World Traveler - World History Student

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Courtney Kearney

Photo of Courtney Kearney. Travels a year ago throughout Great Britain, Ireland and Eastern Europe gave Courtney Kearney one view of the world before she looked at it all over again in an Umpqua Community College classroom.

“I have a greater appreciation for what I saw,” she said, as a result of instructor Charles Young’s World History class. The Umpqua Community College course is giving her a greater sense for the way “cultures fit together.” She also thrives on Young’s teaching style in which he brings into the classroom information from everywhere and uses it to “attack you from all angles.”

The first-year student, a Camas Valley 20-year-old is a graduate of Douglas High School in Winston, has an eye for a life in the theatre performing with puppets. Even now, the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd have captured her: she’s cast in Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which opens on UCC’s Centerstage in March. “In the theatre,” she said, “you have to be empathetic and have an open mind and an open heart. In that regard, all of my classes fit together.” At UCC, she’s taking Writing 122 – Style and Argument, math, independent vocal lessons, as well as Acting II and history.

She already makes her own puppets and performs with her wood, sawdust and fabric alter egos. Additionally, she a member of Kids on the Block, an educational puppet troupe of the Umpqua Disabilities Network that produces shows about stranger safety, disability awareness and drug and alcohol issues for audiences at schools, churches and after-school programs. All of the Kids on the Block shows “have lessons to be learned,” she said.

Courtney said that backpacking and hitchhiking across the British Isles and Eastern Europe last year held “many surprises.” During her wanderings, she found that so many of the things we do almost without thinking at home become “humbling” when we try to do them where we don’t know the language. But, the people she met were “far more open-minded (about Americans) than I gave them credit for in the beginning.”

On a different level, she noticed similarities between the Republic of Ireland, the “Celtic tiger” with the fastest growing economy in the European Community, and the blossoming market economies of post-Iron Curtain Eastern Europe.

Next, Courtney has plans to attend Southern Oregon University followed by a college in Glasgow, Scotland, noted for its theatrical work with puppets – and the puppeteers who come there from Douglas County.