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Chapter 9. Beneath the Surface: Natural Landscapes, Cultural Meanings, and Teaching About Place
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c h a p t e r 9 Beneath the Surface Natural Landscapes, Cultural Meanings, and Teaching About Place k e n t c . r y d e n In one way or another, almost all of my pedagogical activity involves teaching about place. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that what’s really going on is that I’m allowing places to teach me. And to be a good student of place, I’ve learned, you have to be a careful reader and listener. It’s easy to be beguiled by the immediate qualities of an attractive landscape. But we need to look beyond those qualities to the many other stories that may be hidden there in order to understand just how rich a resource places can be for teaching and learning, and just how important their lessons can be. Letmeexplain.I’vealwaysbeendrawntoplacesthathavecomplicated storiestotell.Indeed,IthinkthereasonthatI’vefollowedthisprofessional path is that I’ve always lived in places that have given me plenty to think about. I spent half my childhood in western Connecticut, and followed that up with chunks of adulthood in central Rhode Island and southern Maine. All three of these places offered me plenty of woods to tramp around in—one of my favorite ways to spend an afternoon or a day— and cemented my love of being in the natural world. And yet these were 1 2 6 m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s New England woods, and New England woods always try to teach you more than meets the eye if you know how to look at them the right way. I never had to walk far in my nearby woods before I came across a stone wall or an old foundation; my favorite swimming hole in Connecticut backed up behind the dam of a long-gone paper mill. My natural haunts were full of human artifacts, evidence that many people had been there long before me trying to make the landscape produce useful things for them, be it crops or hay or water power. The places that I enjoyed for their green and watery qualities, I came to understand, looked that way only because of things that farmers and builders had done there in the past. As I’ve continued to read and travel and walk around over the years, I’ve realized that the lessons I’ve learned in New England can be applied anywhere. Any landscape—even one we think of as epitomizing “nature”—is a kind of historical artifact, the end result of natural and cultural processes working together. This hasn’t affected my love of the New England woods. Far from it. As with the books I read, I like my landscapestobechallengingandthought-provoking.ButI’vealsopicked up a lesson that’s important for anyone who teaches about place. Even as we instill a love and understanding of the natural world, we don’t tell the whole story if we go no deeper than the leafy and wooded surface. And the more of the story we tell, the better and more responsible our teaching can be: if we understand that places look the way they do because of things that people have done in the past, we can think more effectively about what we might do to guide those places into a healthy future. Once we understand that “nature” is not separate from “culture,” we have to think more carefully about the roles we must inevitably take in shaping and sustaining the places that we love so well. [3.239.214.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:50 GMT) k e n t c . r y d e n 1 2 7 I teach in a graduate program in American and New England studies, and thus I’ve been able to bring many different disciplinary perspectives together when my students and I talk about place. Depending on the class and the particular assignment, we might bring the lenses of literary studies, environmental history, cultural geography, and other related fields to bear as we try to understand what a particular place is trying to teach us. In some places, the many layers of meaning that a place contains stand out with particular clarity, and I find that these places make especially good teaching tools, both for understanding a specific locality and for raising questions about the complex nature of place more broadly. In the summer of 2005...