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Outreach Programs

Faculty Speakers Bureau

Reed College facilitates a Speakers Bureau of faculty members who are available to address topics of interest and expertise to Portland area high school classes and clubs.   High School teachers should contact Barbara Amen, director of special programs (503-777-7259), to submit requests for a faculty speaker. The director wil take the teacher's information, contact the faculty member about availability, and then notify the teacher accordingly. While we will accommodate as many requests as possible, schedule conflicts and demands upon a faculty member's time make it difficult to complete all requests. Generally faculty members arrange no more than two presentations during the academic year. Fall break (October 15-19), January, Reed's spring break (March 17-21), and late May are times when Reed faculty often have the most flexibility to leave campus during high school hours.

High School teachers interested in having a Reed faculty member come to their class or after school club can facilitate the request process by providing the following information when making initial contact with the special programs office:

            1)  Name of teacher requesting a speaker
            2)  High School
            3)  Phone number and best time to reach teacher (including home number,
                  if appropriate)
            4)  Reed faculty member requested
            5)  Topic to be addressed
            6)  Class/group to be addressed
            7)  Year of students and size of class/group
            8)  Date and time frame for faculty member to address the class
                  (flexibility works best!)

2007-2008 list of available faculty members by department.  It also may be possible to accommodate requests for other Reed faculty members, or requests for topics other than those listed.

Art

Presentations on current gallery exhibits on-site at the Cooley Gallery or at the schools.
September 4—December 9, 2007        Marko Lulic/Peter Kreider
January 8—March 8, 2008                  The Norton Collection
April 8—June 8, 2008                         Jess

Biology

Professor David Dalton  

1)  Pacific Northwest forests
2)  Biological Legacy of Lewis & Clark

Professor Jay Mellies

1)  Spinach on the side: E. coli in our lives

Classics   

Professor Nigel Nicholson

1)  Tragedy          
2)  Epic         
3)  Greek and Roman culture

History

Professor Margot Minardi

1)  Movements and Monuments: remembering the American Revolution
2)  Did women have an American Revolution?
3)  The first Civil Rights movement:  abolitionism and citizenship in nineteenth-century America

Professor Joel Revill

1)  French anti-Semitism/the Dreyfus Affair
2)  Other topics possible in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and Modern Europe, and in intellectual history                        

Linguistics

Professor Matt Pearson          (January through May, late mornings)

1)  Language variation—how the world’s languages vary (or fail to vary) in their structure
2)  Doing language fieldwork—learning about language structure by learning how linguists gather data on unfamiliar languages (most effective as a workshop rather than a lecture)

Mathematics

Professor Irena Swanson

1)  Calendars and modular arithmetic  (history of calendars; the usual and unusual arithmetic behind
           them; on what day of the week were you born?)                   
2)  Perspective drawing and projective geometry
3)  Tessellations of the plane (with group theory)

Music

Professor Virginia Hancock

1)  Choral or small singing group rehearsal/coaching    
2)  Discussion of current Portland Opera production (if class is attending)

Physics

Professor David Griffiths

1)  Special relativity
2)  Elementary particles
3)  Quantum mechanics

Political Science

Professor Tamara Metz    

1)  Current Marriage Debates
2)  American Constitutional Democracy

Professor Marcus Schaper

1)  Environmental politics
2)  European politics
3)  Transatlantic relations

Psychology

Professor Kristen Anderson (also a trained special educator and clinical psychologist)

1)  Adolescents and stress/coping
2)  Adolescent alcohol and drug use disorders
3)  Eating disorders
4)  teacher in-service workshop

Professor Kyle Chambers

1)  How infants learn language
 

Professor Kathy Oleson

1)  Social psychology
2)  Stereotyping and prejudice
3)  The self
4)  Interpersonal perception and relationships

Spanish

Professor Iliana Alcántar

1)  Mexican literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
2)  Latin American film
3)  Mexican and transnational performance

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