INSTITUTE FACULTY

CORE FACULTY

Gregory Sharrow is Director of Education and Folklorist at the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury, Vermont. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania and is a former Vermont classroom teacher. Over the past 20 years Greg has conducted ethnographic field research projects documenting such aspects of regional experience as the culture of dairy farming, historic immigrant communities, and Abenaki life in the present. He has presented this research in print (Many Cultures, One People: A Multicultural Handbook about Vermont for Teachers), in exhibition (Thinking Like a Blacksmith: Artistry and Tradition in the Late 20th Century), as video (The Abenaki of Vermont: A Living Culture), and as radio (Prisoners of War: A Story of Four American Soldiers). Greg has collaborated with educators on numerous school-based oral history/community research projects and has presented community ethnography as a strategy for student engagement at programs for educators throughout the region.


GUEST FACULTY

Jean Berthiaume is a native Vermonter and teaches Social Studies/History and is the Department Head at Harwood Union High School located in central Vermont. He teaches a unique civics course entitled, Creating Sustainable Communities. This course incorporates Service-Learning in teaching students about contemporary issues relating to our Democracy while exploring environmental, economic, and cultural sustainability. In addition, Jean has been a faculty member at Community Works' annual Service-Learning Summer Institute and uses his training as a Critical Friends coach to bring community partners and educators together to build meaningful opportunities for all parties involved in a Service-Learning experiences. He believes that "relevancy" is the remedy to the ever growing disconnect between our youth and their communities.
 

Ned Castle is a native Vermont photographer who focuses on documentary and ethnographic subject matter. He has worked on several photo-documentary style projects, including In Their Own Words, a collection of stories from refugees resettled in Vermont, and more recently, Indigenous Expressions, comprising portraits of Native Peoples from the Lake Champlain Basin. Ned attended photography school in Florence, Italy and New York City, and is a graduate of Williams College, where he majored in Biology and Psychology.
 

Jen Cirillo is Coordinator of Shelburne Farms' Sustainable Schools Project (SSP), providing hands-on support and professional development to classroom teachers at SSP's pilot schools. During her graduate studies she focused on community sustainability and education. As a former coordinator for a city wide sustainability project in Burlington, Vermont, Jen brings a strong background in organizing community improvement projects to her work with schools. She has worked with many local schools and non-profit education programs in Vermont to enhance school-community partnerships. Prior to her work in Vermont, Jen lived and worked as an educator with many diverse communities from Alberta, Canada to Rosia, Italy.

Erica Heilman is a documentary radio producer. Her first experience in documenting stories was in South Africa, in 1993, where she collected stories from Zulu people in the Vulamehlo District of Natal. Upon returning to the U.S., Erica worked in documentary television, producing programs on subjects such as deep space, the Sturgis Biker Rally, cloning technology, and children's dreams. She then worked as a managing editor for a health-related website in New York City, and produced a weekly article series for ABCNews.com. Recently, she collaborated with the Vermont Folklife Center to produce a one-hour documentary about prisoners of war from World War II. She has also produced programming for WJFF, a public radio affiliate in the Catskills. Currently she is making radio stories about Vermont and Vermonters.

Andy Kolovos is the Archivist and a staff Folklorist at the Vermont Folklife Center. He earned a BA in Literature from Bennington College, holds an MA in Folklore and an MLS, and is a doctoral candidate in Folklore at Indiana University. His professional interests focus on the preservation of ethnographic records and field audio recording. As Vermont Folklife Center Archivist, he has instituted a plan of digital audio preservation and management, and works extensively with digital audio editing tools. He maintains the Vermont Folklife Center’s Audio Recording Equipment Guide and consults on audio preservation and field audio recording for oral history and ethnographic research projects nationwide.

Paul D. MacGowan has been producing, shooting, writing, and editing videos for sixteen years for broadcast, corporate, and educational purposes, many of which have been created with and about middle and high school students. Throughout his career MacGowan has focused on working with young people. Recently he served as video consultant for a Vermont Rural Partnership community-based video project, working with students and faculty from three high schools to create a video on a unique aspect of their community. Currently in the works is a series for Vermont Public Television, which will be produced with high school students and will focus topics of relevance in the lives of young people today.

David T. Sobel, M. Ed., is the Director of Teacher Certification Programs in the Education Department and Co-Director of the Center for Place-based Education at Antioch New England Graduate School. 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, environmental organizations and the National Park Service to assist educators with curriculum development and program planning from a learner-centered perspective. His publications include Children's Special Places; Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education; Mapmaking with Children: Sense of Place Education for the Elementary Years; and Place-based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities. David is currently co-director of Project CO-SEED (Community-based School Environmental Education), a member of the editorial board of the journal Encounter, a correspondent for Orion Magazine, and a contributing editor for Community Works Journal.

Kate Toland has been teaching for ten years, six of which were at Winooski High School in Vermont. She is currently a part of the social studies department and director of afterschool programming at Peoples Academy in Morrisville. Kate is passionate about helping students connect to whatever it is they are learning about and finds that many of the connections lie in creating a context for students through community-based learning opportunities. Winooski is a diverse cultural community as countries such as Bosnia, Sudan, Somalia, Vietnam, Bhutan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are represented in the student body. While Kate was teaching there her students studied about culture, history, and immigration through an exploration of their own cultures and that of some of their grandparents'. In partnership with Paul MacGowan, Kate and her students created a documentary framed around the question "What does it mean to live in a multicultural community?"