". . .What we have loved
Others will love, and we will show them how."
                                              William Wordsworth

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Sunday, January 01, 2006

Why should you join us at the Place-Based Learning Conference?

One reason is that you’ll get a chance to hear the professional techniques of some of Montana’s best teachers. The Heritage Project’s demonstration site directors regularly prepare their students to deliver stirring academic performances before large audiences at our annual Youth Heritage Festival at the state capitol. Here are a few of the things these teachers will tell you:

• How to get your kids to write like Studs Terkel

• What techniques work to lead students from stories about family heirlooms into the essential questions of American history and literature

• How well-planned research serves the development of voice and creativity

• Ways to escape the boredom of reading “copy and paste” research papers

• How to transform your classroom into an adventure by joining our Expedition to the 1930s.

• Simple strategies that draw on the power of family history to teach authentic writing.

You’ll also have a chance to hear what nationally acclaimed educators have to say about place-based approaches to teaching:

• Greg Smith, from Lewis and Clark College in Portland has written the definitive articles on place-based learning for Phi Delta Kappan and Educational Leadership. He will speak on “Learning to be where we are.”

• Rachel Tompkins, president of the Rural School and Community Trust, will speak on “Finding our way: examples of place-based teaching from around the nation."

• Sharon Bishop, co-director of the innovative Nebraska Writing Project, will talk about what she has learned as a high school English teacher about using the power of place to get quality writing. Her topic is “Place-conscious education and the teaching of writing.”

• Guha Shankar from the Library of Congress works with programs around the nation (some inspired by our work here in Montana) that extend schooling into the community. He will discuss “Getting beyond textbooks: fieldwork as education.”

You’ll even get to hear some of Montana’s own leaders in education and writing:

• Historian Martha Kohl, Montana Historical Society historian, writer, and editor, has championed the Project since her arrival in Montana in 1995 and recently served as our guest student-writing judge. In this presentation, she’ll describe the way our students can become scholarly detectives, analyzing historic buildings, neighborhoods, and local primary source records--in the context of big issues and themes.

• Poet Mark Gibbons writes powerful poems. He speaks in a voice that is not afraid of what matters. He talks about what we need to talk about. He’s also a gifted teacher. Don’t miss this chance to hear how he values his deep Montana roots. He’ll read from his new collection, Connemara Moonshine.

• Mike Umphrey has directed the Heritage Project since it began in 1995. He’ll draw on his background as a poet (The Lit Window and The Breaking Edge) and a teacher to explain how a focus on story--including narrative environment and narrative identity--can help teachers untangle all sorts of knots that bedevil schooling today.

• Professor Chad Okrusch will take a hard look at Butte’s past and its present, drawing lessons about community health and renewal that are applicable anywhere. His topic is “Environmental History, Education, and Community Renewal in Butte.”

And if that isn’t enough, you might come for the music. Montana’s widely known musical group, Dublin Gulch--named for a Butte landscape–will offer a concert of the Butte Irish music they’ve been gathering and performing for many years.

Lodging is available at the Red Lion in Butte. More economical dorm rooms may also be booked. Most sessions will be held on the campus of Montana Tech.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Essential Questions for the Conference

What might we restore?

How do we cross to safety?

What should we refuse to part with?

What should we let go?

I could give all to Time except - except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There
And what I would not part with I have kept.
                  "I Could Give All to Time," Robert Frost

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

schedule

Exploring Where We Are Through Literature and Writing A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it...Ӕ Joan Didion A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar nonmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. חGeorge Eliot June 19 and 20, 2006 Butte, Montana MONDAY, June 19, 2006 9:00 a.m. Where we are, and why we are here,Ӕ Marcella Sherfy, Education Director, Montana Heritage Project  9:15 a.m. Learning to be where we are,Ӕ Greg Smith, faculty, Lewis & Clark College 10:30 a.m. Place-Conscious Education and the teaching of writing,Ӕ Sharon Bishop, Co-Director, Nebraska Writing Project and Heartland Community Schools 11:45 a.m. Lunch - A place like no other: an introduction to Butte,Ӕ Ellen Crain, Director, Butte-Silver Bow Archives 1:15 p.m. Beyond the text:  fieldwork as education,Ӕ Guha Shankar, Folklife Specialist, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress 2:15 p.m. Break 2:30 p.m. CONCURRENT SESSIONS Best Practices, Montana Heritage Project Teachers ֓Getting to story: investigation as the foundation of writing, Jeff Gruber, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director (Read these essays by JeffԒs students:  Songs of Hope" by Rachel Reckin and ӓSenator John Geiger: A Cold Front" by Amanda Shotzberger.) An Expedition to the 1930s: what you need to know and what youӒll want to take, Mary Sullivan and Nancy Widdicombe, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Directors ԓPointers, pitfalls, and payoffs: picking great topics for community research--and making any topic great, Nancy Heggen, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director 3:30 p.m. Break 4:00 p.m. CONCURRENT SESSIONS Ԗ Best Practices, Montana Heritage Project Teachers Point of entry: using family heirlooms to connect students with the big questions in literature and history,Ӕ Renee Rasmussen, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director How to get your kids to write like Studs Terkel: unleashing creativity through family and community history research,Ӕ  Christa Umphrey, Montana Heritage Project Mentor (Read this essay by Christas student:  ғMy Oma" by Britney Maddox.) Gifts of scholarship: real work your students can do for your community--with an emphasis on non-narrative modes of analysis,Ӕ Sarah Zook, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director 5:00 p.m. Break 6:30 p.m. Dinner - Butte rats and glory holes: a poet mucks about in the Mining City,Ӕ Mark Gibbons, poet Tuesday, June 20, 2006 9:00 a.m. Finding our way:  examples of place-based teaching from around the nation,Ӕ Rachel Tompkins, President, Rural School and Community Trust 10:00 a.m. Break 10:30 a.m.. Text and context:  using historical sources to understand place,Ӕ Martha Kohl, historical specialist, National Register of Historic Places 11:45 a.m. Lunch - IrelandӒs musical heritage in Butte, Members of Dublin Gulch, Butte and Helena Irish musicians 1:30 p.m. CONCURRENT SESSIONS Ԗ Best Practices, Montana Heritage Project Teachers Finding the national in the local: American history through the lense of local history,Ӕ Josh Clixby, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director Gearing up for important work: strategies to engage and motivate,Ӕ Dorothea Susag, Montana Heritage Project Mentor This storied place: ‘connecting’ as a step in the writing process,Ӕ Darlene Beck, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director 2:30 p.m. Break 2:45 p.m. CONCURRENT SESSIONS Best Practices, Montana Heritage Project Teachers ֓Students as leaders of community forumsupdating the Montana Study model,ה Tom Thackeray, Tim Schaff, and Dale Alger, along with student Lindsey Appell from Roundup High School. Additional insights from Montana Study Projects at Libby High School (Jeff Gruber) and Chester High School (Renee Rasmussen) Keeping it real: using family history to teach authentic research and writing,Ӕ Phil Leonardi, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director Exploring other cultures: a case study of the Hutterite Project,Ӕ Nancy Widdicombe, Montana Heritage Project Demonstration Site Director 3:45 p.m. Break 4:15 p.m. Environmental history, education, and community renewal in Butte, Montana,Ӕ Chad Okrusch, faculty, Montana Tech-The University of Montana 5:00 p.m. Break 6:30 p.m. Dinner - Teaching as placemaking,Ӕ Michael Umphrey, Director, Montana Heritage Project Project exhibits available for review during meal and mid-day breaks.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Nancy Heggen- Lesson for the ALERT model

LESSON PLAN for the ALERT model

Outline for the “R” or Reflect

Pre- Prep: Students have been studying the Vietnam War and have finished listening to a Vietnam Veteran tell his Vietnam story. He is a poet and song writer. He sang and told many of his poems to the students. They will now reflect on their own thoughts and feelings, and how they can tell some of their stories through song.

OBJECTIVES:
1. Students will learn about the role of protest songs
2. Students will identify their own political agendas and write protest songs or poems
3. Students will identify political issues that are important to them, choose a song, and rewrite the words to fit a rhythm.

TIME and MATERIALS:
1. Possibly 3 class periods. (one to research, one to write/edit, one to present)
2. Computer lab to research songs
3. Writing materials, tape/CD player if needed
4. Possibly create your own protest song so students have an idea of what is expected
5. Tape or CD of protests song from Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

DAY ONE: In computer lab
Ask the students to research songs of the Vietnam War. Have students print out and listen to the message of the song.  They will then need to list 5 current political issues that deeply concern them. Encourage students to share their topics. List some on the board.

DAY TWO:
Select an old nursery song to help students write their song or poem. Consider using:
Row, Row, Row Your Boat
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
Michael, Row the Boat Ashore
You are my Sunshine
The Itsy-Bitsy Spider
Use the example(play some) of how the Civil Rights children of Birmingham used simple rhythms so as to focus on the passion of the message. Read students your song.
Students will write and edit their messages today.

DAY THREE:
Present songs to the class. Each student will listen and try to understand the message the song is presenting. Have students comment or write down the message.

RESOURCES:

MUSIC: examples of protest songs
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute of Music:
We Shall Overcome
Blowing in the Wind
If You Miss Me From the Back of the Bus
Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round
Freedom Land
We Shall Not Be Moved
Mind on Freedom
This Little of Mine
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

BOOKS:
The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway

WEBSITES:
http://www.yahoo.music

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Martha Kohl: The Homework of Place

Martha Kohl has applied her passion for understanding the past and for understanding historic places to a variety of professional positions.  Currently, Martha is a historical specialist and writer for the Montana Historical Society’s one-of-kind National Register of Historic Places interpretive sign program. Prior to that she served as the editor of the Montana Historical Society Press from 1995 through 2003 and was editor of Gateway Heritage, the Missouri Historical Society’s quarterly from 1991-1994. From 1988 to the present, Martha also has taught English, U. S. History, and literacy in Missouri and Montana universities and colleges. Martha has authored articles on topics ranging from the historic buildings of Forsyth, Montana, to African American enfranchisement to writing good papers for National History Day presentations. The Montana Committee for the Humanities recently awarded Martha a research grant to examine how Montana weddings—one of our beloved rites of passage—have changed over time and what those changes mean. This larger research project grew out of an article that she prepared for Heritage Education (Spring 2006), “Something Old, Something New: Weddings as Windows on Montana History.”

For this place-based conference, we’ve asked Martha to ground us in the combined skills of historiography and historic preservation. She’ll remind us how to “see” buildings and neighborhoods as distinct artifacts of the past. She’ll walk us through the primary historical sources that our students can plumb for still more information about those buildings and neighborhoods.  And then, she will demonstrate how big themes—the social and political circumstances of particular eras—influenced what we see in our own towns. In “Text and Context: Using Historical Sources to Understand Place,” look for a compelling presentation of how an excellent historian melds solid primary and secondary historical source research with the personalities of buildings, towns, and landscapes.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Poetry of Place: Where I’m From

On Monday, in a post on A Shrewdness of Apes, the author thinks of her terminally ill father and reflects on the pieces of her childhood that shaped who she is. 

“I come from a place that plays gospel music over the loudspeaker at a gas station-- you can get Jesus while you get Super Unleaded and a bag of pork rinds to go.

I come from a place where one loves God, Mama, and football-- but not necessarily in that order, particularly on a Friday night or a Saturday afternoon.”

The post reminded me of one of my favorite writing assignments.
A few years ago as a way of beginning to study our local community I had students, who were mostly local, write about where they come from. I thought the background work we did and discussions we had leading up to the writing were very valuable. Students enjoyed thinking about and photographing the places important to them, but the quality of the writing wasn’t as high as I would have liked or as good as I thought is could’ve been. 

Right after I finished the writing assignment I found a much better model for getting the kind of specificity I wanted from students. George Ella Lyon’s book Where I’m From seems to be the original source. Though I haven’t actually read her book, I’ve since run into hundreds of great examples that follow this form. Some just use the model, others have more specific guidelines. Unlike many “forms,” rather than ending up with many examples of vague, similar writing, the style of this makes each piece unique.

I especially like the idea of creating a sort of hyper text poem—along the lines of the first post I mentioned, with links to some of the places and things the poem might reference.

I don’t have examples of my own students work, but there are many others —students, teachers, bloggers—who have also given the format a try.
The Minnesota Writing Project has even used it as a demonstration lesson, as does the United Nations Cyber School Bus.

Almost all the versions I’ve read are interesting. This was the case with my students as well. Nearly every poem my students wrote was powerful in some way—either through the language, imagery or experiences conveyed. Students seemed to appreciate the chance to think about and share what pieces of their pasts had shaped them, and I found that the short assignment really did help me understand where my students where coming from.

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Nature deficit disorder

Richard Louv argues in Last Child in the Woods that over the last few decades children have become increasingly separated from nature and this has left them without powerful experiences of natural beauty and spiritual energy. You can listen to an NPR interview with him.

He defines “nature deficit disorder” as “the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and a higher rate of physical and emotional illnesses.” He quotes Paul Gorman, founder and director of the National Partnership for the Environment: “The extent that we separate our children from creation is the extent to which we separate them from the creator—from God.”

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

The Gift of Stories

Alcestis “Cooky” Oberg has an article about life stories as priceless gifts in USA Today. She makes a point that heritage teachers encounter over and over again--when students encounter stories from their families and communities, they also learn important lessons about how to live that aren’t easy to teach into today’s diverse and divided schools. She notes that the story her godfather gave to his grandson is full of important understandings:

His grandson is not going to find on television the tale of becoming the man of the family at 16 years old either, as my godfather did. He financially supported his mother and sister after his father died during the Depression, while putting himself through Northwestern University on athletic scholarships and odd jobs. He kept 50 cents in his pocket for emergencies and sent everything else home. Self-sacrifice and responsibility for others are not part of the manly role model that is taught in movie chase scenes and shoot-’em-ups, or by celebrity misbehavers and cheaters.

It’s the truth of the stories told that make them so important:

Our kids need to know real things about life besides the lame fantasies they get on television: the life we lived, the good and bad choices we made, the lessons we learned, what we’d do if we had it to do over again. In short, whether role model or cautionary tale, the real story of our lives is the best thing we can give kids because it’s true, and they’ll learn from it.

Oberg suggests that adults begin writing their stories as gifts to younger family members:

Whether housewife or doctor, truck driver or engineer, lawyer or lineman, we all have stories to tell — great stories. Perhaps we could write, record, or videotape these stories for our youngsters in installments over the years — something for them to look forward to during the holidays. They hardly know us or know what’s important in life anymore, amid today’s noise and clutter.

We will better understand education’s historic role as the means through which succeeding and overlapping generations find what they most need in each other--the young need wisdom and the old need acts of regeneration--as this simple idea is recognized to be as profound as it really is.

Here are a couple examples of what’s possible: http://www.montanaheritageproject.org/index.php/home/more/my-omas-story/ and http://www.montanaheritageproject.org/index.php/home/more/songs-of-hope-music-in-libby-montana-during-the-great-depression/.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Every Moment, You’re Writing

I’ve downloaded a copy of Frank McCourt’s new book, Teacher Man, from audible.com and I’m looking forward to listening to it. This quote from Contra Costa Times increases my anticipation:

“Every moment of your life, you’re writing. When you walk the halls in this school you meet various people and you write furiously in your head.” Frank McCourt “Teacher Man”

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

A Montana Style, Take Two

Another trait of Montanans that’s related to self-sufficiency is what Montana Jones calls away-from-it-all-ness. Do we keep up with the latest trends in music? Maybe not. Do we care?

Away-from-it-all-ness. Importing musicians with other styles and tastes is easy enough, but Montana style is about getting away from all the hubub and noise and fashion trends and pop crap. Besides, why should we go to the trouble of bringing some of that hippity-hop music here when the kids down the street have guitars and can do a pretty good job of banging out some old rock and roll songs, it’s just as much fun for dancing.

Not following trends. Do it yourself. Avoiding the madness of the world. All part of Montana style.

Full article: http://montanajones.blogspot.com/2005/12/montana-style-part-two-rock-and-roll.html

Not being with “it” when “it” isn’t all that rewarding--part of the reason for living under the big sky, I think. For a longer and some what edgier take on the charm of not being cosmopolitan--what Anthony Harrigan calls the “therapy of distance"--see this article from the Contemporary Review: http://www.montanaheritageproject.org/index.php/institute/great-plains/

I keep running into articles extolling the virtues of life in the nonurban spaces of the West, especially Montana. Harrigan suggested in his 1994 article that the dissatisfaction with urban conditions and the allure of the West might in time lead to some new form of Homestead Boom (Katherine argues that it’s been underway for a long time, since she left Racine, Wisconsin for Montana for precisely such reasons):

Ironically, the settlement of the American continent began—and long continued—with an impulse to escape the crowded conditions of the Old World, whether the poverty-stricken countryside of Ireland or Sicily or the ghettoes of Russia and Poland. Indeed for many generations of immigrants, there was truly a therapy of distance—from poverty, conscription, and religious persecution. The Russo-Germans who settled in North Dakota in the late 19th century truly fit the description of those who seek therapy in great distances. In this connection, I am reminded of the statement by John G. Ackerman in the New York Times Book Review that there is a ‘dialectic of possibility in his history which is potentially liberating’. Thus, in time, urban Americans may turn against the horrors of American urban life and decide to participate in an internal migration—a new movement West.

I would like to see an oral interview project focusing on why recent immigrants to Montana have come here.

Montana Style--according to Montana Jones

Is there such a thing as a “Montana” style? Montana Jones thinks so, and it has something to do with self-sufficiency. This is exemplified by the number of people who hunt for meat, but it’s not limited to that:

I see self sufficiency everywhere I look around here. I see it in the business people I deal with. I see it in the recreation enthusiasts. I see it in the Missoula hippies and the city dwellers. Not everyone is bagging their own meat, but they are watching out for themselves in their own way.

Full article: http://montanajones.blogspot.com/2005/12/montana-style-part-one-hunting-season.html

Self-sufficiency is a near-universal trait of rural people. What’s the alternative? Do our kids recognize and appreciate this trait in those around them?

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Teaching and a Sense of Place

Originally published by Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students - CARTS

"What is a ‘Place’?" Is that strip of grass between the lanes on the interstate highway a place? Is an internet website a place? Is McDonalds a place? What about the Little Big Horn Battlefield? Chief Charlo’s grave? The camping spot on Lolo Creek that Lewis and Clark  called Travelers’ Rest? Your favorite summer swimming hole? Some "places" are really no place. That is, we pass them without seeing them. When we are there they have no meaning for us. We don’t remember them when we are gone.

But other places are part of the landscapes in our minds. When we think of important events, times full of life, we see in our minds the places where they occurred, which are inseparable from what happened. When we are homesick, we remember them.

Other places are storied with public events of national significance: Gettysburg, Wounded Knee, Pearl Harbor. Visitors flock to them every year, hungry for reality.

Teachers who draw on the power of place in our lives quite literally "place" the abstract and conceptual understandings of traditional curricula in local realities. Many researchers have shown that young people have little real understanding of the decontextualized information that flows over them in conventional teaching, and without such understanding they are often unable to transfer their learning to the world beyond the classroom window.

Besides, place-based teaching is more fun and more engaging for students as well as for teachers, parents, and other community members.

I’ve followed students into the field to document the occupational culture of Montana ranching and logging families for community web sites.

I’ve gone with teams of students from a geography class to gather data from an abandoned cemetery they discovered in the woods, where the first fur trader in the area is buried with his Indian family, near a vanished fort.

I’ve watched a team of English students locate Lewis and Clark campsites after weeks of research using journals and GIS software, so they could document the present, comparing the flora and fauna with the 1804 journals.

I’ve helped art students complete a community calendar featuring drawings inspired by research into local stories.

I’ve attended plays put on by high school drama classes based on oral histories collected from local elders.

I’ve camped with a class of history students at an abandoned gold mining town where they were completing a field archeology project so they could write the history of a place that had been all but forgotten.

When we talk about teaching and a sense of place, we are simply talking about the best teaching--teaching for deep understanding, teaching that transfers to new settings. A simple hunger for reality motivates current thinking about a sense of place, a hunger for meanings that satisfy like the snap of an apple bitten into on a cool October morning, the juice wet and cold and sweet. Real sky. Real stars. Real history. Real stories. Real friendships.

More and more teachers now accompany students to neighborhoods, streams and rivers, forests, community meetings or markets, local celebrations, and historic sites to study, document, and understand the world. They enter the community as hunters and gatherers, ethnographers, scientists, historians, problem-solvers, artists and, most important of all, as fellow community members.

Our youth have been gone so long, off in those huge schools on the edge of town, that when they re-enter the community, they cause something of a commotion. They wake people up. Both young and old have suffered from the loss of perspective that results when they are separated from each other.

Place-based teaching is not only the key to school reform but also to community revitalization. A person or a town whose music comes pre-recorded, whose textbooks are written by distant committees, whose food materializes through unknown processes, whose conversation is drowned out by broadcast chatter, whose politics consists of filling out multiple-choice forms, and whose education is planned by bickering factions is living in a fantasy if it imagines itself free.

It would be good if every student could have at least one class each term that dealt directly and intensively with local knowledge or local issues. And if every class could include at least one unit that focused on the making the places students inhabit better, helping them make personal connections to stories larger than themselves, seeing the ways individuals are intertwined with communities and communities with states and with nations, all sorts of problems we now face would begin to dissolve.

We would sense hopeful answers to many pressing questions: How can we involve our youth in serving others? How can we smooth the transition from school to work by providing experiences in out-of-classroom settings? How can we give young people a sense of belonging? How can we make the curriculum relevant to contemporary concerns? How can we encourage greater parent and community involvement in the schools?

Educators who approach the curriculum through the lens of particular localities quite literally "place" information in contexts that help young people convert the curriculum from mere information into genuine knowledge.

A sense of place, after all, is a sense of orientation. It is both the beginning and the end of knowing.

Monday, December 12, 2005

Writing as a Way of Inhabiting a Place

What better way to open people up to the possibilities of learning something new than to go walk somewhere, with a notebook and a mission.

In one of the most well-known and influential rhetoric texts in the canon, Phaedrus is on his way out of the city, going for a walk “outside the walls, ” when he meets Socrates and shares his belief that his walk in the country will be “more refreshing than a stroll in the city squares”. Socrates joins Phaedrus, where they soon come to the Ilissus; Phaedrus spots a tall plane tree, and they settle there to hear and discuss the speech that Phaedrus has with him. Socrates seems so enchanted with the place and waxes so poetically about it that Phaedrus comments, “So far from being like a native, you resemble …a visitor being shown the sights by a guide. This comes of your never going abroad beyond the frontiers of Attica or even, as far as I can see, outside the actual walls of the city”. Socrates replies that he stays in the city because his love of learning, especially about human nature, keeps him among people. As he puts it, “the fields and trees won’t teach me anything. ” In this opening scene, as the translator tells the reader, Socrates is in unfamiliar territory—and such an excursion “is quite contrary to his usual habits.”

Habitually, then, Socrates hangs out in the city, and through these opening lines Plato draws attention to the role of place in conversations, persuasion, and learning. . .

As Plato knew. . .memory and place, location and argument, walking and learning, are vitally and dramatically linked in our personal histories and personal geographies. Places evoke powerful human emotions because they become layered, like sediment or a palimpsest, with histories and stories and memories. When places are inhabited in the fullest sense, they become embodied with the kinds of stories, myths, and legends that the spot beside the Ilissus holds; they can stimulate and refresh— or disturb and unnerve—their visitors.

.......................................................................................................

From the introduction to Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference by Nedra Reynolds (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004)

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Placemaking in Lolo

Placemaking is often both literal and obvious. We invest our time and energy to remake the world more to our liking.

Saturday, December 03, 2005

Greg Smith: Rooting Children in Place

After working in a variety of different jobs, Greg Smith decided to become an English teacher in his mid-twenties. After completing an M.A. at Southern Oregon State College in Ashland, he taught high school for nine years, most of them at a small Friends boarding school in Nothern California. Convinced of the value of situating education in strong communities, he returned to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where where he earned his Ph.D. and extended the understandings he had developed while teaching in a small high school.

Currently, Greg is a professor of education at Lewis & Clark College in Portland. His publications in leading education journals have called attention to place-based learning: ”Going Local” (Educational Leadership, September, 2002) and ”Place-Based Education: Learning to Be Where We Are” (Phi Delta Kappan, April, 2002).

“How can we encourage students to care about learning? Demonstrate to them that they live in communities that care for and value them, communities willing to acknowledge a long-term dependence on students’ talents and interests, communities willing to make their assets and issues an honored part of every school’s curriculum.”