Natalie Gummer is the director of the Center for Integrative Learning which develops and coordinates cross-disciplinary majors and minors that respond to the passions and hopes of students while meeting the needs that parents and employers articulate. Originally from Canada, she earned her undergraduate degree in Asian Languages, Chinese and Sanskrit, at the University of Toronto, after taking three years off, getting qualified as a stockbroker, and working on Bay Street (the Canadian equivalent of Wall Street). She earned her Ph.D. in the study of religion with a focus on Buddhism at Harvard University.
Centers at Beloit College are about listening to and working within the current moment in higher education and its evolving definition. The Center for Integrative Learning develops thematically focused coursework across the curriculum, empowering students to view particular issues from multiple angles while on campus and to apply that flexibility of mind to challenges of all kinds when they finish their education.
Blocks are cross-disciplinary sets of four courses that explore a particular topic or skill, opening up meaningful new directions for students to engage with their passions. Blocks are organized by topic and students can combine blocks to create self-designed integrative learning majors and minors.
Certificates of Completion turn blocks into a professional credential, combining coursework with experiences outside the classroom and resume building. These educational options rooted in a liberal arts education are tailored to students’ interests and connected to their employment prospects, a both/and.
Your last great watch, listen, or read?
It’s difficult to choose, but I’m currently teaching The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki as part of my Worldbuilding in Buddhist Narrative course. The novel is a compelling story about a neurodivergent boy named Benny who hears the voices of inanimate objects. It is also a brilliant commentary on the place of story in the lives of human beings and the vast amount of “stuff” we accumulate that drives us.
I’ve read multiple works by Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist teacher and novelist. She straddles a line between speaking to the moment that we’re in and bringing a sense of the vast timescape of human beings making the same kinds of interventions in their world as we are today. Her works illustrate the place of literature and story in the way we live our lives.
As for a recent watch and listen, I loved the Brazilian film The Secret Agent, and I’m enjoying the new Dry Cleaning album.
Your favorite food or meal?
I love fermented things, especially things I’ve grown in my own garden.
Your favorite place on campus or in the Beloit area?
I like taking students to the Poetry Garden where we use the big table as a stage, but there are many places in the city of Beloit that I think are cool. For example, I am fond of the YMCA because I like the community there.
Your favorite place in the world outside Beloit?
I love almost every botanical garden I’ve ever visited — the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh especially comes to mind. I’ve been several times: I like the city, too. Also, revolving restaurants on the top of tall buildings are a favorite destination.
How do you spend your free time?
I’m an avid reader. I swim a lot. I love opera (especially baroque and modern operas) and listen to many different kinds of music. I love hiking in the woods and watching birds, not to check them off a list but to watch birds. In the spring, I forage for mushrooms and fiddlehead ferns, one of the childhood comfort foods I ate growing up in Canada. I cook. I enjoy gardening, and right now I’m really excited about growing trees. Last year, we planted a Japanese maple, two plum trees, and a weeping redbud, and it’s wonderful to see them coming to life this spring.
I feel unfulfilled if I don’t have a creative project so I’m a “serial craft” person. I start a project, put it down for a while, and come back to it. It can be the same type of craft or something different. I sketch, draw highly detailed geometric patterns, knit, and do origami, among other things.
What three things would you want if you were shipwrecked on an island?
How about a sailboat, a flare gun, and a water desalinator? I want off the island.
Who would you like to share a meal with, real or imagined?
Speculative fiction authors Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, and transformative justice activist adrienne maree brown, who loves both Butler and Le Guin. We could discuss imagining different worlds, transformative justice work, and how they might help us to live together in our fragile world.
A favorite quote or words to live by?
Let me stick with The Book of Form and Emptiness, which has a lot to do with the way we live in stories and stories live in us. I love this set of questions (spoken by a book) from the novel: “Inside? Outside? What is the difference and how can you tell? When a sound enters your body through your ears and merges with your mind, what happens to it? Is it still a sound then, or has it become something else? When you eat a wing or an egg or a drumstick, at what point is it no longer a chicken? When you read these words on a page, what happens to them, when they become you?”
This moment in your own words?
We’re expanding and changing students’ educational options. We’re creating blocks across the curriculum and offering students the opportunity to put them together in their own inventive ways. What can you do with these pieces? We are creating new possibilities within current frameworks and hopefully they will start to alter the frameworks themselves. In a time that has increasingly constrained the focus and purpose of education, we are developing alternative pathways that offer students flexible, customizable pathways.
I’m thinking about this kind of change on a micro level too — ways to make our learning more embodied and hands-on in classes. What small acts can we do every time we meet that are disruptive to the status quo? Part of that work is performance based with the goal of shaking up normative thinking. Speculative activism, combined with design thinking, offers students different ways of living in the world and helps them to recognize how their change makes their world change.
Why Beloit?
Choosing Beloit College was never in question for me as a person, nor as an instructor. From the beginning, I felt this was a place where I could explore what I wanted to do with greater freedom and flexibility than I could at a research university. I love the directions I’ve ended up taking in my scholarship and teaching and I couldn’t have done it anywhere else. Choosing Beloit College was liberating— I’m grateful for the many opportunities to stretch myself in ways I could never have imagined. The ethos here has always enabled me to figure out what I want to do and do it. I believe this is true for students, too.
May 12, 2026
