From a Classroom in Northern California to a Rice Farm in Kyushu
Stanford Education Partnership for Internationalizing Curriculum (EPIC) Fellow Dr. Jacob Vazquez shares reflections on his EPIC Fellowship and Fulbright experience in Japan.
By Jacob Vazquez
The following is a guest article written by Dr. Jacob Vazquez, Interim Associate Dean of Instruction and Agribusiness Faculty member, and past Fellow of Stanford’s EPIC Community College Faculty Fellowship, one of several teacher professional development programs offered by SPICE.
My interest in agriculture started in high school, through my involvement in Future Farmers of America (FFA). That interest deepened later on, working in agriculture finance at Farm Credit, and eventually leading to my current role teaching Agribusiness at Butte College, where I get to share my passion for agriculture and agribusiness with our students.
My involvement with SPICE began through Stanford Global Studies’ EPIC Community College Leadership Program, where fellows were charged with developing global curricula for use in community college classrooms. Butte College is a rural community college in Northern California, where rice is one of the region’s most valuable commodities. I teach Agricultural Economics, a general education class taken by both agriculture majors and non-majors, and I wanted the curriculum modules to connect the agriculture we grow here in Northern California to something produced elsewhere in the world.
I built the modules around rice, comparing the industry in Butte and Glenn Counties to the industry in Japan. The two differ significantly in scale and farming method, but the crop carries economic and cultural weight in both places. With SPICE’s support and connections with the U.S. Consulate Fukuoka, part of the modules included Zoom interviews that connected students with Japanese rice farmers, including the owner of an organic farm in Saga Prefecture and a former musician who now farms rice and is developing a rice-based ice cream.
Those connections, particularly with the U.S. Consulate Fukuoka, led me to the Fulbright Specialist Program in collaboration with Kyushu Sangyo University (KSU), where SPICE has an existing program through their Stanford e-KyuSan-U Program. This past June, I traveled to Fukuoka as a Fulbright Specialist for a project titled “Seeds of Change: Empowering Community with Food Education.” Over two weeks, the itinerary included close collaboration with KSU students, faculty, and administration, a tour of a rice cracker manufacturing facility, and a public lecture on agribusiness and sustainability, among other events.