Along with instructors and community partners working across several ACM campuses, I contributed a chapter to a new book, Gleanings from the Field: Food Security, Resilience, and Experiential Learning. This anthology was edited by Dan Trudeau, Bill Moseley and Paul Schadewald — my former colleagues at Macalester College — and published by Lever Press in April 2025. The book grew out of a two-part workshop that Dan, Bill and Paul convened in the summers of 2022 and 2023 through an ACM grant. They gave us some time to assemble, to share ideas and food and to visit some important sites here in the Twin Cities and in Wisconsin.
My chapter, “Pedagogy for a public geography of poor farms,” describes the two research practicum courses I designed and taught at Macalester. I present an approach to public geography that supports students in original group research on public institutions (i.e., poor farms) as they worked toward presentations at public institutions (i.e., libraries and online). In the Spring of 2022, students focused on the Ramsey County Poor Farm. In the Spring of 2023, they focused on the Hennepin County Poor Farm.
Drawing on course materials and objectives as well as student feedback and original research findings, the chapter also offers five lessons learned:
- Make local experiences a case study
- Immersive work supports student decision-making and discovery
- Emphasize the quality of the project over the exercise of a method
- Promote trust in the group formation
- Commit to dialogue with the public
Of course, the public presentations made at the end of these two courses are available on this website.
For me, this mode of teaching was a pivotal and very gratifying part of my time working at Macalester. As I write elsewhere on this website, I continue to think about these courses the contributions of students and TAs and the responses that audiences made to the presentations. The experience inspired me to approach later work with the TREC Research Cluster project at Faribault prison, “A public study of the Rice County Poor Farm.”