Michael Lange

Assistant Professor, Core Division;

Anthropologist and folklorist

Favorite aspect of teaching at Champlain College:

the ‘Aha’ moment

Making connections

“Anything people do can be analyzed anthropologically. It lets me poke my nose into a lot of corners and go down lots of different rabbit holes,” says Assistant Professor Michael Lange. He models that kind of intellectual curiosity in the classroom, holding up an imaginary string of ideas and saying, “Show me how this”—the ‘idea’ in his left hand—“connects to this” in his right.

The process of learning to make those connections can be challenging, but the step-by-step process he teaches leads to what he calls ‘the Aha moment.’ “Students learn to run information through the filter of different disciplines and they begin to see what they can do with this knowledge. They may have lived in a black and white world, but now they see there are lots of gray areas—and how to evaluate them.”