A Pedagogy of Place: A Hunger for the RealBy Michael UmphreyOriginally Published in ArtistSearch (January 1998) (c) 1998 Michael Umphrey May be reproduced for educational use.
Not long ago the imagineers at Disney were working on plans for a new "Tomorrowland" set in the year 2055–an intergalactic future full of flying saucers–when CEO Michael Eisner suddenly asked, "How do you show people the future when the future is Montana?" The world is young in Montana–full of promise. It is currently sought after by who have "made it" elsewhere but seem uninterested in living with the world that results from their making. We still have a chance to do better here. Eisner had recently bought a ranch out west, and maybe this led him to think about what sort of future people really do want. Many folks are having second thoughts about what Max Frisch calls our "knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Some people who come to Montana want to escape being buffered from the world, lost in simulations of it. They are hungry for the real. When our teacher Thoreau ranged the wilds around Concord like a half-starved hound, he wanted to see that one place truly, and he knew that until he could see one place truly he could not truly see any place. The best travel, he said, was the journey deeper into a particular place: its nature, its history, its fabulous reality. I recently spent a gorgeous October day in the mountains above Libby with thirteen students in a Montana Heritage class that is being team taught by Jeff Gruber, Bob Malyevac, and Rose Goyen. The students are heirs to over 2,000 historical photographs of logging in the Kootenai Valley that older classmates have gathered and organized over the last two years. Their immediate task was to add to that collection by documenting logging in Montana in 1997. With their cameras and their notebooks, they met David Friedman, a forester for Plum Creek Lumber Company and Paul Brown, a contract logger who is selectively cutting at the site.
The students were impressed by the $320,000 clipper that cuts trees, limbs them, and saws them into log lengths in a smooth, quiet operation leaving little slash on the forest floor, and by the $280,000 rubber-tired forwarder that moves up and down the mountain, loading the bunched logs onto its bunks and hauling them down the road without the need of skid trails. The history of their place is deeply connected to logging, and the town has suffered too much in recent decades for them to be glib about economic concerns. They are finding their way into the fundamentals of a critical community conversation. Some are quickly persuaded by the obvious love of the woods and their work that Friedman and Jones express. "It was interesting how clean, quick, and precise they were," said Caryn Kallay. "The loggers showed that they care for the earth," said Walter Snyder. "They are more educated than people think. There was much care taken in the harvesting of a tree." Others remained skeptical. Cameron Morton said, "I think logging is still hack and slash because when we were there I almost never stepped on the ground, but on fallen logs and broken branches." The goal is less to reach consensus at this stage than, as John Adams wrote to his lifelong opponent Thomas Jefferson, "To explain ourselves to each other." It's a civilized goal. Though occupational culture is only one facet of community, it is a point of entry into a living community, which is where we need to go to provide a living education, to satisfy our students' hunger for the real that, unsatisfied, has the potential to get expressed in all sorts of harmful ways. Local studies help us see that our towns and institutions did not simply happen due to large-scale, anonymous forces. Rather, they were built by particular people who, free to act or react in innumerable ways, did specific things at specific moments in specific places. As the students get close to these people, they get close to truths that are not always easy to teach in schools--the world is real and in it we are free to act, for example. Jeff Gruber said he became involved in heritage teaching because, "I want the kids to know that they are not powerless." Across the state, teachers in the Montana Heritage Project are offering academic instruction that also leads their students into living relationships with their communities. Carley Evans in Chester has had her fifth grade students research the history of homesteading in Liberty County, culminating in oral interviews with the oldest people in the area at the actual sites of their family homesteads. These tapes and other historical documents are being organized into a hyperstudio presentation for other community members and for the future. "I didn't care about my town so much before," stated fifth grader Brad Fenger. "Now I do." In Chester High School, Renee Rasmussen has asked her students "What stories will you take with you into old age? What will these stories tell others about you? The times in which you lived? Your values?" They will seek these stories through a series of community-based research projects and interviews. Middle schoolers in Sarah Reeve's class in St. Ignatius have been studying Lewis and Clark travels through early Montana and discussing the spirit of adventure and discovery in preparation for interviewing community members about "Adventuresome Journeys into the Unknown" that they have taken. In one of Montana's most fabled towns, teachers Pam Birkeland and Jim Takenaka are joining forces with the Fort Benton Historical Society and the Fort Benton Museum to help the seventh graders create a web page about Fort Benton, its resources and people. The students will collect oral histories from the Fort Benton community and put the transcripts on the internet. In Simms, Dorothea Susag and Molly Pasma are guiding their high school students into a host of local issues, including the history of the irrigation project, ranching, homesteading, the railroad, the Blackfeet in both pre- and post-contact times, the experiences of the Metis people, the military history of Fort Shaw, and the educational history of the Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School. Many of these topics have controversial aspects. The students will ask "What's the story we believe today?" and then they will search the historical record and interview people in the community to see if the story adequately accounts for the evidence. Students in Bigfork have set about trying to understand the Montana that was here in the 1920's, researching both what has changed and what has stayed the same. A group of elders in the community have been serving as mentors to the students. Teacher Mary Sullivan says, "The project keeps expanding because the students keep coming up with more ideas." Sophomore Fabienne Fellows reflecting on her conversations with her mentor observed that "it isn't just a project any more. It has become a relationship." Human communities have survived for centuries as elders reach out to forge bonds of understanding with the next generation, and youth have always wanted to join. When the photography and the interviews were over on that October morning above Libby, we headed back to the buses for our lunches. All of the students boarded the buses to eat, while all the adults climbed up on a log deck outside. Bob Malyevac razzed the students a bit for hunkering down inside, but they complained about the chill air and chose the soft seats inside. The adults went on conversing, glad to be outside in a place they loved. Gradually, in twos and threes, the youngsters came outside and found seats around the grownups, joining their conversation. Within fifteen minutes, all the students had left the bus and were outside. The morning fog began to burn off and the sun broke through, lighting up the vast valley vistas below. Poor Michael Eisner. In his heart he must know that no Disneyland will ever measure up to the reality of Montana. Heritage teachers already know that, and gradually their students are coming to see it too.
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