Rural Heritage Institute at Sterling College:

The Place of Work in Rural Communities

June 10-14, 2008

Sterling College

Craftsbury Common, VT

Institute Registration Now Open:

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 10-14, 2008. Each of the four days of the event will highlight and strengthen connections between scholarship on rural communities in northern New England and field experience with and in working communities throughout the region.

The Institute emphasizes a model of community learning and experiential academics shared 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 the 

interwoven threads of place, culture, and community heritage.

Featured speakers and partners include:

- Willem Lange, author of Where Does the Wild Goose Go? and Intermittent Bliss and VPR commentator

- 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

- Natalie Kinsey-Warnock, author of more than 20 young reader and picture books, including As Long as There are Mountains, When Spring Comes, and The Canada Geese Quilt.

- Leland Kinsey, author of The Immigrant's Contract

- John Harris, Director of The Monadnock Institute for Place, Nature, and Culture

- The NorthWoods Stewardship Center

- The Fairbanks Museum

- The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment

See program website for other Institute topics

The Institute will highlight field workshops in the surrounding rural agricultural communities as well as a Local Foods Banquet, Regional Music Interlude, and a Building Bridges Open House for thirty local and regional rural heritage, land use, and agricultural organizations.

The Institute is appropriate for a broad range of practitioners, scholars, community members, and under/graduate students, and teachers who 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 or undergraduate credits for participation in the Institute.

For more information, see the Institute website, www.sterlingcollege.edu/ruralheritage  or email ruralheritage@sterlingcollege.edu