Nez Perce Aesthetic
     Rare beauty

Prairiemary (AKA Mary Strachan Scriver), blogging from Valier, Montana, invites us to see the sophisticated and subtle beauty of an ancient buckskin dress, probably of Nez Perce origin. She explains the Japanese concept of “Shibui”, which refers to “the type of beauty that doesnt need announcement; its quality speaks for itself.” The Japanese think of beauty in levels—"from blatant, brash, and bold to the ideal of beauty: Shibui.” The hallmarks of this level of aesthetics are “understated elegance, utility (each piece serves an important function), rare beauty, and unobtrusive sophistication.”

She nominates a pre-1820 dress from North America as an illustration of “Shibui.” Patched and fringed with pale but not white buckskin, the top is banded simply in black and white stripes, “lazy stitch.” which means that a short string of beads is not then tacked down bead by bead, but left to be a little fluid. These dresses are really two deerskins, one as the front and one as the back, pieced at the hem, with the tail (hair on) of the deer folded over at the top under the chin, pinned down with beading. The stripe at the top of the arms alternates black, white and red.

Prairiemarie mentions DNA evidence linking Plains Indians to peoples of the High Mongolian prairies centuries ago. There is a timeless quality to the dress, which for me evokes those moments when we glimpse eternity through the fecund undulations of time.

Writing for the ages, part 1
     Students should be taught their words may last forever

Teaching writing can be a powerful way of helping young people think about what sort of people they want to be. We don’t need to criticize them as people, but we can help them see the way the persona they are creating comes across, how audiences will understand that persona, and what techniques can be used to strengthen the message that would be most effective in whatever particular situation the persona evokes. The best rhetoric teachers have known for centuries that this needn’t lead to the sort of manipulative sophistry common among politicians. Generally, the most credible and trustworthy persona will be the most effective. The sound of goodness is persuasive.

Forever is composed of nows.
Emily Dickinson

Blogging and the same old same old

I’ve been visiting blogs lately, to see what’s happening and to think about implications for teachers. Much of what’s going on truly is exciting. Now that publishing is as simple as clicking a “submitâ€� link, lots of people are re-thinking what writing and publishing are for.

And yet, much of what is happening seems caught up in the same old same old.

Some blogs give me the same feeling I got at a university MFA program--too much desperation. The MFA program sometimes reminded me of those infomercials that run on late-night television--feeding on people’s desires to lose weight or make lots of money or quit smoking. Most people enrolled in the MFA program because they wanted to be famous poets. Could the professors teach anyone to be a famous poet? Of course not. They liked to claim that the value of the program was that it created a community where aspiring writers could find and support each other.

Maybe that was true. Pretty costly support group though, even if credentials were included.

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Master narratives that shape our schools, Part 3
     My tribe is separate from your tribe

Ethnic separatism in the guise of self-determination is one of the master narratives that organizes the lives of many students in today’s schools. This undermines liberal education’s central tenet–that we should seek evidence and follow it–and the ethnic pride folks have little use for liberal education’s caveat to consider questions from many points of view and to ask rigorous questions. When the right answer is already known, or deeply felt, questions may be threats rather than tools. When the right answer is the one that makes us feel most proud, we can believe anything, and we parody the pursuit of knowledge. At bottom, ethnic warriors believe not in truth but in power. If they care about schooling, it is only because they see it as a technique of power. My faith as a teacher is that such people will be defeated in time by others who pay more attention to facts than to applause or credentials.

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.
Ursula LeGuin

Skinheads and white militiamen are strikingly similar in important ways to advocates of Afrocentrism or Native Pride, just as ignorant armies clashing at night are often more alike than different. The particular ethnicity the competing groups champion is different but the impulse to circle the wagons is the same. One can’t understand moves made by white supremists without understanding moves made by their opponents any more than one can make sense of a chess game if only the white pieces are visible. The two sides inhabit the same story and have become characters in each others’ tales. The other side is their reality.

When you read the paragraph above, you quite likely began forming judgments about me based on your sense of where I stood on questions that affect you. Am I likely to strengthen or weaken cultural forces that worry you? Can you trust me to take care of the things that you feel are good? If I had power or influence, would I likely be a friend or an enemy?

Race has become so politicized that most of us have something to win or lose in the contests that go on and on, and so talking about race is nearly impossible without taking a side, except by sticking to description of what various sides say, do and believe.

Race is a complex topic, by which I mean we experience it on many levels, using many different methods of perception and analysis. When a sociologist gathers data about the behavior of many individuals to analyze statistically, he is viewing humanity at a different level than the physician who examines your white blood cells under a microscope. When we talk about race, some of us will think first and foremost about contemporary political contests, some will consider large questions of history and justice, some will think about family and blood relationship and the cultural bonds that outsiders never see accurately, and some will think about neighborhood taunts endured as a child.

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Local community memory
     Are we in a dark age of community communications?

Kevin Harris wonders whether we are living in a dark age of community communication. I wonder whether working together on community and family histories might be one way of getting back together.

Kevin Harris wonders that modern society seems to lack “the sense of readily available common repositories for local community memory. It’s as if what we’re left with is no longer fulfilling the role of shoring-up everyday lives, of giving form to neighbourhood life.”

He mentions contributing factors, such as the automobile and the television, and laments the loss of a time when “communication between neighbours was lubricated by frequent interaction in the street, in the workplace, in the pub, at school, at the football match or at the church.”

This perspective suggests that we may be living in a ‘dark age’ of community communication, where at the moment we have neither the benefit of dense overlapping networks in our neighbourhoods, nor the potential of an online resource for the accretion of community memory.

I wonder how much the action of building those lost repositories of community memory might provide the animating motive for rebuilding family and community. The wild growth of interest in family genealogy suggests to me that living communities organized around reclaiming and understanding the past might be modern equivalents for old time barn raising and branding parties--work that draws people into shared, purposive relationship.

The History Begins at Home video from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education gives a glimpse of what kids can do. When you have a neighborhood’s history and its children involved, you have powerful forces for inviting engagement from others.

Place and narratable moments
     Longing for a sense of place

The phrase “sense of place” has migrated to the commercial world, where it is linked to the decor of kiosks and fast food counters. But it became popular because of a longing people have for narratable moments--events that have meaning, and that we cannot recall as separate from the places they occurred. It is those meaningful events, rather than the geographic spaces that evoke them, that are of human importance.

If you land at JFK airport and come through Terminal 8 or 9 you may notice that the 60 or so shops – food courts, kiosks, newsstands, duty-free stores, etc., etc. – aren’t quite the same as those in, say, New Orleans or San Francisco. You see, these shops are “visually related� to each other through design elements inspired by the 1930s New York streetscape.

This provides a “sense of place,� the designer said. So between the taxi lanes and the portable tunnels to climb aboard planes, this corridor is given the atmosphere of a recognizable time and place. Though the terminal as a whole is designed to sort us and move us like so many widgets past uniforms and signs through some total administrative state of loudspeakers and no smoking, the murals, signs and plastic cutouts give us a feeling of ease as we negotiate the minimum security nowhere in which we have locked ourselves. This noisy chute to anywhere offers the charm of a custom retail environment without sacrificing the comfort of familiar brands.

The plan worked. The decor increased per passenger spending by fifty percent, the designer said. This, the designer said, was because it gave passengers a sense of place.

A sense of place. Not the real thing, I suppose, but a sense of it like the after image of a blown out candle. A sense of place haunts the Pizza Hut, evoked by wallpaper images of nineteenth century London.

With such thoughts in my mind, I hesitated when an editor called and asked me to write a piece on “teaching and a sense of place.�

“Let me think about it.”

In most ways I don’t mind the designer thinking about how to make more people spend more money. That certainly doesn’t make her worse than me or my friends and family. Most of the time I don’t do anything more ennobling than turning my time and skill to what pays. And really, the New York streetscape is an improvement over those old Soviet cafeterias designed by political appointees who didn’t care what sort of feelings a space gives us.

Still, I suspected that an editor asking for a piece on “sense of place� was expecting something more profound than marketing. Her audience was no doubt hankering after something more authentic than moods evoked by plastic signage. We use “authentic� much as the optimists before World War I used “progressive,� as an all-purpose term of praise, part accolade and part prayer.

No doubt the editor thought I was a natural to write about a sense of place since I still live in the western Montana town where I grew up – a little place of about a thousand people nestled at bottom of the west slope of the Mission Range in the Northern Rockies. Surely one who has stayed in place could write authentically about place.

As I sat at my desk gazing out the window at the orchard I had planted and thinking about such things, or maybe just gazing out the window, my 21-month old grandson, toddled up and pulled on my sleeve. I looked down at him. He fully understood that people his size only need to be adorable, and he turned his begging eyes full on me.

“Campin?� he asked, reaching up with both hands.

It took me a moment. Then I made the connection. The week before he had come with us on a three-family camping trip. We stayed up late talking around the fire while he wandered from person to person, lap to lap, waving a willow sticky with marshmellow. He had associated the “camping� he heard us talk about with what was most memorable about the experience: being surrounded by people who loved him.

“Campin� had become his word for sitting on laps and getting hugs. He liked it.

The “place� we had camped was an unmarked patch of grass along Wounded Buck Creek not far from Glacier Park, just above the little town of Hungry Horse. I had gone there with my parents when I was not much older than my grandson. His mother had gone there with my wife and me. We usually went there to pick huckleberries in late July. Sometimes we camped there and spent the days in the park. It was a short drive and we avoided the hassles of camping inside the park: full campgrounds and surly grizzlies.

Most people would pass by that little place on Wounded Buck Creek without considering it a place at all. It was just a spot along the road.

But it had become a place because we knew good times there. The places we have in mind when we talk about our sense of place are those intersections of landscape and memory we know as narratable moments. If I had taken my grandson back to that place it wouldn’t have satisfied him. It wasn’t the place but what had happened there that he wanted.

In a word, it was story that mattered. Not a story we have told but the story we have lived.

There are significant dangers in misunderstanding what it is that one wants. I worry that sometimes people who are pursuing a sense of place are not clear about what they want. All our airports and shopping districts might get prettier and we might be just as lonely, just as full of longing.

What we want are stories and hugs.

Beyond Hollywood
     Let's make a movie

Left: Richard and Catherine Saltz watch a multimedia production at the Bigfork Veterans Assembly about their son, Matthew, who was killed in Iraq. The production focused on the beauty of Matthew’s life. Through creating and watching productions drawn from the real lives of our communities, we clarify the common core of feelings and ideas that bind us together. We now have the tools to create powerful public art born of our social life, revolving around celebrations, rituals, and recurring community events such as marriages and deaths.

The Montana Heritage Project is celebrating its tenth year this year. After a decade of paying attention to work done by high school students across the state, I realize that what sticks in my mind–that is, what really matters--are the moments of beauty.

In Bigfork this year I attended a school-wide Veterans Day Assembly put on by juniors in Mary Sullivan’s classes. Part of the program included a multimedia presentation using photographs and music to pay tribute to Bigfork High School graduate Matthew Saltz, Montana’s first casualty in the Iraq War.

The format was simple--images of Matt accompanied by music. But the production transmitted a powerful message about what matters to one group of people in a small Montana town, simply because the photos were ones that Matt’s family and friends had chosen to record and save. People document what matters to them.

Quite a few values were celebrated, and thus taught. Work hard. Take care of family. Learn to be good at things. Set goals. Take life seriously. Have fun. Have friends, and remember them. The production was a powerful event in the community’s history–the sort of art by which cultures are created and transmitted.

The entire assembly, which was carefully staged, got me thinking about the role of beauty in teaching. We are drawn to beauty. This is important for communities to remember as they think about how to educate their youth. Teachers today compete for the attention of kids who live in a world that is noisy with seductive and sophisticated claims on our consciousness.

It’s a hard world to grow up in. Many kids have questions about what really is important. If we want our youth to stay with us, caring for what we care for, we need to invite them into the beauty we know, teaching them to see it, to feel it, and to create it.

I like what I see happening in the Heritage Project. A student in Phil Leonardi’s class in Corvallis made a movie based on newspaper research into an eighty-year-old unsolved crime. Students in Darlene Beck’s classes in Townsend used images and recorded voices to explore the local culture of quilters. Students in Dorothea Susag’s classes in Simms did a documentary production that brought to life the Sun River Valley as it was in 1910. Students in Nancy Widdicombe’s classes created a documentary video about three families who have ranched near the Snowy Mountains for more than a hundred years.

Digital tools for making movies and music have made this possible in ways that didn’t exist a few years ago. Kids today have at their command the power of a symphony orchestra. They have in their computers access to movie wizardry unavailable even to Hollywood producers in the recent past. They have the tools. What they need are good ideas about what these tools are for.

Already, the power and sophistication of local productions is limited less by our tools or budgets than by what we haven’t yet learned. The learning could be a joy. Students today need to be critical viewers of the media that surrounds them. The best way to learn how perceptions are shaped by camera angle, framing, juxtaposition, and editing is to create their own videos. The work of researching, scripting, shooting, and editing a video can be a collaborative process, a series of conversations about appearances and realities, about possibilities and results, about what matters and what does not.

Over the past ten years, the world has become noisier. Learning to focus our attention is getting to be a survival skill. We can help young people, and ourselves, by ignoring many of the distractions and making space to have important conversations, to do research, to reflect, and then to do something beautiful. Let’s make a slide show about the history of this river. Let’s make a documentary about the building of this school. Let’s make a movie about your grandfather’s life.

If we pass on our cultural heritage by using our new technology to find and celebrate the beauties of life in Montana, we will be thinking about and teaching what matters.

Folkways, norms, and laws
     Ordering Society

Ronald Bolender:

William Graham Sumner Classified Norms into 3 Major Types:

a) Folkways - are relatively weak norms which are only mildly enforced in a society. (not against the law)

Example of Folkways

1. Correct manners.

2. Appropriate dress.

3. Proper eating behavior.

b) Mores - are the strong and important norms of a society. Violation of mores will evoke severe punishment. (against the law most of the time.)

Example of Mores

1. Bigamy

2. Incest

3. Cannibalism

c) Laws - are norms which are designed, maintained and enforced by the political authority of a society.

Examples of Violations of Laws

1. Speeding

2, Cheating on Income Tax

3. Murder