Dr. Greg Smith teaches and coordinates the Graduate School’s Core Program at Lewis & Clark College in Portland. Dr. Smith’s current writing and research revolves around the practice of place- and community-based education. This approach to education focuses on using local knowledge, phenomena, and experience as the foundation for teaching and learning. Its aim is to connect children and youth more firmly to their own communities and region and to prepare them to participate in the shaping of a more just and sustainable society.
Dr. Smith serves on the board of the Rural School and Community Trust, a national organization that has been an active sponsor of place- and community-based education reform throughout the United States. He is also a fellow of the National Educational Policy Center based at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He has helped facilitate Lewis & Clark’s Courage to Teach Program, a national project aimed at supporting the renewal of experienced teachers. Dr. Smith was also a founding member of the Environmental Middle School in the Portland area and served on its site council for several years.
Dr. Smith is a native Oregonian who is strongly attached to the Pacific Northwest. As an undergraduate, he attended Oberlin College in Ohio and the University of Oregon. After completing an M.A. at Southern Oregon State College in Ashland, he taught high school English for nine years. Convinced of the value of strong communities to the process of education, he returned to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an educational researcher studying ways to extend what he had learned while teaching in small private high schools to the public education system. Prior to joining the faculty at Lewis & Clark College, he taught at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, where he helped coordinate the Teachers for Alaska Program.