thesis, by dealing with “how time spent in nature can improve cognition and mood.”
Both theses address McCauley’s main goals, which deal with the desire to shift behavior to more pro-environmental standards, as well as discover better means to support people’s psychological health needs and build a healthy, engaged community.
“Staying engaged doesn’t just mean you do it when somebody tells you to turn off the light because it’s there, but rather say ‘Oh, that’s a great point. What else can I do?’” said McCauley.
“I can get people to use all this creativity that’s on campus to continue not only here but when they go out into the world. She continued, “There are some important discussions to be had, but you need to have that autonomy and freedom and intelligence to improve our world.”