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Staff / Faculty
Julia Frost Nerbonne
Teaching & Learning with HECUA Students
Preparing students for the real world is one of my primary passions. I have devoted much of my energy over the past 14 years to helping my students learn, both in the classroom and in the community. One of the ways that I do this is by making it clear that I too am learning every day. At any particular moment, they may well be the teacher and I the learner. It is my job to facilitate the exchange and bound the learning environment, not to have all the answers. I love HECUA because it gives me the opportunity to continue my exploration of the environmental movement in Minnesota in a truly hands-on way. Instead of analyzing the community, we work with the community and at the same time take the time to process what we have learned in a way that will be useful to us (and maybe even to others) in the future. In the ES program I am part of a learning community and of a moral community. The experiences we have together help hold up a mirror so that I can look at my own life with new insight and motivation.
My Research and Current Projects
My research focuses on the relationship between natural systems and human action. I have long been interested in charting the relationship between science and citizen empowerment. My dissertation focused on understanding the role of data in empowering citizen groups at the community level. Recently I have shifted my research to focus more on individual knowledge and attitudes and how they impact environmental behavior. Most importantly, I consider myself to be part of a broader movement that embraces local communities, researching questions that they have identified, and working with them to better understand how to take action in their communities
Presentations and Publications
Recently I have worked with the HECUA ES class to conduct a study of knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of residents of south Minneapolis regarding water quality. You can view that study on the home page of our funder, the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization: www.mwmo.org. To take a peek some work I did evaluating citizen monitoring initiatives: published in Society and Natural Resources (2004): Volunteer Macroinvertebrate Monitoring in the United States: Resource Mobilization and Comparative State Structures. One of my favorite projects was working with a farmer colleague, Ralph Lentz to analyze our experience on a interdisciplinary research team. This one was published in Agriculture and Human Values (2003): Rooted in Grass: Challenging patterns of knowledge exchange as a means of fostering social change in a Minnesota farm community. For other work, see my C.V.
A research paper that I wrote somewhat recently (2003), "The Racher's Dilemma: A Game of Exploring the Implications of an Open Access System" which I developed to allow high school, college and adult students to experience problems associated with open access resources. If you have a moment click on the above link to download the four page paper.