The Voices Project at Michigan State University Museum is grounded in the field research of Cynthia Vagnetti and her Voices from the Fields Collection.
Our products, a readers' theatre script activity to inform and inspire public exploration, lists to encourage book club and film festival programs, an introduction to civic dialogue, and essays to help introduce readers' theatre, were developed through the expertise of Voices Project founders and refined with input from farmers, educators, and playwrights, and tested with audiences from community theatre and agricultural organizations. Here is how we did it.
Essay: The Oral History Interview
“One of the most precious resources for understanding the conditions of our society and culture is the oral history interview. It allows us to see one human event from a multitude of perspectives and is a flexible means to creating a variety of literary forms.”
Read MoreEssay: Cynthia Vagnetti's Voices from the Field Collection
The authentic voices of farmers and ranchers from across American have been documented and are the basis for this collection. Since 1991 Vagnetti has interviewed, filmed and photographed over 100 American farmers and ranchers. This research base represents farmers in 25 states, with nearly 200 hours of videotaped oral history interviews and contextual footage, and 2,000 documentary photographs.
Read MoreEssay: Creating the Script & Audience Surveys
To insure authentic content, farmers, agricultural educators, and humanities and theatre professionals have been involved in the development of the script. What Will Be in the Fields Tomorrow? was shaped with purposeful aesthetic and political decisions that
- embody issues in the actual words and experiences of real farmers
- increase awareness of sustainability in farming
- broaden awareness in the general public
- is accessible in format and flexibility
Fields was created to be a vehicle to educate and to bring about real conversation and discussion about farming and food production, both within agricultural communities and among general consumers.
This essay describes script development and reports the findings of audience surveys from six pilot sites. Audiences included sustainable, organic, and general public groups.
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