I have been teaching composition courses through the lens of literacy studies for a few years now, and at times have felt like I do a pretty good job of it. I've selected my mentor texts and research readings with great care and try to walk my students through our discussions making sure to hit on the key points I want to address along the way. Donehower, Hogg, and Schell's chapter on their teaching units caused me to pause and question everything I do as a composition teacher. The thing that stopped me in my tracks was their talk about many literacy studies texts working with the idea of rural literacies as deficit models or that they are out of date (157). I have taught with Adler-Kassner's text, and particularly, have taught with Andrea Fishman's "A Lesson from the Amish." And I feel as though I've been using this text in a way that does not show it as a deficit model-- in fact, I use it as a tool to help my students process and discuss the ways literacy are multiple and varied, and to view the type of education Amish children receive and the literacy habits of Old Order Amish as rich and useful in their lives. I hadn't yet thought of this text in the context of place, though, really, I've just been dancing around the subject and calling it something else all this time. =)

Dammit. the internet just ate my post. So you've read what I salvaged from an early cut/paste... now I'll try (poorly) to replicate the awesomeness that followed:

I think part of the reason I have kept teaching with Fishman (and other texts that take up Amish culture and values) is because it is a way for me to engage my students with a lifestyle that is entirely unfamiliar to them. In St. Louis, I taught students in an urban area, many of which had never been outside a city or urban area, much less visited a farm. So there is a certain amount of thrill in seeing and learning about a group of people who live their whole lives only a few states or counties away in such a different way. From these readings, particularly these three units, I'm finding that I could do so much more with this study.

I saw a lot of connections between the work I did with my students in St. Louis and Susan Swan's work. When I assigned my students to write literacy histories, place came up as a theme, with my students realizing that they had led vastly different lives in some ways and very similar lives in others. But by writing about it, and then talking about it in class, the best part (in my humble opinion) was seeing them draw connections between their experiences and those of the authors or subjects of pieces they'd read for class. Including the Amish.

So, what have I learned here? I've learned that teaching with place at the center, whether it's an urban setting like Pittsburgh or small-big cities like Fort Worth, offer big learning opportunities for my students. In the future, I think I'll work with the resources I've been using and be more deliberate about crafting a unit that explores agricultural literacies or rural literacies because I've found that all of my students, whether they're from Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois... or California, are intrigued and interested in learning about place as it relates to others.

"It's just a place."

I really appreciated the kind words my peers wrote in response to my post for last week, and I've been thinking quite a bit about what a few of you said. It hasn't been easy to give up the 'place' of the farm for a few different reasons. First, and most obvious at this moment, is that it's a subject that I have written and talked about at length in the past year-- more than I ever did before. Second, it is hard to walk away from a family history that centers on a place, and without the chance to resolve my feelings the way my mom and siblings got to when they were out loading the truck last weekend. The other part is this-- the farm was a safe place for me when I originally moved there. It was a place to go when I couldn't stay with my dad and stepmother anymore, and even though it was a hard life, and certainly challenged me in ways I still don't think I've fully realized, I was able to go to that place and feel loved, comforted, and protected when I was feeling most vulnerable at fourteen.

Fast forward to the present-- my mom has been doing separation and divorce 'stuff' for the past six months. She has lamented the fact that she didn't have this or that thing, we children have asked her if she thought to grab this or that thing, or... well, you get the picture. But a month or so ago she started saying "It's just stuff" and "It's just a place" about our possessions and our home. I read this as a defense mechanism for her to protect her from the heartbreak that might come if she never gets to have those things back, or if she never gets to have the 'home' place that she crafted over the years. And I can understand that, especially as she relates it to her faith-- her material possessions in this world will be of no use to her when she goes to Heaven, so why stress about it now?

So I keep thinking about that line... "It's just a place." Well, IS it? Really? Because everything I've been reading and all the deeply personal writing I've been doing this summer and fall says to me that it's not JUST a place. It matters, and for us to brush it off seems like a tremendous disservice or pain in our hearts later. I, for example, find myself hurting more now than I thought I would because I DID push the place of our farm and agricultural life away. I just hope that my mom will wrap her memories of that space up with care and tend to the emotions and scars that are tied to the experience without having to sacrifice what she built and who she became in that place.

So that's that.

Clever title here

As I read Price and Jackson's chapters this week I caught myself wandering back through the farm country in southern Illinois that I used to inhabit. I've spent so many years now, as an adult, creating distance and space between myself and Niermann Dairy. It is no small coincidence that I'm reading these texts about place as my mother and siblings go to the farm to clean themselves, and me, out of it-- to erase twenty-three years of family life from a house that's been standing on the property since the forties. On the same day that I made my little move from an apartment in downtown Lincoln to the suburbia of South Point, my mother and a little army of helpers descended on our farm house to take our things away.

My mother and step-father are getting divorced and it is happening at a most inconvenient moment, because here is the time when I want so badly to go back and walk the lane east of the main lot to the back forty. I want to jam my foot into the side of a straw bale, get a good grip on the twine and haul myself up to the top, stand up tall above the corn that runs alongside this long row of bales and walk the length of the field up high in the air. I've been thinking about our willow tree too. We planted it the year Drew was born, 1990, and the little twig that was sprouted in a milk bucket has grown to a trunk that I could barely get my arms around when I left the last time. It's branches are full and thick and sway in the breeze, dragging into the pond when the water's high.

When I think of our farm now, I feel like it is broken, even though I cannot see it and know if it is thriving. And in one really big way it IS broken-- like Jackson's Matfield Green, the human care and love for the place is gone. I imagine he'll sell the cows soon and that the property will have an eery stillness to it as the pieces of the dairy are sold off. The cows will go first, then the milking apparatus, the tank, all the hoses and glass tubing. Eventually the free stalls in the barn will be dismantled and sold, along with grain troughs and anything else that will fetch a little profit. I imagine the desolation that I'm reading about. A house where someday someone might find an old memory box with old programs from school concerts and prayer cards from the UCC church in town. Forgive me, but I'm wallowing a little here, because I'm pretty sure I'll never get to go back to that place and I didn't get to say goodbye.

Even though I'm wallowing (which, technically is not a negative sort of pass-time, for the record) I'm seeing the hope that comes with innovative thinking and program development of the sort that Jackson is a part. His efforts to buy up abandoned buildings and whole sections of prairie are truly remarkable-- and the fact that a community of people who care deeply about the land, about giving back, is developing around it, is wonderful. I'll confess that I had a "psshh, yeah right," moment because it seems a little surreal. I think I might have to go check this place out. But spending some time navigating the Prairie Plains Resource Institute's website and reading their newsletter, I can see that real community efforts are truly working in these places and that they are turning out great rewards for those participating, as well as (obviously) returning the land to its original beauty and encouraging human beings to live in harmony with our natural ecosystems.

Social Citizenship and Action

This week's readings have me thinking deeply about how I will change the way I teach my EN 254 "Writing and Communities" course in coming semesters. While I absolutely fell into Gruchow's "Rosewood Township" and was even sad to see the chapter coming to a close, the projects that KCAC offers on their website and the evidence of community involvement in LeeAnn Lands' essay are pretty motivational.

The five themes that KCAC teachers use for their classes, reclaiming displaced heritages, cultivating homelands, educating for citizenship, building cities, and shifting landscapes, converging peoples, are unique enough that teachers who select one or more theme for their course inevitably make a marked impact on their student learners. However, I am skeptical about the practicality of how this would work-- in light of the obvious trouble of our "public" education and the expectation of assessment and proof of individual development toward a particular goal. I suppose in some way I am especially grateful that I get to teach college students-- at least I'm not preparing them for a state or national assessment exam. Instead, I am tasked with meeting a set of ACE requirements or, in my mind, a set of personal goals that I have for them as a teacher.

Among the strands that KCAC teachers use as themes for their classrooms, I think I find "Educating for Citizenship" and "Shifting Landscapes, Converging Peoples" to be the two themes I would most likely teach with. My goal for students this semester is for them to re-examine their beliefs about the uses and values in their community and the communities of others. I've forced them to slog through Freire, and despite a few comments about the leftist nature of his writing, I felt like I got a few good points thrown out there-- but I don't think I really made the point about social literacy-- about engaging the local community, about learning and thinking in a way that supports independent (and group, more importantly) thought to spur community action. Hmmm....

My other preoccupation as a teacher is asking my students to examine difference and, particularly since we're in Nebraska, which under other circumstances might be a significantly smaller state, re-evaluate what and how they know. Maybe by focusing on "Shifting Landscapes, Converging People" I could ask my students to see their own local space (the way Gruchow did) and look at the way it has changed over a century, and how communities have evolved and changed with new people and cultures moving in. I think students who are local to Lincoln would be able to discuss this at length, as would students who are from areas like Chicago, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.

In the classroom resources for KCAC, I found a number of lessons that I would have eagerly done with my eighth graders, and there are a handful that I can see myself using this semester, and in future semesters with UNL students. More than anything though, as I'm about to really draft out the Service Learning component for my students final project, I'm thinking of new ways to get them to think about the communities they might go out and engage in.

Service Learning does a Community Good

A few years ago, I partnered with a new professor at UMSL to allow her college students a chance to try service learning in the community around the university. Deb, the professor, had arranged for students to visit a local daycare as well, but a nice group of students would be assigned to my eighth grade classroom where they would, presumably, perform some service for the community. Since this was the first experience with this for me, I didn’t really have a sense for what to expect and hadn’t read any scholarship around service learning at the time. We developed the project over the next three semesters, but as I read for this week, I was coming to question whether or not not we were able to foster a deep understanding of place for the students who came to my classroom every week, or for that matter, for my eighth grade students. Certainly, there were a few students who were from the area and knew the demographics of our school and the community, but few students knew about issues that we could expressly work to affect. There wasn’t a particular interest in the real possibility of changing locally—it was more about making college seem approachable to the kids who lived in the university’s shadow. And, since I had already developed a program that centered on the concepts of choosing success/college-bound for our kids, it fit well that the students would participate in this with us too.

So what weren’t we doing? We weren’t teaching my kids, the eighth graders, about the value that lay in their local community. I taught a book called We Beat the Streets with those kids, a middle-school text based on a memoir called The Pact, written by the Three Doctors. I just started teaching this text with my 254 class this week, and showed a few minutes of a 2006 documentary about the guys as well. As I leaned against the wall watching the film, I realized that this is what I should have been teaching my eighth graders—that yes, college is a wonderful tool, but see? This young man came back to his community because he knew they needed doctors. He knew the place, he knew the struggles—he had a place-consciousness that many of my former students did not. Instead, I was teaching my children some of the same ideas that rural school children learn: that “if you’re any good you go somewhere else. You go where good people go” (99) which is further complicated by the cultural struggle of abandoning their social group in an urban area, alluding to the possibility that their neighborhood or family isn’t good enough for them to stay. Gruenwald and Smith’s thoughts resonate with me here: “… a case can be made that the process of schooling actually encourages youth to reject their home communities and to look elsewhere for the good life depicted by media advertisers and the entertainment industry” (3-4). It isn’t enough for me as an educator to encourage my students to go to college—I should also actively be asking them to think about the issues their community is dealing with and get them involved.

Our other reading this semester has already included Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which led them into an inquiry project and, for a handful, a seriously thoughtful reflection and call to arms to do something. In just two weeks, I will ask my students to embark on a service learning project of their own, and I will keep Brooke’s guiding principles in mind as I develop this project for them. I will ask students to participate fully in the community or organization they work with—this means that they will have to spend some amount of time learning about the community and engaging it before they select their service-learning site. In the end, through journal writing, inquiry research, interviews, and time spent in service-learning sites, my students will produce a “text” (this is flexible) that supports the particular community they have been engaging in for the middle part of the semester. I am hopeful that we’ll see ourselves fulfilling our goals and meeting the principles that Brooke has laid out in his article and reminding students that it’s “about conserving and creating patterns of connectedness and mutuality that are the foundation of community well-being” (Gruenwald/Smith 4).

Confessions from Suburbia

I have a confession to make-- I'm about to move to a townhouse in South Point. Having inhabited the Near South for the past year, and in light of this week's readings, I'm feeling especially aware of my choice to do so. Some of you have heard/read me talking about the power of shame in the past year. When we feel ashamed or have been shamed, we have a tendency to blush-- an instance where our body betrays our internal emotions and thoughts, with a flush rising in the neck and coloring the cheeks. (I think also about the ways that shame/blushing is so visible in white folks too-- our coloring lends itself to such exposure.... hmmm, sorry, a digression.) Anyway, shame can be just as positive as it can be negative, and I'm hoping that despite the fact that I'm moving into a tragically homogenous relocation of young families to a retail mecca, I can draw some positive from the experience. In my mind, I can validate the move a little bit by accounting for the fact that I am a grad student who was in search of the greatest amount of work space for the right price, which happened to include a garage space and a remote clicker so I don't have to do any heaving of heavy doors. On the other hand, I'm a grown woman who has inhabited enough new spaces to know that I will inevitably take ownership (to some degree) of my space and the close neighborhood/community around it.

After reading Sobel's account of the development of the CO-SEED program and marveling at the pluck of the people who have started community organizations and facilitated school engagement with the community, and particularly the development of positions within schools to handle community outreach and curriculum coordination, I am feeling like I've just signed myself up for living in a wasteland of complacency. And, granted, I haven't moved in yet, there are certainly things I might be able to do that would support a sense of community, foster cultural understanding, and such, but the abbreviated time that I'll be there has me wondering what I'll really do. Now that I've got that off my shoulders, I want to talk a little about what I've learned about place from the time I spent living in St. Louis (2002-2010).

Bishop's "The Power of Place" really resonated with me as a teacher, because I taught in north St. Louis County, where the sense of community has eroded over the past 30 years or so, and in my humble opinion, has changed the way students perform in school and experience membership in groups throughout their lives. Berkeley Middle is unofficially a "city" school, in that we were technically outside the bounds of St. Louis proper, but we dealt with most of the same issues that the city schools did. One thing I noticed early in my teaching career at BMS was that there were maybe 6 kids who actually walked to school. Everyone else came in on a bus. I asked the principal about it once, and he encouraged me to go out and drive around the neighborhoods our students actually lived in. I quickly realized that my students had no real connection to the neighborhood they attended school in, and that even though our students came from a pretty concentrated area about 2-3 miles away from the building, they also didn't have a 'community' that they did identify with.



Instead of the school defining the community as Bishop describes, the liquor store, the gas station, the gentleman's club, and the assortment of airport parking garages on the main drag are my former students inhabit. As a result, these students are pretty detached from their 'place.' They find community in other ways-- many of them through vibrant church communities (some drive some distance on Sundays to participate), in matriarchal homes (grandmother is leader of the family, and an assortment of aunts and cousins are the primary residents), and sadly, in gang membership. At least with a gang, the community is always together, and there are distinct streets/blocks that are designated as "theirs."

This vision of a community has always been heartbreaking for me as a teacher, especially as I imagine the long-term effects of my students never getting to experience membership or ownership of a community or place the way Bishop, Sobel, and Robert describe. In contrast to the rural settings of some of the stories told in these articles, I would like to think that I had some success of securing place for my students. We wrote "I am from..." poems and I encouraged students to utilize their own personal narratives in our class work. But I see so many ways that I could go back and do more now. And it's too late, in some sense.

This week's readings have reminded me of the importance of a cadre of teachers and administration who are invested in bringing the community and the school together to make connections. We made some efforts at this at BMS, but high teacher-turnover, pressure to meet AYP (annual yearly progress for NCLB), and threats of violence against our students in the community typically were privileged over community engagement. I have renewed interest though in thinking about the ways I can be a "steward" for a place, even if it isn't a wetlands or forest preserve. My students and their siblings deserved a park, or at least some space that they could cultivate and find identity in, don't they? And even if I am living in South Point for the next few years, I think I'll make a more concerted effort to be engaged in the Lincoln community than I have been in the past.

Confessions from Suburbia

Introductions

“You’re from St. Louis? Cool, me too! What high school did you go to?” This is the standard greeting and attempt at bonding and sizing someone up that occurs in St. Louis. In this one single question, a person’s social class, success in school, and the general geography of your home and/or the places you prefer to loiter can be determined, or at least, supposed. Hi everyone! My name is Kelly Meyer, and I moved here last year from St. Louis, Missouri. This move was a pretty big deal for me, since St. Louis is the place that I have felt most “at home” in my whole life. But, it’s official—I even went ahead and got my new license plates and a Nebraska driver’s license a few weeks ago. Unfortunately for me, though I claim St. Louis as “home,” I never went to high school there, so people have a harder time figuring me out, which means more questions. But I don’t mind—it’s fun to be a little bit of a puzzle for people who prefer to categorize others so rigidly.

I have spent most of my life traveling the interstates, first as a passenger in my mother’s 1986 Plymouth Voyager, and at sixteen, in my 1988 Dodge Shadow, and an assortment of vehicles since. My parents divorced when I was in first grade, and I have been burdened with (yes, that’s how I feel about it) the need to travel between them and visit with some regularity for my entire life. Traveling up and down I-55 or I-57 in Illinois from Chicago to St. Louis was once a very pleasurable experience—I read for hours on end, napped when I felt like it, and played license plate bingo with my siblings. But as I’ve grown older, I have noticed a feeling of resentment creeping into these drives—I found myself calculating the amount of money I wasn’t making by driving six hours to and from my dad’s house at Thanksgiving or Easter. I counted the pages I wasn’t getting read or the papers I couldn’t grade because I was behind the steering wheel. Now, these drives evoke frustration and resignation in me—I know I must go and see them, because that is how it has always been, and that they will not come to see me if I decide to stay put.

A few years after my dad remarried, we moved to a quiet town in northern Illinois on the Chain of Lakes. Antioch had only 6000 people when we turned up and moved into our blue house in a newly designed subdivision. Over the years, we played in the mud and watched as houses exactly like ours sprouted up all around us. Dad has become a prominent member of the community and pretty much knows someone everywhere he goes. This is sometimes fun, but is also a little exhausting, if I’m being completely honest. Our houses in Antioch (there have been four) aren’t committed to my memory by my bedroom décor or the swing in the backyard—they are tied to marriage, divorce, relationships, and heartbreak. Without belaboring the subject, I think I choose this detached affiliation because too many things hurt about those spaces.

But I got out of there in high school, moving to live with my mother and her husband on their dairy farm in southern Illinois. There, I milked cows, washed and sanitized the milking parlor every afternoon, fed calves and cats, and painted fences. It was a big shift in lifestyle, but I did come to appreciate much about the very different lives my parents were living. I had plenty of time to think as I scuffed across the front lot carrying buckets of milk and doling out bottles to the calves as the sun set each evening. But even this place didn’t feel much like home. It was a kind of marking-time, a pause for four years before I would go out on my own and make my own way.



That said, I don’t have many good feelings about the places my parents have lived and have preferred to make my own “family” among friends and professors at various institutions and jobs. I wonder about this sometimes, if other people create communities around themselves this way, if I am particularly unique in this way. Probably not.

Here at UNL, where I teach EN 254 (Writing and Communities), EN 357 (with Robert), tutor in the writing center, and lurk in coffee shops, I find that I am not pressed to fit into a particular mold and that my previous place, while important to me, matters a little less than my present. While I am stoked to be here, I am a little sad, a little wistful at times, because I miss teaching eighth and the vibrant urgency of working with teenagers. The spaces I inhabit are very different, and I will (briefly) attempt to take stock of those here for you.

I moved from a townhouse that I proudly purchased back in 2006 that is now wasting away on the housing market in St. Louis. My dwelling is a cozy one bedroom apartment in a cinderblock and cement building on G Street. Since moving in, I have felt very safe and protected in this fortress of a building. No weather could knock us over and there has been little need to turn on the heat because of the warmth created by all the other units in the building. My academic life dominates this space—there are large cinderblock and 2x6 board bookshelves that fill the one large wall, laden with books that I have skimmed or read repeatedly, and some I aspire to read when I find some spare time. My spare time has been shelved as well, as piles of articles and notebooks are creeping in all around this space. When I look out the sliding glass door in the living room, the swaying green of the large tree in the front yard greets me, a constant reminder that I have moved to the plains where there is generally a breeze, though it is often hot, like opening an oven. It is rarely quiet in my apartment—G Street is a major road with a few buses running their routes right past us, squealing and roaring, reminding me that other people are already on their commute to work and that I really must get out of bed at 6:30 in the morning. And then there are times when the space is oppressively quiet, where I am alone and feel very alone in my endeavor and in my cozy little shoebox. Someone to talk to would be nice.

I’m uncomfortable with the notion of the ivory tower in academia, and perhaps as a result, I favor public spaces for doing my thinking, reading, and writing. Last semester I managed to avoid working in my office for more than twenty minutes at a time, and made some great new local friends at the Coffee House and Jakes on P Street. I like the racket of espresso beans being ground to their fine powder and the sound of spoons clanking around in glass mugs. I’d rather drink a beer if I’m reading Barthe and Foucault or if I’m revising a piece of writing. It is easy to find anonymity in these places, and just as easy to make friends and socialize. It just depends on what kind of mood you’re in when you turn up. I’ve met Mexican immigrants and chatted about their powerful literacy experiences and struggles over a pint and have helped a couple bartenders who moonlight as English majors with their research and writing. My students know they can find me at CoHo on Saturdays in self-inflicted detention with a friend if they want to talk about their writing. I walk up and down the Centennial Mall most days, enjoying the routine and the movement up and down easy steps. I stray across the streets when I shouldn’t and sometimes pause at the fountain to dip my toes in because it might feel good. Then I spend the rest of the walk home thinking about how dirty that water might actually be. Gross.