The Syllabus

Description

The Rural Heritage Institute at Sterling College (RHI) is a four-day series of interdisciplinary academic, experiential, and instructional field-based workshops scheduled for June 11-15th 2008. Each of the four days of the event will highlight and strengthen connections between scholarship on rural communities in the Northeast broadly – and in the Northeast Kingdom specifically – and field experience with/in the working communities in the region.

The Institute capitalizes on the integrative model of community learning and experiential academics by our host venue. Sterling College, located only 30 miles from the Canadian border in the heart of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, is an ideal place in which to explore interwoven threads of place, culture, and community in the fabric of the region’s agricultural and land-use heritage. RHI effectively integrates aspects of the Sterling College mission of environmental stewardship and fostering a sustainable community-based approach to global issues through “plain hard work” with an innovative approach to experience-based education. A natural extension of Sterling College’s forestry, draft horse, and sustainable agriculture programs – as well as its integrative community-based curriculum – RHI can serve as the base for a cross-disciplinary exploration of rural heritage in Vermont and across northern New England.

Seminar topics will include:

• The Farmhouse: A Vision of Rural Heritage
• The Politics of Rural Life through Journalism
• Agrarianism in the North
• Butterworks Farm: Diversified, Integrated, Signature Farming - Solutions for the Future?
• Poetry and Place: The Agricultural Imagination
• Three Kingdom Agrarians: Garret Keizer, Howard Frank Mosher, and James Hayford
• Sense of Place and Work in Nineteenth-Century Vermont
• The North Country Project: Oral History and Community Memory
• Mapping Historical Landscapes
• Looking for the Animal in the Animal-Embodiment of National/Regional Symbols
• Working the Land: Conservation, Management, and the Rural Landscape

Additional featured speakers and partners include Willem Lange, Public Radio commentator and author of several books about the North Country, including Where Does the Wild Goose Go? and Intermittent Bliss; Vermont authors Leland Kinsey and Natalie Kinsey-Warnock; John Miller, photographer and author of Granite and Cedar and Deer Camp; Kent Ryden, Director of the New England and American Studies Program at USM and author of Landscape with Figures: Nature and Culture in New England and Mapping the Invisible Landscape; John Harris, Director of The Monadnock Institute for Place, Nature, and Culture; and The NorthWoods Stewardship Center.

As part of the event, we are facilitating a number of field workshops in the surrounding rural, agricultural community as well as an on-site local foods banquet, and a local music interlude. Additionally, Sterling College is hosting an open house for thirty local and regional rural heritage, land use, and agricultural organizations, which will include local foods purveyors.

Course Overview

The Rural Heritage Institute is appropriate for a broad range of students, from practitioners, scholars, community members, and teachers who share an interest in exploring the intersections of nature and culture in the rural Northeast – and, most importantly, are passionate about solidifying the connections between community, academic scholarship, and meaningful work in the field. Sterling College, in partnership with The Northeast Kingdom School Development Center at Lyndon State College, is offering 2 graduate credits for participation in the Institute. The Institute is appropriate as a professional development opportunity for teachers from across the region.

Students participating the Institute for credit are required to attend all available presentations, field workshops, and discussions.

Outcomes

RHI enables students to engage in dialogue with leading scholars and practitioners in the fields of rural studies, sustainable agriculture, rural heritage preservation, conservation ecology, cultural history, New England studies, and related areas. By completing the RHI curriculum, students should be able to:

• Recognize and learn specific examples of the rich diversity of rural heritage in Northern New England.
• Build skills necessary to bridge classroom scholarship and field experience, in both their own study and teaching experience.
• Understand the interdisciplinary nature of rural heritage and the links that can be forged between cultural history, economy, history, area studies, and ecology, among others.
• Develop rural-heritage focused curricula at their home institutions.

Assignments

The principal assignments will be participation in all available RHI events and completion of a analytical seminar paper that illustrates students’ ability to engage with, contextualize, and synthesize a range of issues addressed at the Institute. In the two weeks following RHI, students are asked to use both notes and reflections from the Institute as well as primary and secondary sources to craft an analytical essay that responds to rural heritage as defined in the Institute proceedings.

One of the outcomes for students attending the Institute is the ability to integrate content-rich experiences with rural heritage into their existing classrooms. As part of their participation in RHI, students will be asked to develop a curriculum module specific to rural heritage that would be appropriate for their home institutions. Further details regarding the development of this curriculum will be discussed during the Institute in June.

Furthermore, students will meet once daily during the Institute for a discussion with faculty and to help build the knowledge base for their capstone essay and curriculum design.

In addition to selections from the attached reading list, the Brown Library at Sterling College is home to an extensive collection in the areas covered in the Institute, and specific readings will be part of individual presentations.

Grading and Hours

Attendance and on-site instructor meetings (30 contact hours total): 30%
Curriculum module (due Monday June 30): 30%
Analytical Response Essay (due Monday, June 30): 40%

Contact

Pavel Cenkl, Ph.D.
Dean of Academics
Sterling College
PO Box 72
Craftsbury Common, VT 05827
ruralheritage@sterlingcollege.edu
802-586-7711 ext.140