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231 In this profile, John Sipple gives us a richly detailed account of his work and experience as a graduate student and his efforts to develop and pursue a research agenda as an assistant professor in the field of education. The main practice story he tells helps us to see how scholars who choose to integrate their academic and public work can end up leapfrogging back and forth between scholarly and public worlds. John’s reflections on his work and experience in the story also help us to see that civic engagement can have both public and academic value. While John speaks in uncertain terms about his future at Cornell, based on doubts about how his peers will judge his work, his worries turned out to be unfounded. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2005. I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Education. This is my sixth year. I’m in the learning, teaching, and social policy area of the department. I came into the social foundations program area, but it was shut down about two or three years into my time here. I originally had a 50/40/10 time split: 50 percent teaching, 40 percent research, 10 percent Extension. That was changed a year and half ago, when the decree came down from the college that we’re supposed to get rid of those three-way splits. So now I’m 50 percent teaching and 50 percent research. When I was hired and I came in with my three-way split, it was pretty clear to me what that 10 percent Extension was supposed to go to (10 percent: how, how do you bracket out 10 percent of your time? It’s strange). I was supposed to work with the Rural Schools Program, which has since changed its name to the Rural Schools Association of New York State. My 10 percent extension appointment was supposed to be time spent serving the C H A P T E R 1 3 Leapfrogging Back and Forth A Profile of John Sipple Associate Professor, Department of Education, Cornell University Interviews conducted by Scott Peters, April 21 and April 28, 2004 C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N 232 group, working with the group as a liaison from the department to the organization, which is a statewide organization representing approximately three hundred rural school districts. And part of the conception of how that was supposed to work was through my research. I was supposed to be useful to these people. It could work as a nice conduit out to the field. I do my work, I do my research, and then the next step is to disseminate it or diffuse it through the organization. The conduit works both ways. Through my association with the organization , many, many opportunities—consulting opportunities, research opportunities, just interaction opportunities—have come up. It is truly both ways, where I serve them, and I get great benefit out of working with them. There’s a two-way flow of information back and forth. My teaching program was fairly clear when I came in. There were two courses that had been previously taught for decades. One was the Sociology of Education undergraduate course, a large lecture course. I took that over. The second one was Education 661, the Administration of Educational Organizations. It’s an organizational behavior class, the first course that brand-new students in the Foundations of Policy graduate program would take. So those two courses were kind of set. I designed a third course called American School Reform, which is a graduate-level seminar. It’s still rooted in organization studies, but it’s much more about policy than 661. Students certainly can—and I argue, should—take both, because they complement each other nicely. So those are the three main courses that I’ve been teaching for six years now. I had also at one point taught an interdisciplinary course with Rolf Pendall from the Department of City and Regional Planning, and Lorraine Maxwell from the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis. We got a grant with a grad student, Kieran Kileen, to create this Clarence Stein lecture series, where we tried, in an interdisciplinary manner, to bring together issues of education, planning, and design, and explore how those various disciplines can speak to school settings and various learning environments. I also taught a seminar that coincided with our Ph.D...

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