scholarly journals Incorporating Organic and Agroecological Approaches into the University Curricula: The Iowa State University Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture

2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Delate

Organic agriculture has expanded to a $13 billion industry in the United States in 2005, continuing the nearly decade-long trend of 20% annual growth. Despite the growth in organic agriculture, our scientific knowledge of organic agriculture farming systems remains limited. Interest in sustainable and organic education at the university level has increased in recent years. To help address this need, the Iowa State University Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture (GPSA) was established in 2001 to meet three principal objectives: 1) provide students with the analytical and problem-solving skills required to meet the challenges confronting agriculture in the 21st century; 2) develop an innovative interdisciplinary and interdepartmental approach to graduate education; and 3) position Iowa State University at the forefront of institutions conducting research and extending knowledge about sustainable agricultural systems. As of 2004, more than 70 faculty from various departments and 29 students have participated in the program. Students have the opportunity to investigate organic issues within the context of the five new GPSA courses and to conduct organic agriculture farming systems research in thesis and dissertation studies. Producers and agricultural professionals are involved with GPSA students through the curriculum and on-farm research. Research questions involving optimizing crop or livestock production, plant protection, soil quality, and socioeconomic benefits of farming systems constitute typical theses.

Author(s):  
PHILIP VAN BEYNE ◽  
VANDA CLAUDINO-SALES ◽  
SAULO ROBERTO DE OLIVEIRA VITAL ◽  
DIEGO NUNES VALADARES

In its third edition, the “William Morris Davis – Journal of Geomorphology” presents its second interview with geographers, to head the “Interviews” section, which opens each published issue. This time, it is the first international interview, carried out with Professor Philip van Beynen, from the University of South Florida, in the United States. Professor Philip van Beynen was interviewed on the topic “Karst in Urban Areas”, and brings important data on the subject, with beautiful illustrations and with examples from all over the world. The interview took place on September 17, 2020, with the participation of Vanda de Claudino-Sales (Professor of the Academic Master in Geography at the State University of Vale do Acarau-UVA) and Saulo Roberto Oliveira Vital (Professor of the Department of Geography and the Post-Graduate Program in Geography at the Federal University of Paraiba - UFPB), and was transcribed by Diego Nunes Valadares, master's student on Geography at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. Professor van Beynen was born in New Zealand, where he received his degree in Geography at the University of Auckland. He earned a master's degree from the same university, and a doctorate and post-doctorate from McMaster University, Canada. He has been a professor at the School of Geoscience at the University of South Florida since 2009, where he   has been developing research related to different components of karst environments. The interview shows his great expertise on the subject, and is very much worth to be read and seen even for those who are not specialists in karst.


1994 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 403-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald L. Wyse

Weed science has a long history of solving weed management problems for farmers. Over the last four decades most of the solutions to weed problems have been based on herbicide technology. Thus, most crop production systems in the United States rely heavily on herbicides as the primary method of weed management. During the last decade environmentalists, farmers, agricultural scientists, policy makers, and the general public have begun to question the long-term sustainability of conventional farming systems. The sustainability of these systems is being questioned because of environmental, social, and economic concerns caused by global competition, cost of production, soil erosion, water pollution, and concern over the quality of rural life. Weeds are the major deterrent to the development of more sustainable agriculture systems. Since weeds dictate most of the crop production practices (e.g., tillage, herbicides, cultivation, row spacing) weed scientists must become the leaders of collaborative integrated approaches to agriculture systems research. New crop production systems must be developed that are less destructive to the environment, are profitable, conserve energy, and support rural community development. The goal is to facilitate the development of ecologically based alternative methods of weed management that will support crop production systems that require less tillage and herbicide inputs. To accomplish this goal, research efforts must be radically expanded in weed/crop ecology and in the development of ecologically based technologies for weed management.


Author(s):  
Maria Resendiz ◽  
Maria Diana Gonzales ◽  
Clarissa Rodriguez

International collaborations usually involve individuals from one country traveling to another country (Kuehn & Henne, 2003). However, for various reasons, students and faculty from the United States do not always have the option to travel to another country. This was the case when the Department of Communication Disorders Speech-Language Hearing Clinic at Texas State University was contacted by personnel from a clinic in Monterrey, México. Together, we developed an international collaboration that would be mutually beneficial to all parties involved. We developed goals for the clinical component of the speech-language pathology graduate program, the participating clients and their families, professionals employed at the private clinic in Monterrey, México, and research goals to document the effectiveness of the international collaboration we called the Multicultural Intensive Speech-Language Therapy Intervention Clinic (MISTIC). In this case, families and professionals from México traveled to the United States to participate in this international collaboration.


1993 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-151
Author(s):  
R. William Orr ◽  
Richard H. Fluegeman

In 1990 (Fluegeman and Orr) the writers published a short study on known North American cyclocystoids. This enigmatic group is best represented in the United States Devonian by only two specimens, both illustrated in the 1990 report. Previously, the Cortland, New York, specimen initially described by Heaslip (1969) was housed at State University College at Cortland, New York, and the Logansport, Indiana, specimen was housed at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. Both institutions recognize the importance of permanently placing these rare specimens in a proper paleontologic repository with other cyclocystoids. Therefore, these two specimens have been transferred to the curated paleontologic collection at the University of Cincinnati Geological Museum where they can be readily studied by future workers in association with a good assemblage of Ordovician specimens of the Cyclocystoidea.


2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. E8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis J. Jareczek ◽  
Marshall T. Holland ◽  
Matthew A. Howard ◽  
Timothy Walch ◽  
Taylor J. Abel

Neurosurgery for the treatment of psychological disorders has a checkered history in the United States. Prior to the advent of antipsychotic medications, individuals with severe mental illness were institutionalized and subjected to extreme therapies in an attempt to palliate their symptoms. Psychiatrist Walter Freeman first introduced psychosurgery, in the form of frontal lobotomy, as an intervention that could offer some hope to those patients in whom all other treatments had failed. Since that time, however, the use of psychosurgery in the United States has waxed and waned significantly, though literature describing its use is relatively sparse. In an effort to contribute to a better understanding of the evolution of psychosurgery, the authors describe the history of psychosurgery in the state of Iowa and particularly at the University of Iowa Department of Neurosurgery. An interesting aspect of psychosurgery at the University of Iowa is that these procedures have been nearly continuously active since Freeman introduced the lobotomy in the 1930s. Frontal lobotomies and transorbital leukotomies were performed by physicians in the state mental health institutions as well as by neurosurgeons at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (formerly known as the State University of Iowa Hospital). Though the early technique of frontal lobotomy quickly fell out of favor, the use of neurosurgery to treat select cases of intractable mental illness persisted as a collaborative treatment effort between psychiatrists and neurosurgeons at Iowa. Frontal lobotomies gave way to more targeted lesions such as anterior cingulotomies and to neuromodulation through deep brain stimulation. As knowledge of brain circuits and the pathophysiology underlying mental illness continues to grow, surgical intervention for psychiatric pathologies is likely to persist as a viable treatment option for select patients at the University of Iowa and in the larger medical community.


2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh McCarthy

<span>This study explores the efficacy of the online social networking site </span><em>Facebook</em><span>, for linking international digital media student cohorts through an e-mentoring scheme. It reports on the 2011 collaboration between the University of Adelaide in Australia, and Penn State University in the United States. Over one semester, twelve postgraduate students in Australia and ten undergraduate students in the United States took part in an online mentor scheme hosted by </span><em>Facebook</em><span>. Students were required to submit work-in-progress imagery each week to a series of galleries within the forum. Postgraduate students from Adelaide mentored the undergraduate students at Penn State, and in turn, staff and associated industry professionals mentored the Adelaide students. Interaction between the two student cohorts was consistently strong throughout the semester, and all parties benefitted from the collaboration. Students from Penn State University were able to receive guidance and critiques from more experienced peers, and responded positively to the continual feedback over the semester. Students from the University of Adelaide received support from three different groups: Penn State staff and associated professionals; local industry professionals and recent graduates; and peers from Penn State. The 2011 scheme highlighted the efficacy of </span><em>Facebook</em><span> as a host site for e-mentoring and strengthened the bond between the two collaborating institutions.</span>


2020 ◽  
pp. 249-251

This anthology stems from a 2014 conference at the University of Maryland, which focused on how American Jews provided material aid to Holocaust refugees during and after the Holocaust, and also how they began to cope with the catastrophe. This coping involved both an imagining and a re-imagining of “the old country,” a reevaluation of the places American Jews had left behind in more or less normal circumstances before the First World War but in increasingly desperate circumstances after 1918 and, again, after 1939. American Jews who had come to the United States before the 1920s maintained ties with their former communities in Central and Eastern Europe, ties that were fostered by efforts to remain in touch with family and friends and, more generally, with the world’s most populous Jewish communities. Those efforts were aided by the ...


1982 ◽  
Vol 4 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 22-24
Author(s):  
D. Warren

Since 1973, The United States Agency for International Development's "New Directions" policies have required that international development projects be designed and evaluated from a more complex multidisciplinary format, adding social soundness analyses to problems of economic, financial, and technical analyses. Due to personnel constraints, USAID includes non-Agency persons on project design and evaluation teams. They frequently rely on international development consulting firms to identify and assemble the non-Agency members of these teams. More often than not the team members, assembled at short notice from different universities and agencies, have never met each other prior to the assignment, have had no previous experience in the country or region to be visited, may be unfamiliar with USAID procedures and expectations, and are anything but a "team." The different approaches of these "team" members to development planning, combined with different personalities and political ideologies, can be difficult constraints to overcome in short-term project design and evaluation assessments.


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