Alumni Who Teach
Jan Plan brings Colby graduates back to Mayflower Hill to share their expertise and connect with students and the campus
Ned Warner ’09 returned to Colby to teach a Jan Plan course because his Jan Plan experiences as a student were life changing. He hopes to create the same for current students.
Bonnie Maldonado ’16 came back to share her love of Caribbean cooking and culture—and her commitment to the Pugh Center.
Heather Jahrling ’21 returned to fully enjoy Colby in ways she could not as a student, because her time on Mayflower Hill was interrupted by Covid-19. “The opportunity to come back and experience some of the things we missed was really appealing,” she said. “I’m so glad to be here again.”
The faculty parking pass is pretty sweet, too.
These alumni are among the many Colby graduates who return to campus each winter to teach Jan Plan courses in their areas of expertise. For some, coming back is about reconnecting with the College, former professors, and old friends. For others, teaching Jan Plan offers the chance to gain valuable college-level teaching experience.
And for all, it’s about finding meaningful ways to give something back, to return the favor of a Colby education, and perhaps become a positive and lasting influence on the next generation of Colby students.
Jan Plan has been a uniquely Colby tradition since 1962. The four-week term began as an experiment with the academic calendar and a way to encourage students to try something different or learn something new. Today, students are still encouraged to explore their imagination and try new things, such as carpentry, blacksmithing, or even aviation, and it’s also a time for research, internships, and study-abroad experiences.
Mindful photography
An art major at Colby who specialized in photography, Warner is teaching a course called Mindful Photography: Exploring the Inner Landscape. He instructs students in the basics of digital photography while giving them lessons in meditation and mindfulness.
He learned both at Colby—photography from Professor of Art Gary Green and meditation and mindfulness from Peter Harris, Zacamy Professor of English, Emeritus.
“I realized there was an opportunity to teach Jan Plan, and I thought that it would be so much fun,” said Warner, who lives an hour from campus in Freeport. “I wanted to design a course that I would love to take if I were going to college again, so I designed a curriculum around that intention.”
Students use photography and a series of readings and discussions to explore their inner landscape. The course asks, “What makes you feel most alive, and how can this be expressed with photography?” Course texts include The Mindful Photographer by Sophie Howarth and The Little Book of Contemporary Photography: Seeing With Wonder, Respect And Humility (Justice and Peacebuilding) by Howard Zehr.
Warner begins each session with a guided meditation that lasts from five to upwards of 20 minutes before moving into photography lessons. He is teaching students to use a digital single-lens reflex camera. Prior to this course, most of the 12 students had taken photos only with an iPhone or something similar.
One class, he took students to the arboretum and instructed them to stand in one area for 20 minutes and take just 10 photos during that time, an exercise that forced them “to really focus” as they paused for an extended period and keenly observed their surroundings and considered their presence in it.
In addition to his work as a photographer, Warner is a filmmaker. His 2022 documentary Mother Daughter, a coming-of-age story about a Colorado woman who used dog-sledding and playwriting as a way to find herself, won the Audience Award at the Cannes Short Film Festival.
He learned documentary filmmaking through his own Jan Plan experiences. He traveled to New York the day Barack Obama became the first African American president and interviewed residents about their reaction for a short film called The Inauguration in Harlem. For another Jan Plan, he and another Colby student went to India for an independent study project to document the impact of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on tribal communities in the Indian state of Gujarat.
After graduating from Colby, he moved to Colorado, where he got his master’s in education, taught for a time, then made his career in filmmaking and photography before returning to Maine. He is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in photography and filmmaking at Maine Media Workshops + College.
“I love teaching again. My students are awesome. They are incredible. They are engaged, they are with it, and they are smart. I say somewhat confidently, I am having as much fun as I hope they are—and I am having a blast,” he said. “If I can give them a doorway into being fully and truly present, even just a little bit, that is valuable.”
Perhaps even life changing.
Caribbean food, culture, and connection
A Condon Medal winner, Maldonado came back to teach a course called Cooking Marvels and Tasting Morsels of Caribbean History. It combines cooking, eating, reading, and digesting Caribbean food and texts to understand the region’s history, theory, and memory. Themes include sovereignty, U.S. involvement and occupation, agriculture, labor, tourism, and migration, both internal and external.
She is teaching from the book Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora by Bryant Terry, a collection of recipes and stories that interrogate what Black food is across the African diaspora. It’s hard to talk about food without tasting it, so Maldonado includes a cooking component, as well.
“One of the best things to do with teaching is to have students walk out with a tangible skill, and to me cooking is a great way to do that. I am not an expert at cooking at all, but to me the best way to learn something is through an embodied practice,” said Maldonado, who is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. “Students learn Caribbean history and theory through gathering together, cooking, eating, and having conversations about their experiences of and with the Caribbean, what they perceive the Caribbean to be, and how a collective of scholars, writers, and thinkers experience and are of the Caribbean.”
Maldonado was born in the United States, but both of her parents were born and raised in the Dominican Republic. Growing up in the Bronx, New York, Maldonado and her immediate family visited extended family in the Dominican Republic every summer, instilling in her a sense of place, connection, and belonging.
Classes convene four days a week, and on Thursdays students gather at the Pugh Center to cook. It was essential for Maldonado that her students meet at the Pugh Center, because the center and the community it fostered were vital to her success at Colby. Specifically, Maldonado mentioned SOBLU—Students Organized for Black and Latinx Unity, which was known as SOBHU during Maldonado’s time here—as key to her Colby experience and part of why she wanted to come back. “They were and continue to be my lifelines,” she said.
“This has been a year of returns for me—returning back, reconnecting with family and friends—and so it felt aligned for me to return to this place. The way that I have designed my class brings me back to the spaces that helped develop me, and specifically the Pugh Center,” she said. “The Pugh Center values are very much aligned with the values that I hope people walk out of the class with and gather, which is people coming together to have cross-cultural conversions and just to be in the space together and be at ease.”
At Colby, Maldonado majored in American studies with a minor in women, gender, and sexuality studies and Italian. She is earning a Ph.D. in Africana studies at Penn, and her goal is to teach at a liberal arts college like Colby after she finishes.
Returning as a teacher to the campus that shaped her as a scholar has been profoundly rewarding, she said. In returning to this place of influence, she hopes to become an influence on the students she is teaching. “Should you need support,” she has told them, “I am another layer in your network you can reach out to.”
Going deep
For Jahrling, coming back to teach a Jan Plan course was an easy decision. A proverbial no-brainer, she said.
“I have always wanted to be a professor, so this was the perfect way to start what will hopefully be a lifetime in the classroom,” said Jahrling, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Princeton. “Once my general exams and coursework were complete, I had more freedom in my schedule. I thought, ‘I want to teach a Jan Plan. I want to head back to Maine.’ Given everything my Colby professors have given me, this is one way I can pay it forward.”
She has wanted to teach since she began her collegiate career at Colby, and she credits Jim Fleming, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, Emeritus, for inspiring and guiding her. Jahrling double majored in STS and history at Colby. In addition to her doctorate in 20th-century American urban and technological history at Princeton, she is pursuing a certificate in the history of science.
Jahrling’s Jan Plan course is called Carceral Technologies, as it confronts the tools used to control or confine entire categories of people, from facial recognition software to electronic monitors to criminal risk assessment algorithms. Selecting their own technology to study, students consider what it means for society to make policy, police, and prison, “smart.”
The course aligns with the concepts of Colby’s STS major, which investigates the social, political, cultural, and ethical dimensions of science, technology, and medicine in relation to public policy issues. According to Jahrling, her course is a matter of social justice, a means for students to deconstruct structural power relations and imagine more liberatory futures.
Jahrling requested Diamond 242, the STS seminar room, as her classroom. That is where she spent many hours as a student and where she presented one of her honors theses. It’s a place that holds meaning and memories. “If I am going back, that is where I want to teach,” she said.
As a student, her Jan Plan experiences were transformative. One was a creative environmental storytelling course, and the other involved an internship at the National Museum of Bermuda, where she conducted intensive research on NASA’s Cooper’s Island space tracking station. Both were transformative because they allowed her to dig deep into an area of interest and focus.
They gave her insight into what an academic career might look like.
“There is something special about getting a chance to dive into a topic and research it at this level. You get to do that in grad school. You don’t often get to do that at the undergrad level. I knew it was special at the time, but looking back, I didn’t realize what a powerful opportunity it truly was. To have that flexibility, to have that choice, is a gift,” she said.
For Jahrling and for other alumni who return to teach, Jan Plan is a gift that keeps on giving.
