selected publications

Mapping Advocacy and Outreach for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

In Teaching and Learning Inquiry 4(1): 2016.

Mary Taylor Huber, Jennifer Meta Robinson

From early days, SoTL scholars have documented the “small significant networks” (Roxå and Mårtensson’s term) in which colleagues discuss teaching in local gatherings, as well as in broadly attended conferences and publications. Recent ISSOTL discussions recognize the significance of efforts at this scale and seek to situate them in a larger SoTL landscape, or SoTLscape, of advocacy and outreach activities in the field. In this essay, we present a matrix of possible audiences as an aid to seeing where scholars of teaching and learning are more—and less—active as advocates for SoTL and for positions on pedagogy, curricula, and student success supported by SoTL research. Beyond mapping current activity and looking for gaps, we suggest that the matrix could also help organize pithy accounts of practice into a resource that would stimulate imagination about how scholars of teaching and learning could be more effective as advocates both near to and far from their campus and disciplinary homes.

Model-Based Reasoning to Foster Environmental and Socio-Scientific Literacy in Higher Education

In Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. 1-8.

Amanda E. Sorensen, Rebecca C. Jordan, Rachel Shwom, Diane Ebert-May, Cindy Isenhour, Aaron M, McCright, Jennifer Meta Robinson. 2015.

The American public’s environmental, scientific, and civic literacies are generally low. While environmental science courses often recognize the human dimensions of environmental problems and solutions, they typically treat such phenomena as matters of opinion and rarely engage with social scientific ways of knowing. Recently, there has been a push in higher education to advance broader scientific literacy, but little attention has been paid to helping students gain an understanding of how socio-scientific evidence and claims are generated. Our work here aims to develop the knowledge framework that facilitates the integration of knowledge across biophysical and social science domains. In this research brief, we report on a project in which an interdisciplinary team developed a model of climate adaptation and mitigation to help teach undergraduates about the coupled human-climate system. The research team found this process to be integral to both thinking and learning about a system with biophysical and social variables. This project is unique in that we then used this model to develop not just curricula but also a framework that can be used to guide and assess interdisciplinary instruction at the collegiate level. This framework allows learners to make sense of complex socio-environmental issues and reason with scientific information from the social and biophysical sciences.

Agrileisure: Farmers’ Markets, CSAs, and the Privilege in Eating Local

In Journal of Leisure Research, special issue on Social and Environmental Justice 46, (2014): 313-328.

Farmer, J. R., Chancellor, C., Robinson, J. M., West, S., and Weddell, M.

Participation in local food systems has recently emerged as an important and overlooked leisure behavior that is critical to community recreation agencies, sustainable development, and overall public health. This study collected motivational, participation, and demographic data from 712 individuals who shop at farmers' markets, subscribe to community supported agriculture (CSA) programs, or do not participate in either. The results indicate that environmental and nutritional motives were the top two factors affecting farmers' market and CSA participants' engagement, while also highlighting a significant association between the CSA and farmers' market participants and privilege variables. These findings suggest that even as farmers' markets and CSAs are promoted as a means to reduce food insecurity and promote agrileisure opportunities, barriers exist that exclude many from engagement.

Teaching on Purpose: A Collegium Community Model for Supporting Intentional Teaching

In Journal on Excellence in College Teaching.

With K. Kearns, M. Gresalfi, A. Sievert, and T. Christensen.

The "collegium" learning community teaches mid-career graduate students intentionally to prepare for and create learning opportunities for their undergraduate students, what the authors call "teaching on purpose." The design addresses the lack of alignment between research on learning and preparation of faculty for teaching, supports graduate students' development as scholars, primes them for responsible participation in a multidisciplinary campus community, and introduces teaching as a field of inquiry. Case studies demonstrate that participants' pedagogies moved from assumptions to theories and from anecdotes to evidence and prepared them to become advocates for teaching change. This effective and transferable collegium model can bridge the divide between the science and application of learning.

A Cultural Approach to Interpersonal Communication: Essential Readings

2nd Edition. Eds. L. Monaghan, J. Goodman, and J.M. Robinson. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Featuring several all-new chapters, revisions, and updates, the Second Edition of A Cultural Approach to Interpersonal Communication presents an interdisciplinary collection of key readings that explore how interpersonal communication is socially and culturally mediated. Includes key readings from the fields of cultural and linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and communication studies Features new chapters that focus on digital media Offers new introductory chapters and an expanded toolkit of concepts that students may draw on to link culture, communication, and community Expands the Ethnographer's Toolkit to include an introduction to basic concepts followed by a range of ethnographic case studies

Saying Hello in a Digital World: Emergent Performance and Social Competence

In A Cultural Approach to Interpersonal Communication: Essential Readings, Second Edition. L. Monaghan, J. Goodman, and J.M. Robinson, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012.

This piece ethnographically investigates how people greet each other in Second Life, a "sim" (digitally simulated space) designed to look like a three-dimensional world.

Performing Authenticity: Questions of Identity Competence in a Virtual World Point to Real Life Constructions

In Shaping Virtual Lives: Online Identities, Representations, and Conducts. V. Krawczyk-Wasilewska, T. Meder, and A. Ross, eds. Lodz, Poland: University of Lodz Press, 2012.

Learning Abroad and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

In Student Learning Abroad: What They’re Learning, What They’re Not, and What You Can Do about It.

Michael Vande Berg, Michael Paige, and Kris Lou, eds. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2012.

Talking Across the Disciplines: Building Communicative Competence

In The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning In and Across the Disciplines, K. McKinney, Ed. With M. Gresalfi, K. D. Kearns, A. K. Sievert, T. B. Christensen, and M. E. Zolan. Indiana University Press, 2013.

"[Represents] the continuation of an important conversation about the nature of scholarship, a renewed and increasingly sophisticated understanding of teaching. . . . [S]hows the extent to which a common language and methodologies have emerged as SoTL has matured." —Margaret Miller, University of Virginia

Teaching Environmental Literacy: Across Campus and Across the Curriculum

Reynolds, H., E. Brondizio, and J.M. Robinson, eds. Indiana University Press, 2010.

"What makes Teaching Environmental Literacy noteworthy is its coherence and accessibility.... Providing useful overviews of topics such as ecosystem services, population, and sense of place, the authors focus on specific disciplines as well as cross-disciplinary topics. While not designed as a how-to guide, Teaching Environmental Literacywould serve well any institution seeking to implement revisions to the curriculum―or individuals looking to create or revise courses that foreground environmental literacy." ―Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

To prepare today's students to meet growing global environmental challenges, colleges and universities must make environmental literacy a core learning goal for all students, in all disciplines. But what should an environmentally literate citizen know? What teaching and learning strategies are most effective in helping students think critically about human-environment interactions and sustainability, and integrate what they have learned in diverse settings? Educators from the natural and social sciences and the humanities discuss the critical content, skills, and affective qualities essential to environmental literacy. This volume is an invaluable resource for developing integrated, campus-wide programs to prepare students to think critically about, and to work to create, a sustainable society.

Foreword to Rachel Peden's Rural Free: A Farmwife’s Almanac of Country Living

2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. vii-xiii.

Rural Free, first published in 1961, beautifully conveys the joys of family life on an Indiana farm. Marked by the slow pace and rich variety of seasonal change, Rachel Peden’s narrative offers an authentic month-by-month chronicle of her family’s daily adventures. Today, as the slow-food movement gathers support and more urban dwellers return to the land to plant roots again in honest soil, Peden’s stories of country life and her lessons on sustainability, frugality, and wastefulness gain a special resonance.Rural Free will be a source of inspiration for all who rejoice in rural virtues and the spiritual freedom of country life.

The Farmers' Market Book: Growing Food, Cultivating Community

With J. A. Hartenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

The Farmers' Market Book examines this national phenomenon through the story of the market in Bloomington, Indiana, and considers the social, ecological, and economic power of farmers' markets generally. Authors Jennifer Meta Robinson and J. A. Hartenfeld describe farmers' markets as a rewarding intersection of rural and urban lives, sustaining and healing both our communities and our relationship to the land. While they may seem nostalgic or idealistic, these markets are both current and forward-looking, cultivating a fresh, diverse space and recognizing the personal differences of community members. These common grounds are intimate and socially complex, representing far more than a place to buy food.