Flora, fauna, first-years
How a new orientation program is helping the Exeter community more fully embrace Harkness learning and living.
Dan Hummel leads his group of preps in an orientation activity at the Browne Center.
It’s a crystal-clear Sunday morning in early September as the sound of wheels on crushed gravel slowly becomes audible. Soon, four long, lumbering First Student school buses roll through the gates of the Browne Center for Innovative Learning. Situated on a gorgeous wooded property adjoining the Great Bay Estuary in Durham, the center, just 20 minutes from Exeter’s campus, is a renowned experiential education site affiliated with the University of New Hampshire.
As the buses’ doors creak open, 203 students, all members of the class of 2021, spill out. Carrying backpacks and bagged lunches, they amble down to an open field. Here they are greeted warmly by a cadre of purple-clad Browne Center staff members, many of whom work full-time elsewhere as guidance counselors or social workers. Each is considered a master facilitator, fluent in the language of engagement.
Instructed to gather in a circle, the preps nervously assemble. A lanky, stubbled facilitator commences the program by introducing the day’s leitmotif. Thrusting a pointer finger into the air indicates a brilliant idea, he says, while a spread palm is a proxy for an open mind. Pursing his lips and letting his finger fall to his waiting palm, he makes a warbly whistling noise like a spent bottle rocket falling back to earth. “That’s the sound of a great idea meeting an open mind.”
Next, and as if to replicate a Harkness classroom, the students are divided into groups of 12. Interspersed among them are Exeter instructors and a handful of alumni from the class of 1971. The latter, inspired and organized by classmates Sam Perkins and Bill Rawson, have joined forces with the class of 2021 to pilot a symbiotic partnership intended to build over the next four years as the class of ’71 prepares to celebrate its 50th reunion in the same year that the class of ’21 graduates.