Profile Series: Loyola University's Leading Example

This spring, Writing Professor Ron Tanner will embark on an historic preservation project that will take him more than 7,000 miles away to the Marshall Islands in Micronesia, a cluster of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There, he will spend five months teaching web design and storytelling to a group of about 30 students at the College of the Marshall Islands.

The project, funded through the National Park Service, attempts to help the Marshallese preserve their rapidly fading oral history.

“I want to teach these young people the importance of preserving their culture,” says Tanner, who explains that many Marshallese youth have begun to abandon their own traditions and culture in favor of a more generic global pop culture. “They need to reacquaint themselves with their culture so that they will want to promote and preserve it.”

Tanner will teach his students the fundamentals of storytelling and share global stories with them, followed by some from their own culture. The class will then take trips to speak with Marshallese elders throughout the islands, gathering cultural, historical and survival stories as well as information about customs such as chants, songs, weaving, navigation and tattooing.

When the class returns, they will translate the stories and post them on a Web site that Tanner has set up at http://mistories.org.

“I hope that this project will increase their pride for their culture and make them want to share it with the world,” says Tanner. “For me, the best part of teaching is seeing the students take charge of their own learning.”

Tanner earned his Ph.D. in literature, with a concentration in Creative Writing, from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and is proud that his passion for writing may help the Marshallese in some way.

“What I like about writing is it’s a way of making sense of the world,” says Tanner. “Writing is a form of adventure; you never know what will happen. It’s an act of discovery and that’s what makes it fun.”

The idea for this project originated in 1993 when Tanner took a trip to Micronesia to research a novel. He had lived there for a short time during his teenage years while his father was in the military and was familiar with the islands’ rich, largely undocumented history.

Tanner considered ways in which he could help the Marshallese, and credits Loyola with providing him the support and flexibility to pursue those aspirations.

“Loyola is a great place to work,” says Tanner, who joined Loyola in 1991. “The College wants to see its faculty grow. It wants to see them doing projects and going places. The support has been tremendous.”

Jim Buckley, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, praises Tanner’s initiative and contributions to the College.

“Ron is a veteran member of the Arts and Sciences faculty who is not only a well-known writer, but who has also done yeoman's work as chair of the old department of communication and the new department of writing,” says Buckley. “His work in the Marshall Islands is an extraordinarily creative way for Ron eventually to move back to the full-time teaching I know he loves.”

Lia Purpura, Loyola’s Writer-in-Residence, also applauds Tanner’s collaboration with the department.

“I’ll really miss his complete and utter presence and attentiveness as a chair and a colleague,” says Purpura. “He always has enough time and that’s an astonishing quality. He’s such a great example for our students of how rich and full a life can be.”

At the end of the project, Tanner will share the results of his class with the College of the Marshall Islands in the hope that the College will continue the program in the spring of 2009.

Members of the Campus Community can follow Tanner’s adventures through his blog, http://ronaldtanner.com/blog, which he plans to update weekly.

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