Last year Brian Burke explored Ethiopia, China and the Middle East, all without leaving metropolitan Chicago. His guide was Moraine Valley Community College’s adjunct professor of the year, Nancy Lennon.
“I like her teaching style,” says the Summit resident, a sophomore at Moraine Valley in Palos Hills who was so impressed he’s taking another session with Lennon, this one on North American Indians. “I was never bored in her class. In fact, I didn’t want to miss it.”
“We can all learn from one another, no matter when the other person lived,” says Lennon, 47, who lives on Chicago’s North Side. In her world, that special someone can be a Chinese ruler who lived in 200 B.C., an American Indian or the family from Belize who lives around the corner from her.
A part-time instructor of physical anthropology, archeology and cultural anthropology, Lennon was nominated for the 1997 teaching honor by Moraine Valley students; their choices were reviewed and the final decision made by a group of administrators. This honor was just one more bit of serendipity in her relationship with Moraine Valley, which began 11 years ago.
She had earned a bachelor’s degree in archeology at Loyola University in Chicago and a master’s degree in psychological anthropology from Northwestern University in Evanston, which she attended on a fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health. She also worked in the archeology lab at Northwestern.
“I was in heaven,” she says. “I got to wash, identify and catalog the professors’ finds.”
Unable to find a teaching position after graduating in 1973, Lennon began working as a counselor for a state mental health facility. She went on to earn a master’s degree in social work at the University of Illinois at Chicago and took a job as a counselor with AERO, a special education cooperative in the southwest suburbs, and later for the Southwest YMCA in Alsip. But that just didn’t satisfy her.
“I wanted to get back in my field. I’d sent out hundreds of resumes and got no response. Teaching anthropology and archeology is what I truly wanted to do. I was losing faith that it would happen,” Lennon says. “Then months later I got a call from Moraine Valley. The professor had canceled her contract, and they offered me a position with an immediate start date. I didn’t hesitate.”
Joseph Jioia, chairman of the social science department at Moraine who made the offer to Lennon, says he is pleased with his decision.
“She’s done a great job. She communicates well with the students. She’s very flexible, and she’s developed coursework on her own,” Jioia said. “Right now she’s developing an archeology course that will focus on Indian ruins on our property.”
Lennon has joined with Thomas Fuelling, a full-time professor at the college, to develop a course that will have students excavating a site at Sullivan Springs on the campus. The site was a temporary encampment between 1000 and 1500 A.D. for native Americans traveling a route now known as Kean Avenue. Fuelling said the site was last excavated in the 1970s, and he’s certain students would still find things there.
“They did flint-knapping (the making of stone tools) there along the spring,” Fuelling explains. “If you know anything about that, you know that two out of three times flint tools fail, so there are plenty of remnants out there.”
He says Lennon has “really been the initiator on this project. She’s doing all the intellectual work.”
Lennon has been enamored with archeology since her days at Queen of Peace High School in Burbank.
“I had an interest in archeology and history, and as I got older I was interested in people from different places,” she recalls. “I just really loved the subject.”
Lennon got a true taste for archeology when she spent the summer between her junior and senior years of high school on a dig in Metropolis, Ill., uncovering Indian and French artifacts at Ft. Massac, one of the early French forts in the Illinois territory. Her work for a professor at Southern Illinois University was part of a reconstruction project of the Kincaid Mounds and a study of the Mississippian culture.
Lennon remembers spending weeks in painstaking excavation, unearthing coins, buttons and historical artifacts. Then on the last day of her summer break, the team uncovered an intact foot-tall ceramic statue of a human being. Today that statue is in a museum at Ft. Massac.
“I spent the whole summer digging. I think it was the best summer of my life,” Lennon says.
It will be some time until Lennon can take her students on a campus dig, so she tries to re-create the feel of discovery in her classroom.
“I constructed some mystery artifact collections for the students to surmise what the culture is,” she explains. “I use a lot of slides and films of Indians, but mostly what I try to do is get rid of the stereotypes and give the students historically correct ideas.”
Lennon’s students work in groups as they study tribes, then present a program about that culture. In the fall semester, Lennon’s students surprised her.
“One group, which represented the Ute tribe, made contact with tribe members on the Internet and got an invitation to the Ute reservation near Salt Lake City and flew down for a personal tour one weekend,” Lennon explains. “The students who really get into it get an emotional connection. That’s really exciting for me because I keep learning.”
In her social anthropology class, the students venture beyond the campus into Chicago and surrounding suburbs for ethnic dinners. Student Rosie Saenz of Summit still talks about the Arab restaurant the class visited.
“I went for the experience,” she says. “I tried all the foods–at least one helping–no matter how scary they seemed.”
Going beyond the menu, Lennon asks her students to complete worksheets on details such as the demographics of the neighborhood, its housing stock and the restaurant’s decor and patrons. When possible, they’re to interview someone from the ethnic group the restaurant represents.
“It forces them to explore the area,” Lennon says.
Fuelling says students gravitate to Lennon.
“She’s just wonderful and is great at communicating. That’s a major part of teaching,” he stresses.
Lennon has picked an expensive field of specialty and jokes about how her salary ends up paying for her family’s explorations. Last summer found her family–husband John McNellis and daughters Jane Lennon, 16, and Annie McNellis, 14,–in China, and Christmas vacation was spent in Belize and Guatemala.
“I drag them along, but they’re really good travelers and I think they have a good time,” she says.
Her favorite spot in China was Xian, home of Emperor Shi Huangdi, who ruled China two centuries before Christ. When archeologists discovered his tomb, they unearthed thousands of life-sized terra-cotta soldier statues with strikingly detailed faces and distinct insignia.
“For as far as you can see, there are these giant terra-cotta soldiers,” Lennon recalls.
Old as such sites are, Lennon says, they still speak to us.
“Physical anthropology is changing rapidly. It’s hard to keep up with everything that’s happening. Discoveries keep going farther back to extend our (human) family tree.
“The thing that I love about archeology is that it is a subject that evolves,” Lennon says. “That makes it more exciting and stimulating, and it makes it easier to teach.”
