Publications

The New American Farmer:
Profiles of Agricultural Innovation

Driven by economics, concerns about the environment or a yearning for a more satisfying lifestyle, the farmers and ranchers profiled in The New American Farmer, 2nd edition have embraced new approaches to agriculture. Their stories vary but they share many goals—these new American farmers strive to renew profits, enhance environmental stewardship and improve life for their families and communities.

The profiles in The New American Farmer hail from small vegetable farms and ranches and grain farms covering thousands of acres. They produce commodities like beef, corn and soybeans, or they raise more unusual crops like ginseng, 25 kinds of lettuce or Katahdin lamb. Others add value—and profits—by producing ice cream, goat cheese, cashmere wool and on-farm processed meat. Another set provides agriculture-oriented tourism through “guest” ranches, inns, on-farm zoos and education centers. There are more than 60 examples in the second edition, and these farmers and ranchers not only shared what they learned, but also volunteered their contact information. To learn how to adapt what they’ve done, readers are able to get in touch directly.

The New American Farmer is available from the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program’s Sustainable Agriculture Network at (301) 504-5236, http://www.sare.org/publications/naf.htm.

Reflections on Teaching and Learning

For much of the 1990s, new staff members of the Cooperative Extension Service in Michigan received a monthly mailing consisting of an essay to assist them in better understanding their role as educators and to challenge them to consider new and different ways of thinking about that role. S. Joseph Levine, now professor emeritus at Michigan State University, wrote most of those essays based on the following set of guidelines:

• The essays had to be fairly short, direct and to the point.
• Each essay needed to encourage a concern for reflection—the value of reflection in education and how to use reflection to inform their practice.
• Since most Extension educators had a strong disciplinary background, the essays had to represent the human side, rather than the technical side, of what they were expected to do. The essays had to focus on helping people learn and change.
• Each essay had to have a sense of lightness, a touch of humor, in an attempt to be disarming and therefore encourage the educator to “listen” to what was being said.

Through the years, the essays developed a following. Getting to the Core: Reflections on Teaching and Learning is a collection of 46 of these reflective essays that examine the role of the teacher and the challenges faced when trying to help others learn. The topics are diverse, yet the focus continues as it always has—on encouraging the reader to take a few minutes to reflect on their role as an educator.

Getting to the Core is available from Learner Associates at http://www.learnerassociates.net/.

Engaging Campus and Community

A century ago, a new type of scholar was envisioned in American higher education. Rejecting the historical stance of ivory-tower detachment and isolation, the new scholar was to embrace a stance of close and direct engagement. In the conversation that has developed in recent years about American higher education’s civic mission, engagement is viewed as a scholarly activity.

In a book recently published by Kettering Foundation Press, the scholarly practice of engagement in public work is called “public scholarship.” The editors define public scholarship as a particular variety of action research and community-based research. It is creative intellectual work that is conducted in public, with and for particular groups of citizens. Scholars who practice public scholarship seek to advance the academy’s teaching and research missions in ways that hold both academic and public value.

Titled Engaging Campus and Community: The Practice of Public Scholarship in the State and Land-grant University System, the book includes eight case studies of academic professionals and students in the land-grant system who have chosen to directly relate their academic work to the social and environmental challenges beyond the campus. The focus was on understanding the nature and significance of scholars’ academic and civic purposes and practices rather than on determining and evaluating the actual results of their work. Drawing mainly from scholars’ own subjective accounts of their motivations and experiences, the editors’ goals were to understand why they choose to become engaged in public work, what roles they play and what contributions they seek to make. Because they are aware that it is not easy to undertake and sustain public engagement, especially for scholars working out of academic cultures that do not always support it, they also sought to identify the kinds of difficulties and challenges scholars who are engaged in public work encounter.

The editors of Engaging Campus and Community are Scott Peters, Nicholas Jordan, Margaret Adamek and Theodore Alter. To order, e-mail ecruffolo@ecruffolo.com or call (800) 600-4060.

Inventing Civic Solutions

Finding solutions to tough community problems rarely follows a linear path. Rather, it is most often a blending of experimentation with knowledge garnered from research and practice. The resulting civic inventions are a unique product of trial-and-error.

Solutions for America: Inventing Civic Solutions is an attempt to capture both the process and the context of proven community solutions. Each highlighted program was part of a national research initiative, Solutions for America, which set out to document the outcomes of existing efforts to solve some of the nation’s most pressing challenges. Program staff and their research partner (usually a faculty member from an area college or university) teamed up to document the results of these programs. For this volume, they were asked to examine their solution from the vantage point of invention and related lessons. The writers focus on the steps necessary to create and implement successful civic inventions—from understanding the challenge, to designing and launching the program, to keeping the program on track through measuring outcomes.

Inventing Civic Solutions is available from the Pew Partnership for Civic Change at (434) 971-2073, http://www.pew-partnership.org.

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Last updated May 12, 2006 .