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Cathedrals, Museums, Crepes and Oysters— Beaufort Signature Students Experience the Environment and French Maritime Culture in Brittany p. 2
The course’s itinerary provided students with a daily balance of intellectual, cultural and recreational pursuits, with ample time left for reflection and discussion in the evenings and during rides between sites in the group’s nine-passenger rental van.
After flying into Paris on Oct. 5 and making their way by train to the Atlantic coast, the class spent its first day in Brittany exploring the area around Brest, the region’s largest port and urban hub.
They visited a modern lighthouse and the ruins of a 10th century abbey at Pointe St. Matthieu, and headed to the picturesque fishing village of Le Conquet, where the hierarchy of boats at moorings piqued their curiosity. The boats moored farther up the estuary “rested upright on the mud with the aid of stilts when the tide was low,” they wrote in one of their first virtual postcards. “Are the fees for moorings up estuary less than those down estuary? Do they rotate moorings based on who needs or wants to fish when?”
Days two and three in Brittany were spent exploring the Parc Regional d’Armorique, a sprawling regional park encompassing more than 425,000 acres of rocky coastline, heaths, historic sites, farms and 39 towns and villages clustered along the Crozon peninsula at France’s westernmost tip.
For Eminhizer, who hopes to pursue a career in coastal tourism development after graduating with her Master of Environmental Management degree this May, speaking with park managers and historians about their management philosophy was especially useful.
“The management of the French park system, whether it’s fully executed or not, represents a really unique approach,” she says. “It’s designed to protect an area’s heritage as well as its natural beauty. Towns can decide whether or not they want to be part of a park. If they do, they have to follow guidelines to reduce development’s impact on the environment and encourage sustainable economic growth. That’s different from the American model.”
In the days that followed, Van Dover and her students learned about shellfish cultivation and pollution mitigation projects from experts at the Institute Francoise pour la Recherche et l’Exploitation de la Mer; visited a working, family-run oyster farm; toured the abbey of Mont St. Michel and learned about its famous tidal estuary; observed mussel cultivation at Le Vivier sur Mer; studied tidal energy at La Rance; toured labs and an industrial pilot plant for seaweed culture and processing at the Center for Algal Research and Valorization; and observed local marine life at the Roscoff Marine Biological Laboratory.
In addition to Eminhizer and Davenport, the class included MEM students Abra Bacchioni and Jennifer Jackson, and Gettysburg College undergraduate Leslie Rieck.
As with all Beaufort Signature courses, preparation for the trip was a key to ensuring that the students gained the maximum benefits from it, Van Dover says.
Students took part in hours of discussions about French maritime culture and environmental practices leading up to their departure. Over informal dinners of crepes and other iconic French fare at Van Dover’s house, they discussed the course’s required reading assignments, and met with aquaculturists from the Beaufort area who had been to France and could talk about the innovative practices being employed there.
After returning to the Marine Lab, the students researched answers for questions that had been raised on the trip, and took turns leading class discussions on them. As a capstone project, each student prepared an annotated photolog providing a scholarly summary of what she saw and learned in Brittany, and the follow-up research she had done since returning.
“The point of a Beaufort Signature course is not merely what you do on the trip, but what you bring back from it,” Van Dover says.
Or, as French novelist Marcel Proust wrote about his own travels to Brittany, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
Tim Lucas is the Nicholas School’s national media relations and marketing specialist.