Note: The Nottingham Year is based on community: students living together in a flat leased by the college and having the opportunity to be involved in a community service project of their choosing. A Luther faculty director lives in a leased house near the student flat and serves as the resident director for the year. The faculty director coordinates/teaches four courses throughout the year which all students take.
The 2021-22 Nottingham program co-directors are Associate Professor of Art Ben Moore and Sarah Frydenlund.
Not often do we arrive abroad and nestle into our accommodation for ten cozy mandatory days with our traveling companions. Sarah and I are accompanied on this trip by our two and five year old daughters. These days have helped us get to know our new home more deeply than perhaps we might have if we had lept out to explore the sights and sounds of the city and beyond. Instead, we investigate every inch of the house and set up our family home for the year, ordering groceries and forgotten items, shifting and shuffling. At times it seems we could still be in Iowa, our routine is so unchanged, our world so small and needs so present.
Free from quarantine and in search of more space for everyone, we fill the remainder of our first month with adventures taking in thousands of years in history and varied geography, in just a few hundred miles. Standing at an overlook on Hadrian’s Wall, circa 122 AD, seriously doubting that anyone would ever consider taking it on, then slurping up ice cream in an English heatwave at St Margaret’s Bay near Dover, white cliffs and all. Traversing nearly a half-mile of sand to reach the sea waves at low tide on Brancaster Beach in North Norfolk or imagining Robin Hood hiding behind (or inside) ancient oaks like the 1000-year-old Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, we are captivated. We have lunch at a sustainably built cafe in the middle of the Pennines and head down the road to trek into a black as ink woodland leading to a splashing waterfall clearly articulating the geological formation of the area that made Hadrian’s Wall possible (Whin Sill, if you’re asking). We moor a narrowboat pub side on a Warwickshire canal for a quick bite on a sunny afternoon, and closer to home, wander the local markets and sample sausages from a local butcher—the peppery Cumberland came out the favorite. We are lucky as a family to have spent time in England prior to this trip, but we are smitten all over again.
Through our children’s eyes, we appreciate the capacity for beholding new spaces and places. A stop at a bookshop in Wells-next-the-Sea seems to disappear into a cozy nook to read without a peep. At the massive ruin of Barnard Castle, they instantly move in and determine the preferred window seat to admire their new home. We collect treasures from our adventures, identify a feather from the back garden (Goldfinch, probably), find stones to differentiate each beach, creating physical connections to their memories.
The slow days too have so much to show us about our place and this unique program. We pop out to the newsagents for a paper and forage for a tangy bramble on the way. A pint at a nearby pub, meeting the locals. At the house, which the girls now called home after traveling away from it and returning to it, we watch them play on the swing hung in the apple tree (planted by a director in 1990), plan trips and experiences for the students across this varied country, noting Director preferences and ideas: who planted what, turning over a picture to see who chose it and when, find Winnie the Pooh with an inscription of which the family gifted it to the shelves of the Director’s house—each discovery gives insight to the history and growth of the program. Over tea and biscuits, we hear from the Juggins’—dear friends of the program for most of its existence—about the strawberry patch that once filled the back garden and why the hedge between us has a pass near that back which drops two meters before rising again.
We, like directors before, have followed the path laid out over the fifty years of Luther College in Nottingham, each choosing when to add branches or prune back, to venture down different roads, finding new connections and practices with an eye on what is yet to come. It is a privilege and a responsibility to share in the five decades of history that offer students the opportunity to live as both citizens of Nottingham and ambassadors of Luther College. As we prepare for the imminent arrival of this year’s students, we are at once raring to go in our planning and preparing, imagining and exploring, and yet also happy to pause, settle in for a moment, and put the kettle on.
Comments
I'm so glad the program is back this year! It literally changed my life.
-Kendra Korte
Class of 2003
(Nottingham 2001-2002)
Currently living in Beeston.