STUDENT PRESENTATIONS

GEOG 298-001: Secret Life of Coffee
(keep scrolling for GEOG 298-H01 and GEOG 287 projects)

Students in GEOG 298-001 were required (among other things!) to prepare slides that tell some part of the coffee story in a given country. Ordinarily each group of 2-3 students would work together on a poster. The Spring 2020 is a set of slides for each such group.

Three cups offered by the farmer at El Toledo Coffee Plantation
during the BSU Costa Rica travel course in January 2020

Please visit each slide set in turn (you can press <SHIFT> when clicking to open each set in a new window.

When you open SLIDES,
Click <Present> for
the best viewing.

BRAZIL -  Jake Anderson, Brooke Gonsalves
COLOMBIA - Brian Damon, Erin Hallam
GUATEMALA - Bruno Tamurrini, Nate Irwin
MEXICO - Mackayla Gouvia
NICARAGUA - Pedro Reis
PERU - Shaniely Fernandez-Chico, Zak Labonte
VIETNAM - Alexa Shearns, Katie Yanchuck, Tayla Sypek

We have recommended a particular coffee for each country; students had the option of referencing the specific coffees in their presentations. These are the coffees each group would be serving in tiny cups at an in-person tasting. Please visit the BYOB page if you would like to order these single-origin coffees for your home -- with the exception of the Vietnam coffee, these all come from Massachusetts roasters.

The Secret Life of Coffee explores geography both globally and locally. In addition to the tasting event, students are required to visit and study local coffee shops. Because social distancing began just as students were beginning to make those visits, the assignment became one of studying cafes that were local ... but at a distance. Each student identified a café in an assigned state outside of New England and prepared a digital presentation. In addition, each student prepared an entry for the course blog that has featured student (and professor) reports on approximately 200 independent cafés since 2011.

After the tasting, you can listen to
 Coffee Talks by the professor and by

alumni who started their
 coffee professions in this class!

GEOG 298-H01: Secret Life of Coffee, Honors

The Commonwealth Honors section of Secret Life of Coffee connected the local and global themes of the course by drawing on two ongoing endeavors at BSU. The earlier of these is the proposal for a Ben Linder Café at Bridgewater State. The proposal was initiated in 2010 by students in our coffee courses, some of whom were able to visit a café of the same name that was built in Nicaragua with the support of a social entrepreneur with a graduate certificate from Bridgewater State.

Students in the 2012 Geography of Coffee travel course (several of whom also took this Secret Life of Coffee
seminar) visit the hydroelectric plant in Bocay, Nicaragua. Ben Linder was doing survey work
 for this project when he was assassinated. More than 100 BSU students have visited his grave in Matagalpa,
where he remains an icon of sustainable development and social justice,
two institutional values of Bridgewater State University.

The other major initiative is the United Nations Global Goals for Sustainable Development, which have been the subject of much interdisciplinary curriculum development in recent years. The Global Goals, as they are more commonly known, are also increasingly important in K-12 curricula in our region.

Students in this small Honors class chose some of the goals, researched examples of those goals in action, and discussed how a campus café could operate in ways to advance these goals. Their progress suggests that most or ALL of the Global Goals could be incorporated into a visionary café that would allow BSU not only to teach about social and environmental sustainability, but to exemplify it.

Global Goal 4: Quality Education 
The Ben Linder Cafe & Education - Marissa Bradstreet
How the Ben Linder Cafe at BSU Would Impact Students’ Education - Jade Monte

Global Goal 8: Decent Work & Economic Growth
How the Ben Linder Café in BSU Supports Global Goal 8 -- Kaue Gabriel-Dasilva

Global Goal 12: Responsible Consumption

A Cup to Satisfy Everyone -- Matthew Cady

Global Goal 13: Climate Action
The Ben Linder Café and Climate Change - Nicholas Herd

Global Goal 17: Partnerships
Creating Cultivation and Collaboration with COFFEE - Lorrhan Ferreira

GEOG 285: New Orleans, Global City

This is not a class about coffee, but it is a one-credit symposium for Commonwealth Honors students, in which coffee was sometimes discussed and always served! I will be leading a similar course in the fall: Detroit, Arts City.

City of Music - Paul Goldring

Hurricane Katrina - Yalinet Mantilla

Crime Rates - Lia Cocomazzi 

Indigenous Tribes - Jalila Waller

Latin American City - Paul Landry

Race and Ethnicity - Marc Bercy

Population Fluctuations - Ashley Carpenter

Shrinking Land - Kaue Gabriel-Dasilva

We sincerely hope you have enjoyed this virtual tasting event. As soon as conditions allow, we will organize an on-campus reception to share coffee in real life and to celebrate the contributions of the students in these three classes.