What is NELP?

NELP is a University of Michigan academic program that takes place off campus during the Spring half-term. UM faculty and other staff teach the courses, and students earn regular UM credit.

The program takes place at Camp Wohelo on Sebago Lake in Maine. For six and a half weeks, 40 students and 12 staff members live and work together closely, reading New England authors, writing, and exploring the New England countryside, its people, culture, and history.

In addition to formal academic work in literature and writing, staff and students offer non-credit instruction in canoeing, camping, art, and nature studies. Students teach or co-teach classes as part of their NELP experience.

NELP also includes trips to places of natural and cultural interest, including several three-day hiking and camping trips.

Camp facilities are simple though there are showers and toilets. Cabins are unheated, but a heated area is available for reading and classes. The weather is cold when the program begins, but by the time NELP ends in mid-June, the weather is warm, and summer has started.

NELP's Educational Philosophy

Aristotle says that learning is one of life's greatest pleasures, and we at NELP believe that diverse kinds of learning are all valuable and pleasurable. Accordingly, we provide opportunities for NELPers to learn about things as different (or similar) as the rhythm of a poem and the song of a bird, the shaping of a piece of pottery and the shaping of a novel, the seasoning of a stew
and the seasoning of a style. We believe that intellectual and physical challenges are often parallel and that each kind of learning reinforces other kinds. We try to respond to students' interests and to draw on students' abilities, harmonizing special interests with the central purposes of the program. Each year NELP is different because of the interests and talents of the participants.

Learning at NELP is steeped in nature rather than in the constructed environment of Ann Arbor. Communal living--in which students and teachers share work, recreation, and academic experiences--further intensifies learning.

NELP is a cooperative community. All NELPers belong to work groups. Work responsibilities rotate among the groups, which prepare meals, wash dishes and pots, and clean common areas. NELP begins with a work day during which equipment is unpacked and camp set up, and it ends with another work day to pack it all up again.

At NELP life is unified, and its rhythms are dictated by that fact, not by the demands of one or more separate parts. We live, work, relax, and study together. Life there is full, but the frantic "all nighter" is as out of place as the frenetic Ann Arbor party.

We have classes every day, but we also have oppor-tunity for communing with nature, for quiet conversations with other NELPers, and for solitude. NELPers can find the right balance between solitude and group activity.

The Academic Program

NELP students earn 8 hours of credit. Although NELP's academic work is taught as a single integrated academic experience, the credits appear on transcripts
as three separate courses:

English 473 Topics in American Literature (3 cr.)

English 317 Literature and Culture (2 cr.)

English 324 Creative Writing (3 cr.)

The program emphasizes the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Sarah Orne Jewett, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Carolyn Chu, Louise Glück, and/or other 18th through 20th century writers of various backgrounds.

NELP offers creative writing workshops, but most writing is done in a journal. Journal writing is required and is central to NELP education. The journals are both personal and academic. Every NELPer belongs to a journal group, which meets twice a week for discussion and sharing. Writing assignments of various sorts are connected with the readings, and they are supplemented by writing on topics of the students' own choosing. Student writing often explores creative expression, the natural world and the New England environment, and the writer's response to the NELP experience.

NELP courses are graded. The academic program requires completion of a reading list, active work in the journal, and vigorous participation in classes and in the journal group.