Jennifer Meta Robinson

Jennifer Meta Robinson, Ph.D, is Professor of Practice in the Indiana University Anthropology Department. She maintains two research agendas--the study of local food movements and of college pedagogy. Those areas intersect through her teaching and also through her overarching interest in how people learn to be members of communities and, simultaneously, express themselves as individuals. She is an affiliated faculty member with the Ostrom Workshop, Sustainable Food Systems Science, and the Integrated Program on the Environment at IU.

 

Jennifer has written two books on local food movements. Selling Local: Why Local Food Movements Matter (2017) and The Farmers’ Market Book: Growing Food, Cultivating Community (2007) explore how small-scale farmers position themselves relative to industrial, hegemonic food systems, creating both personal meaning webs and transferable innovations. She co-edited the book Teaching Environmental Literacy across the Curriculum and Across Campus (2010). Her research on local food movements continues in the US and internationally. She teaches related courses on food and culture.

 

Jennifer’s latest book develops notions of how new college teachers learn to teach and become members of teaching communities—Teaching as if Learning Matters: Pedagogies of Becoming by Next Generation Faculty (2022), which won an outstanding book award from the Society for Professors of Education.  She was president of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) and co-edits the book series on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. At IU, she was a long-time Student Learning Analytics Fellow and also a Mack Fellow for research on teaching and learning. She teaches graduate courses on college pedagogy and co-directs IU’s Graduate Certificate on College Pedagogy. She won Distinguished Service Awards from ISSOTL and IU’s Faculty Academy on Excellence in Teaching as well as the Trustees Teaching Award from Indiana University in 2020, 2018, and 2012.

 

Jennifer’s research has been funded by grants from the US Department of Agriculture, the Lilly Foundation, Association of American Universities, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Teagle Foundation, Indiana Arts Commission, and Indiana University.