Each issue of COA reflects the pursuits, activities, and ethos of the COA community.

“A Global Education Grounded in Community” celebrates the work that the greater COA community is doing throughout the world, which of course includes right on campus. It also commemorates fifteen years of the Davis United World Scholars Program that has made COA such a global campus, and twenty years of our Yucatán term. You’ll find articles, essays, short stories, artwork, poetry, and photography by and about our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and supporters, along with news items and class and community notes.

Come fall, 2016, we’ll be celebrating the connections between COA and Acadia National Park. Please send your poems, short stories, art work, and article ideas to Donna Gold, COA editor.

Latest from the COA Magazine

  • NEWS
    Cracking the Coconut: COA’s Yucatán Program

    The Yucatán Program—with its language immersion in either Spanish or Mayan—is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year. As COA’s first ongoing off-campus program, it has transformed the lives of multiple students, among them Rebecca Haydu ’16.

  • NEWS
    The Ears and Eyes of American Music
    Aaron Lewis ’05 takes down-home American music across the ocean, with his Corn Potato String Band. Why the name? “We’re the ears and eyes of America.”
  • NEWS
    Waste is a Verb: The Odyssey of Lisa Bjerke ’13, MPhil ’16
    Lisa Bjerke ’13, MPhil ’16 is transforming how COA thinks about what and how we dispose. Waste, she says, is a verb; not a noun.
  • NEWS
    Mozambique Sustenance
    Helena Shilomboleni ’09 is completing her PhD in the social and ecological sustainability of food systems at Canada’s University of Waterloo, examining food security in Mozambique through two local organizations.
  • NEWS
    Baltic Fisheries
    Edward Stern ’03 has dipped his feet into almost every aspect of the ocean fisheries world: commercial fishing, policy, government, science, technology, even boatbuilding. He currently works for The Fisheries Secretariat in Stockholm, Sweden.
  • NEWS
    Portland Stories
    Maine resident Marjolaine Whittlesey ’05 is the Teaching Artist Associate at The Telling Room, a nonprofit writing center for students ages six to eighteen in Portland, Maine, which recently received one of a dozen National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Awards from First Lady Michelle Obama.
  • NEWS
    Exploration Antarctica

    Alex Borowicz ’14, Antarctic field guide and PhD student in ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University, New York, speaks about his love of the creatures and vistas of the South Pole.

  • NEWS
    Island Activism
    Hiyasmin Saturay ’15, creator of the film Pangandoy: The Manobo fight for land, education and their future on the struggles of a Philippine indigenous group, speaks about her commitment to her homeland.
  • NEWS
    Island Journals: Great Duck Island
    Through observation, field research, and archival searches, summer research sessions by COA students on Great Duck are amassing a thorough ecology of this one small island.
  • NEWS
    Island Journals: Mount Desert Rock

    Battered by waves, coursed by wind night and day, Mount Desert Rock’s location—twenty-one miles out to sea—makes it an excellent platform for studying whales, seals, and other marine life.

  • NEWS
    Sunblind Almost Motorcrash
    An excerpt from writing lecturer Daniel Mahoney’s recent publication—a collection of reviews of imaginary albums by imaginary bands.
  • NEWS
    An Island Return
    Bonnie Tai, education faculty member, reflects on a sabbatical studying traditional Chinese in her homeland of Taiwan, while also contemplating the integration of Buddhism and feminism.
  • NEWS
    Abandoned to Nature

    Audubon guide Gabriel Willow ’00 offers New Yorkers and visitors a sense of the  natural wonders of Manhattan and its islands.

  • NEWS
    The Restaurant: Popping Up Delicacies
    Eloise Schultz ’16 has been a singing dishwasher at The Restaurant for the past three years. In addition to literature and education, she maintains a passion for cannolis.
  • NEWS
    Creativity in Motion: Tawanda Chabikwa ’07
    Tawanda is devoted to exploring the currents that flow beneath our lives, the ones that bind us as humans. Stories and myths — whether from science, contemporary theory, or ancient mystics — nourish him, as does the gesture of dance, the movement that illuminates being
  • NEWS
    Leaping into the Feature: Nancy Andrews’ “Strange Eyes”
    With three decades of diverse artistic production behind her, this drawing, painting, puppet- and video-making Guggenheim Fellow has embarked on her first feature-length film, The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes.
  • NEWS
    Leaders of the Track: The Human Ecology of Blocking and Jamming

    Ten women stand tight in a pack on an indoor track. They are ready for battle. This is roller derby, contact sport on skates.

  • NEWS
    A Sense of Self and Place: The Community School
    Through an integrated, expeditionary curriculum, weekly outings, and town meeting-style gatherings, The Community School has found new ways to cultivate a sense of self and of place.
  • NEWS
    Ernie McMullen’s Lasting Impact
    Ernie McMullen retired this spring. The many skills he has taught and cultivated offer students a direct, intuitive way of interacting with their material environment, and of finding their place within it.
  • NEWS
    Scouring the Waters: Chris Petersen’s Decades of Marine Biology
    As a researcher, Chris Petersen is focused on the reproductive behavior and biology of fish. He says. “I am, most of all, a behavioral ecologist, trying to understand why animals behave the way they do.”