Blue sky, eager faculty, and fresh snow greeted arriving students on Wednesday, January 22, the first day of Maine Coast Semester 64. Parents and siblings helped unpack students’ belongings from cars while our workhorse Bob, with Farm Manager Megan Phillips at the reins, clopped back and forth between the parking lot and cabins, pulling wagon loads of suitcases, backpacks, bedding, musical instruments, and even a treasured stuffed animal or two.  In the afternoon, parents met with Read More

I’m excited to announce the launch of Chewonki’s new Alumni & Friends Program. This program will invigorate and centralize Chewonki’s efforts to connect with alumni and friends from all programs through reunions, regional events, strategic communications, and more. The purpose of this work is to provide a strong foundation for fundraising and enrollment activities and to support Chewonki’s mission of challenging people to “build thriving, sustainable communities throughout their Read More

It was a perfect day to stroll over to the farm and see what Megan Phillips and Lisa Beneman are up to... Read More

You can hold your phone in front of a fern and get an immediate plant i.d. Take your device into the forest at springtime, push a button to broadcast a cardinal’s song, and another cardinal will swoop into view. Type “turkey tail mushroom” into your browser and 21,100,000 results surface.  So why sit for hours, paper and pencil in wet hands, rain creeping through the seams of your slicker, crouched and tired, all to draw a twig? Maine Coast Semester alumni know the reason why. Read More

Maine Coast Semester math teachers Katie Curtis and Liz Burroughs had their precalculus students doing something fishy last week: calculating an equation to describe the curve of a pilot whale’s spine and then plotting points of the curve on a swath of graph paper. One student, Dylan Stachtiaris, went farther, using graphing software called Desmos to create the perfect outline of the whale’s entire body. Curtis and Burroughs, who co-teach the course, enjoy helping their students see how Read More

Most of us, consciously or unconsciously, carry in our heads annotated maps of the places we love. Maine Coast Semester English teacher Sarah Rebick asked her “Literature and the Land” students each to make a map of “the place they think of as home,” she explains, at the start of Semester 63 in September. Those maps included depictions ranging from a desktop to summer camps and family homes and even a New Mexico ski mountain.  That was then. Last week, Rebick asked those same students, now Read More

In November, the award-winning author, journalist, and culture critic Colin Woodard joined us at Chewonki to speak to Maine Coast Semester students about Maine history and identity. He’s the perfect person to do it; he dissected Maine in his bestselling book The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier, exploring his home state’s history and environment, probing the tension between coastal Mainers and newcomers “from away” and the locals’ stubborn inclination Read More