July 10, 2009
David T. Sobel
Place-Based Education: Making Schools More Like a Farmer's Market

The landscape of schooling has begun to look like sprawl America. Generic textbooks designed for the big markets of California and Texas provide the same homogenized, unnutritious diet as all those fast food places on the strip. Educational biodiversity falls prey to the bulldozers of standardization.

Clandestinely, we have developed a hidden curriculum paradigm. The paradigm is that which is nearby is parochial and insignificant; only things in textbooks and beyond a 50-mile radius are important. Place-based Education is a response to the alienation between schools and community, or between schools and the local landscape that has flourished from the 1950’s through the beginning of the 21st century.

Place-based education holds that we need schools organized around the principles of the Farmers’ Market – drawing on the resources of the local community. Let’s bring education back into the neighborhood. Let’s connect students with adult mentors, conservation commissions and local businesses. Let’s get the town engineer, the mayor and the environmental educators on the schoolyard and inside the four walls of the school.

David T. Sobel, M.Ed. is the Director of Teacher Certification Programs in the Education Department and Director of the Center for Place-based Education at Antioch University New England. Prior to 1997, he served as the Chairperson of the department for a dozen years. He was one of the founders of The Harrisville Children’s Center and has served on the board of public and private schools. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice and has served as a correspondent for Orion Magazine. His published books include Children’s Special Places; Beyond Ecophobia; Mapmaking with Children; Place-based Education; and Childhood and Nature: Design Principles for Educators. His articles examine the relationship between child development, authentic curriculum and environmental education. He was the winner of a 1991 Education Press Award. In 2007 he was identified as one of the Daring Dozen educators in the United States by Edutopia magazine.

David’s exploration and documentation of the natural interests of children are the foundation for much of his work. He has served as a consultant with school districts, foundations, children’s museums, zoos, nature centers and the National Park Service to assist educators with curriculum development, program planning, exhibit design and evaluation from a learner-centered perspective.

Moderator: Richard Ames

July 17, 2009
Edward R. (TED) Leach
Responding to the Climate Change Challenge: Too Little, Too Late?

Climate change will be the focus of this talk as former Monadnock Ledger publisher Ted Leach addresses this timely topic from an environmental, political and journalistic perspective.

How does a newspaper publisher land in the middle of the climate change discussion? Almost three decades ago, one of the largest solar panels in New England was located in downtown Peterborough, New Hampshire, hanging on the back of the Monadnock Ledger Building. After acquiring the building, the old Peterborough Baptist Church, one of Ted’s first tasks was to attack fixed costs. “It had nothing to do with climate change,” says Leach, “it was all about dollars.” Installing the solar panel and a large wood stove saw the Ledger’s fuel oil usage plummet from 1780 gallons per year to 76 gallons.

As Leach Newspapers, Inc. continued to expand with newspapers in South Carolina and Nantucket Island, so did the appearance of more environmentally related stories. State, regional and national awards for environmental reporting began pouring into the newspaper family, and Ted’s “MO” as a desktop environmentalist was given shape. When not in the editor’s chair, Ted squeezed in five years at the Harvard Extension School where he followed a curriculum focused on environmental management. When he formed the New England Marionette Opera in Peterborough in 1992, he launched a unique program called Environmental Echo. Each performance began with a short multi-media moment during which the audience was informed that a portion of all ticket sales was being directed to two environmental organizations, Defenders of Wildlife in Washington, D.C. and the Harris Center for Conservation Education in Hancock.

In 2000 Leach was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives and was the author of the amendment that became the first four-pollutant bill in the nation, a recognition that carbon dioxide emissions need to be brought under control. He was Chairman of the Clean Air subcommittee and he was the founder of the bipartisan Environmental Caucus.

In 2003 he was asked to become co-chair of The Carbon Coalition, New Hampshire Citizens for a responsible energy policy.

As for that solar panel on the back of the Ledger Building, it was destroyed when the building burned on New Year’s Day, 1999. It has been replaced by a large solar hot water system on Ted’s house in Hancock. “This decision had both a financial and climate component,” says Ted.

Moderator: Barbara Gilbert

July 24, 2009
Robert D. Putnam
E Pluribus Unum: Immigration, Diversity, and Community

Diversity is difficult: disturbing evidence shows that community bonds are weakened by ethnic diversity. Our own history shows that diversity’s great advantages can be realized and its side effects overcome, although it is also true that diversity remains one of the most important challenges of our nation.

Robert D. Putnam is the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, and Visiting Professor and Director of the Graduate Programme in Social Change, University of Manchester (UK). Raised in a small town in the Midwest and educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale, he has served as Dean of the Kennedy School of Government. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and past president of the American Political Science Association. He was the 2006 recipient of the Skytte Prize, the most prestigious international award for scholarly achievement in political science. The London Sunday Times has called him “the most influential academic in the world today.”

He has written a dozen books, translated into twenty languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of new forms of social connectedness. His Making Democracy Work was praised by the Economist as “a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber.” Both Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone rank among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last half century.

Putnam has worked on these themes with Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, as well as with British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Ireland’s Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi, and many other national leaders and grassroots activists around the world. He founded the Saguaro Seminar, bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners from across America to develop actionable ideas for civic renewal.

His earlier work included research on political elites, Italian politics, and globalization. Before coming to Harvard in 1979, he taught at the University of Michigan and served on the staff of the National Security Council. He is currently working on four major empirical projects: (1) the changing role of religion in contemporary America, (2) strategies for social integration in the context of immigration and ethnic diversity, (3) the effects of workplace practices on family and community life, and (4) growing class disparities among American youth.

Moderator: Roderick MacFarquhar

July 31, 2009
Hahrie Han
Acitivism in the 2008 Campaigns: What Worked, Why, and What Does it Mean for the Future?

In 2008 the Obama campaign built an activist network of unprecedented breadth and depth that formed the backbone of his improbable victory. How did the campaign do this, and what implications does this have for the future of American politics? In many ways, the Obama campaign represented a watershed moment in American history, renewing interest in how people come together to make change. The media has focused on the role new media technologies, like the Internet, played in helping the campaign build its network of 13 million supporters. Han’s talk will probe some of the prevalent assumptions about what these new media sources accomplished, and examine the campaign’s overall organizing strategy. She will contextualize Obama’s political organizing in historical trends in civic engagement, and examine the future implications for individuals who want to get involved and organizations who want to involve them.

Hahrie Han is currently the Sidney R. Knafel Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College, but is on leave for two years as a Fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholars Program at Harvard University. Her first book is being published this summer and examines the role that political organizations (like the Obama campaign) can play in motivating political participation, particularly among disadvantaged communities.

As the daughter of two Korean immigrants, Han’s interest in politics originated in the differences she observed between conceptions of community in Texas (where she grew up) and Korea. She left Texas to attend Harvard as an undergraduate, where she first experienced the power of collective action through her work with undergraduate community service organizations. After college, she worked for two years in Washington, D.C. for Senator Bill Bradley, and then worked as a policy advisor on his presidential campaign in 2000. She also volunteered as the co-chair of a Policy Advisory Committee for the 2008 Obama campaign, and as chair of an Advisory Committee to the EAC Agency Review Team on the Obama-Biden Transition Team. Through her research, Han works closely with civic associations like the Sierra Club, where she currently serves on an advisory committee to the national Sierra Club board.

Moderator: Dalena Wright

August 7, 2009
Michele Belletete
Addressing Humanitarian Crises: Joys and Sorrows

Reaching those in peril because of armed conflict, famine, epidemics, natural disasters and poverty presents governments and private organizations with extraordinary challenges. The impediments can range from the logistical to the ethical to the financial demands of any given situation, and relief comes only when dedicated individuals working with humanitarian organizations come through for those desperately in need. Michele Belletete of Jaffrey has been one of those tireless workers and she can attest to the joys and worries of providing medical care in the midst of political upheaval and extreme deprivation. She will reflect on her personal experiences as well as the dilemmas facing organizations providing assistance.

Michele Belletete has worked overseas a number of times with Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). Her first assignment with MSF was in 2006, remaining for nine months in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Haiti has the highest maternal mortality rate in the Western Hemisphere and Ms. Belletete worked as a nurse at the Jude Anne Hospital, an obstetrical hospital for women of high risk. Her second mission was in 2008 in the Democratic Republic of Congo where she was the nursing supervisor in a hospital run by the Ministry of Health and supported by MSF. She has recently returned from her third mission for MSF which was in Zimbabwe. She worked in a therapeutic feeding center serving nearly 400 severely malnourished children. The feeding center in Epworth, Zimbabwe is part of an HIV project which serves a population of nearly 400,000.

Medecins Sans Frontieres was founded by doctors and journalists in France in 1971. Quoting from MSF’s own literature: “MSF’s work is based on the humanitarian principles of medical ethics and impartiality. MSF operates independently of any political, military or religious agendas. At times MSF may speak out publicly in an effort to bring a forgotten crisis to public attention, to alert the public to abuses occurring beyond the headlines, to criticize the inadequacies of the aid system, or to challenge the diversion of humanitarian aid for political interests. On any one day, more than 27,000 committed individuals representing dozens of nationalities can be found providing assistance. . .”

In 1999, Medecins Sans Frontieres received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Moderator: Stephen H. Gelbach, MD

August 14, 2008
Larissa MacFarquhar
A Tourist in Other People's Lives

Larissa MacFarquhar is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker magazine who has written profiles of Barack Obama, the poet John Ashbery, the political activist Naomi Klein, playwrights Edward Albee and Michael Frayn, filmmakers Quentin Tarrantino and Michael Moore, linguist and activist Noam Chomsky, chef David Chang, literary critics Harold Bloom and Stanley Fish, novelist Louis Auchincloss, and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, among many others. She will talk about what it was like to spend time with some of these people and try to figure out what makes them tick.

She will also talk more generally about what it’s like to become completely immersed in someone else’s life; what it’s like to spend many hours with them, asking them extremely personal questions; and what it’s like to then turn those intimate and rambling conversations into a story. She is intrigued by the peculiar human situation of the interview, and will talk about the different ways other writers such as Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, and V.S. Naipaul have approached it.

Before she was hired by The New Yorker, MacFarquhar wrote for a variety of publications including Artforum, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Slate. She has also worked as an editor at Lingua Franca (a magazine about academia, now defunct), Spy (a humor magazine, now defunct), and The Paris Review (a literary magazine, still alive). Although MacFarquhar did not much like being an editor herself, she is fascinated by editing, and in a quest to figure out what exactly a fiction editor does she conducted The Paris Review’s first “Art of Editing” feature, a compilation of interviews with the eminent book editor Robert Gottlieb and many of his writers, including Toni Morrison, Michael Crichton, Doris Lessing, John Le Carre, and Cynthia Ozick.

Moderator: Kenneth D. Cambell

August 21, 2009
Karl Kaiser
America's New Foreign Policy: Promises and Realities

Presidential Candidate Barack Obama promised to conduct a foreign policy quite different from that of his prececessor. His election was greeted with curiosity all over the world. In large measure, this is because of his promise of a new beginning in foreign policy. To what extent has President Obama been able to fulfill his promise so far and what major obstacles is he likely to face? Karl Kaiser will lead us through this timely topic, analyzing US policy on relations with Russia, on Afghanistan and Pakistan, non-proliferation with respect to Iran and North Korea, relations with the Islamic World, and last, but not least, restoring relations with allies.

Karl Kaiser is Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Director of the Program on Transatlantic Relations of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs of Harvard University. He was educated at the Universities of Cologne, Grenoble and Oxford and taught at the Universities of Bonn, Johns Hopkins (Bologna), Saarbruecken, Cologne, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the Departments of Government and Social Studies of Harvard. He holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences. For decades he directed the German Council on Foreign Relations, Bonn/Berlin and acted as occasional advisor to Chancellors Brandt and Schmidt. He was a member of the German Council of Environmental Advisors. He serves on the Board of Foreign Policy, Internationale Politik, the Advisory Board of the American- Jewish Committee, Berlin, and the Board of the Federal Academy of Security Policy, Berlin.

Professor Kaiser is the author or editor of numerous articles andbooks in the fields of world affairs, German, French, British and US foreign policy, transatlantic and East-West relations, nuclear proliferation, strategic theory, and international environmental policy.

Moderator: Richard C. L. Webb