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By MEREDITH GOAD, Staff Writer Sunday, April 15, 2007

WATERVILLE - As Cynthia Anderson-Bauer poured a yellowish liquid into a row of plastic cups, she warned her classmates that the concoction "tastes a lot better than it looks, you guys."

Her classmates in this Jane Austen course at Colby College were acting as guinea pigs, testing out a punch recipe that Jane Austen herself may have sipped at a gala ball. The lack of a good strainer left bits of green tea floating in it, but otherwise it tasted a lot like lemonade.

"It was supposedly the Prince Regent's favorite punch to have at balls," Anderson-Bauer, a sophomore, explained "Of course, he served it with rum and champagne and all kinds of other forms of alcohol. We thought we'd make it for the class and see what you guys thought."

How many college literature classes have a refreshments committee? This one does because the students are preparing for their own gala ball, where the women will be dressed like Austen in empire-waisted "gowns" and wrap themselves in lace shawls. The men will sport cravats, top hats, and britches that show off their calves ­ the 18th-century equivalent of washboard abs. The public is invited to the class' April 29 living-history ball, which will be held from 3 to 6 p.m. at the Waterville Public Library. Everyone is encouraged to come in costume. Don't know how to dance 18th-century style? No worries, the students will teach you a waltz and a jig.

The ball will be the culmination of a "civic engagement" course that's being taught by Tilar Mazzeo, an assistant professor of English, and funded by the school's Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement. In addition to the ball, the students have been leading book club discussions at the Waterville library.

The idea of a civic engagement course is to take learning out of the classroom and into the community, where students can do more hands-on projects and interact with the public while they are digging up and absorbing information about the topic they are studying.

With Jane Austen experiencing a resurgence in popularity, it wasn't hard to fill the 30 seats in Mazzeo's class. Students had to be turned away. "It's been really a terrific experience," Mazzeo said. "The students have taken initiative for things that I would never have expected. I mean, they have other classes, and sometimes you wouldn't know it."

UNIQUELY ENGAGING

Civic engagement courses are nothing new, but the concept doesn't lend itself well to every course, said Alice Elliott, assistant director for community outreach and programming at the Goldfarb Center.

Previous civic engagement courses at Colby have included environmental science courses in which students helped with water-quality sampling at regional lakes, and a first-year English composition course that led to a mentoring program that now involves 350 Colby students tutoring in the public schools.

What's intriguing about the Jane Austen course, Elliott said, is that "it's the kind of course where you don't often see this happening."

"People just have a hard time imagining teaching a literature course that has a really significant community component to it," she said. "And so this was, I thought, a really unusual idea."

The students are reading five of Austen's six major novels and have traditional classroom discussions about the themes of the books. But they also put the events they read about into historical and cultural context by researching things like fashion, food and dance.

The costume committee for the ball, for example, has researched what kind of clothes Austen wore, how the fashions in her books have been represented in film adaptations over the years, and the political and social history behind the production of textiles both in England and New England.

COURTESY OF AUSTEN

Much of their information has come from reading Jane Austen's letters, Mazzeo said. "She has all these letters in which she talks about making dresses, what she wore to balls."

The committee has been making dresses for the April 29 ball out of nightgowns ­ a modern article of clothing that often has the empire waist that typified ladies' fashion during the Regency Period. The dresses of the period also typically had short, puffy sleeves.

"We also learned that there are tons of different kinds of dresses," said Elena Cogliano, a sophomore on the committee. "Morning dress, walking dress, evening dress, day dress, visiting dress. They're all basically the same pattern. They vary in the fabric and accessories."

The committee will be supplying women who attend the gala ball with fans, along with a guide to the "language of the fan." The way a woman held her fan said a lot about her availability to admiring gentlemen.

For gentlemen, the way in which they tied their cravat revealed much about their social status.

"If it were tied incorrectly, or messily, they wouldn't speak to you for the rest of the night at the ball," said Kayla Zemsky, a sophomore who wore an Austenesque dress to class recently. "I think there were at least 32 different ways to tie cravats."

Sam Jones, a junior, and four other members of the dance committee have been teaching their classmates 18th-century dances, their routines filled with bowing and curtsying. At the April 29 ball, they'll be teaching the public the "Duke of Kent's Waltz" as well as a jig. John Kuehune, a Waterville musician with an interest in 18th-century music, will be playing the fiddle for accompaniment.

RULES AND FRUITCAKE

The lessons the students have received in ballroom etiquette have been eye-opening.

"What we've found is that there's a lot of rules that go along with it," Jones said. "If a woman refused a gentleman's offer to dance, she was not allowed to dance for the rest of the night. That was one of the most interesting things we found."

The food committee has been researching what would have been served at an Austen-era ball. In addition to the punch, treats would have included pasties, which are a kind of meat pie, and Bath buns, a biscuit that contains raisins but is not very sweet.

"Fruitcakes were big, and marzipan," said Mae Ogorzaly, a sophomore who has been working on the refreshments.

The committee also researched sugar and alcohol as commodities, discovering that some people turned up their noses at these ingredients because they felt their purchase supported the slave trade.

The students searched for original Austen family recipes, even consulting the curator at Chawton, location of the house where Jane Austen spent the last eight years of her life and where she wrote "Emma," "Persuasion" and "Mansfield Park." Then they tried the recipes to make sure they would work. Some of them were too outdated.

"Jane Austen's mother, for example, wrote out the recipes, but she did it in a very poetic way, so she'd make a poem about how to make pound cake," said Jess Gunraj, a junior. "I think the main difficulty in making the recipes was just how to write it out so that anyone who picked up a recipe card would be able to figure out how to make this."

'DURABLE' LEARNING

This kind of research can be fun, but is it really teaching the students anything? Elliott and Mazzeo say that the civic engagement method reaches a broader group of students than traditional academics, requires them to take more responsibility for their own learning, and the learning may be "more durable" in some ways.

"One thing you worry about as faculty is, are they getting the same intellectual content?" Mazzeo said. "I actually think they get more out of it, but understand it at a personal level. They maybe understand a more narrow spectrum of things, but they understand a lot more detail."

Some of the students signed up for the class because they are already Jane Austen fans. Sheehan Lunt, a senior English major, and her friend Kaitlin Gangl traveled to London together and visited the places that were important in Jane Austen's life. They decided to sign up for the Colby course both to learn more about their favorite author and because they like the way Mazzeo teaches.

"I've been getting more out of Austen than I imagined in that we're learning more about the culture," Sheehan said.

Other students were more attracted to the civic engagement aspect of the course.

Tim Brown, a senior on the dance committee, is an English major who signed up because he had a positive experience last spring in a civic engagement poetry class.

"We went and taught poetry in Oakland to fourth-graders," he said. "It was a really enjoyable experience. The class worked together a lot, and so it was a much more interactive class than your standard literature classes."

Tyler Ingram, a junior, is an English major and education minor who values the firsthand experience he's getting working on the book club committee, where he can "get a feel for facilitating a book club general discussion on a piece of literature since that's what I want to do. I want to teach."

Ingram also likes the idea of helping to get Austen's works back into popular circulation.

"They're considered classics, but Austen clearly didn't write them just to be read in an academic sense," he said. "It's kind of getting the fun back into reading books. In such a digitally mediated era, I think it's an important thing."

Staff Writer Meredith Goad can be contacted at 791-6332 or at: mgoad@pressherald.com