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Introduction: Why Teach About Place?
- University of Nevada Press
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At the front of nearly any road atlas of the United States is a picture of the nation snared in a colorful net: gray strands run between the states, red strands trace the older roads, and thick blue strands carry shields along the postwar interstates. There are broken lines of time zones, too, and even some faint blue rivers. Many people could point on the map to several places they have called home. Most could name other locations where family members live, and one or two places where they dream of someday living. For some, all these points on the map might be clustered within a fifty-mile radius. For others, including the editors of this collection, these points span thousands of miles. We each have called more than a dozen places home, and our families are scattered across the nation and overseas. Neither of us inhabits our native places: The one raised north of New York’s Adirondacks now lives along Utah’s Wasatch Front. The one from the Columbia River’s southern shore now lives in Vermont, near the head of Lake Champlain. This collection is born of that displacement, a response to our decades spent chasing education, adventure, or employment. The tension between the appeal of the road and our desire for roots has defined our lives, personally and professionally, and so we find that our complicated relationship with place informs our teaching and our writing. We are in i n t r o d u c t i o n Why Teach About Place? l a i r d c h r i s t e n s e n a n d h a l c r i m m e l good company, however, as a similar fascination with place fills the pages of writers such as Scott Russell Sanders, N. Scott Momaday, Janisse Ray, David Orr, Gary Snyder, Kathleen Norris, John Tallmadge, Joy Harjo, Wendell Berry, and John Daniel. Of course, for most of human history there was no need to question what it meant to belong to a particular place. Survival depended absolutely on people’s understanding of the specific possibilities and challenges of the places they called home. So it is not surprising that inhabitory peoples, as Leslie Marmon Silko and Keith Basso have shown, tend to dwell in places that are alive with stories. It is only because we have been “freed” from that most fundamental context by our fossilfueled economic networks that we find it necessary to remind ourselves that there is something worth learning about the physical places we call home. Lately, this desire to understand what it means to be a part of a particular place has begun to inspire some of the most innovative teaching in American colleges and universities. Accounts of such learning experiences, however, are rare. We hope that the stories included in this collection might inspire other teachers to discover what may be learned through close investigation of their own places. Though instructors will find many helpful suggestions in this volume, these essays are not intended as templates for particular courses. Rather, our hope is that the narrative approach used here will reveal broader lessons about the possibilities and limitations that come with teaching about place. Perhaps this collection may also contribute to the larger mission of expanding the way college instructors think about teaching writing and literature. Most of these accounts approach their subjects in x i n t r o d u c t i o n [3.85.63.190] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:29 GMT) experiential and interdisciplinary ways, and the fact that many feature field components reflects a general sense that the best way to learn about a place is on location. Similarly, many of the essays illustrate the value of collaborating with faculty from other disciplines, as place-based studies are especially resistant to artificial (and often arbitrary) academic boundaries. We hope the collection will assist instructors in the humanities, and perhaps in the social and life sciences as well, in considering how teaching about place is especially relevant in the increasingly mediated educational environment of the twenty-first century. As one anonymous reviewer of this collection observed, “Those of us in higher education could be doing more than we traditionally do to encourage students not to take places—with their unique ecological and cultural attributes— for granted, despite the overwhelming tendency of mass American consumerism and pop culture to obscure or obliterate local differences...