Meredith (“Mimi”) Garcia had the unique challenge of teaching “Apocalyptic Lit” amidst the COVID-19 hybrid year. Still, the central questions of the course remained, “Will the apocalypse bring total annihilation, transcendence, bloodthirsty zombies, or all of the above? Will it bring people together or tear them apart?” As a medium, fiction allows for distance from both the material and reality, enough to critically engage with the text. Despite the fantastical, sci-fi qualities to apocalyptic literature, Mimi stresses that each text, from The Walking Dead to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, speak to questions of human nature and of hope.
Mimi’s new course offering, “Globalization, Literature, & Film”, investigates how globalization and media have come to shape each other and our everyday lives. The course utilizes films like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and Walter Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries (2004) to discuss how politics, history, and cross-cultural encounters come to manifest in film. Mimi notes that the entire film industry and how we have come to watch film also plays a role in how we analyze and reflect on the relationship between literature and media—to be both critical of the past and the present.
Sixth Grade CFA Partnership
The Sixth Grade has a long relationship with the Center for Food Action Garden in Englewood. This garden supplies fresh, organic produce to families struggling with food insecurity, adding variety to their diets and supplying essential nutrients. This garden was first...
Sixth Grade Science
In sixth grade science, students start off the school year by learning how to make scientific observations. This allows them to explore our campus and garden, gather data, and understand the natural world and the processes that govern it. The scientific...
Apiary
Dwight-Englewood maintains two colonies of honey bees located near the Nettie Coit Garden. There is also a much smaller demonstration hive located in the Library, where one can see the bees moving about within the hive, which is made of glass. These bees pollinate...
Pollinator Border
The Nettie Coit Garden is surrounded by a pollinator border full of plants designed to attract bees, monarch butterflies, and other pollinators. These pollinators, attracted by the flowers in the pollinator border, go on to also pollinate the various vegetables in the...
Nettie Louise Coit Teaching Garden
The Nettie Lousie Coit Teaching Garden is a large organic garden situated on campus. As the name suggests, the primary purpose of this garden is to educate students and community members about sustainable agricultural practices such as crop rotation, cover cropping,...
Compost Arena + Initiatives
The Compost Arena has been growing exponentially, going from two tumblers to ten in just six years, in addition to moving to a new location in 2023. Currently, the compost arena has enough room to process a majority of compostable food scraps from the kitchen and the...
The Greenhouse
The Greenhouse, built alongside the Hajjar STEM Center, is a teaching space and laboratory for many groups: DIG and Environmental Science classes, AIRS and Focus students doing research, and the Environmental and Garden Clubs. The space allows students to start...
The Green Building Spaces (STEM, MS – LEED Certified Buildings)
Dwight-Englewood is proud to have two of its buildings LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified, awarded by the USGBC (U.S. Green Building Council). The first building, the Hajjar STEM Center – more commonly known as “STEM” – consists of seven...
US Garden Club Completes Rehabilitation of Lower School Garden Bed
The US Garden Club has been working hard over the past few weeks to rehabilitate the Lower School Garden, which had effectively been left fallow since the departure of long-time LS science teacher and avid gardener Beth Lemire. Now, the Garden Club has successfully...
US Garden Club Expands Relationship with CFA
On April 12, the Garden Club took a field trip to the organic vegetable garden at the Center for Food Action. While the Sixth Grade has a long-standing relationship with the CFA, having been the ones to originally construct this garden, this was the first organized...
