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