#CoffeeWeek (Not Weak)

Coffee Week (Not Weak) is one of the first courses to be offered in a new format at Bridgewater State University. The concept for the course came immediately to mind when the new dean of the College of Continuing Education invited faculty members to teach intensive summer courses spanning just one or two weeks (one week of all-day sessions or two weeks of half days).

I already teach two courses on coffee. One is a travel course exploring coffeelands in Nicaragua each January (and soon to be offered in Peru and perhaps Ethiopia); the other is a seminar in which second-year students develop speaking skills by working together on projects about coffee production in specific countries and by individual presentations on local coffee shops.

Coffee Week (Not Weak) offered a third option -- visiting coffee shops and roasters in our region as a group. I originally intended devote a lot of classroom time to some of the great films about coffee and some guest speakers, but I eventually realized that our region has so much to offer that a roving classroom would be best -- and speakers could meet us in cafes!

My Coffee Coach sign and the Dean's Beans bumper sticker
became temporary tattoos for our class van.
I could not resist taking a dig at the coffee nemesis that somehow
remains on our campus, despite various
 pronouncements on justice and sustainability. 

More background about the course is posted on my "main blog" Environmental Geography, which also includes scores of coffee posts that make every possible connection, from sustainability to mermaids.

We visited all of the sites shown above -- sites visited on a given day share a color. Coffee-savvy readers will notice that we did not get into Acton, Boston, Providence, Tiverton, Provincetown, Wareham, and many other places in our region with great coffee connections. This course could easily fill a fortnight of long days, just within easy day trips of our campus (which sadly has no cafe of its own).

This particular blog was created to give students (and me) the opportunity to share some of what we learned during Coffee Week. (Our #coffeeweek hashtag will also bring up some of their public posts on social media.) Because we spent most of our 40 hours together in the cafes and roasters, we did not have time to write extensively about all of them. In the posts below, each student reflects on a site visit that she (or he) found especially meaningful. I include one of my own as well. In the POTPOURRI post, I provide a brief discussion of each visit.

Throughout the week, we shared photos with each other. Explore the
CoffeeWeek 2016 Flickr Album for some sites that we did not get to include in this blog.
See the Coffee Maven's Coffee Collection for many more coffee-related photo albums. 

Stay tuned ... next summer I hope to offer Coffee Week (Not Weak) again and to introduce the New Bedford Fortnight, two weeks of afternoon sessions, each involving a different local institution in Whaling City.