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Foreword
- Utah State University Press
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ix Foreword How to Begin to Know What You Didn’t Know Bonnie Stone Sunstein1 As a longtime teacher, it’s hard for me to admit that some of the most permanent teaching and learning happen outside school: “Learn without realizing you’re learning.” “Teach when the teachable moment presents itself.” “The natural classroom of the real world.” “A school without walls.” Annoying clichés? Perhaps. Idealistic? I’m not so sure. As our schools pressure us to account for what students learn, we don’t have time to think about where and how our students learn. Yet we know it is our job to think about exactly that. We see learning; we know it happens. Often it’s on Mondays or after vacations, when our students arrive with impressive new skills and insights. We delight as they connect their out-of-school knowledge with our curricula; we feel satisfied and smug as we link that learning to our curriculum standards. What we call “community heritage” is simply a part of everything we and our students do. It’s invisible, intangible. For more than twenty years, I taught writing in New England. I read hundreds of students’ words about the traditions, crafts, and community activities they learned without realizing they were learning them. I read detailed homages to Canadian pork pie and Greek baklava, peeked through the pages at a whole community’s plans for the strawberry festival. I read dialogues about the intricacies of boat building, monologues on the wizardry of net mending. I learned how to build ice-fishing rigs, felt the ruts Bonnie Stone Sunstein, a former high-school teacher, is a professor at the University of Iowa, where she directs undergraduate nonfiction writing and chairs English education. Through the Schoolhouse Door x in spring ski trails, and watched granite being carved into gravestones. I observed grandmothers with wrinkly thighs teaching smooth, slippery babies to swim in lakes as clear today as they were a hundred years ago. On my students’ pages, I watched neighbors and relatives spin stories, braid rugs, dry flowers, fiddle, dance, and erect barns with a reverence for the way it’s “always been done” and an equal excitement for the latest version that hadn’t yet appeared. I’ve taught almost another twenty years in Iowa, and still those texts bring New Hampshire back to life when I’m feeling nostalgic or homesick. But here I read about the teenage ritual of cow tipping in pastures at midnight , peace in endless fields of waving prairie grass, or meditations on the ethics of keeping preslaughtered pigs as family pets. I smell chokecherries and fry bread at the entrance to a Sioux grandmother’s home, learn about strange textures and awkward finger strategies required to stuff Polish sausages into casings made of animal guts. I indulge in a cultural high as a young man climbs his uncle’s silo to get a geometric view of the landscape. My students teach me their local culture with the words on their pages. I don’t know that’s what they’re doing; they don’t know it at the time, either. Students scope a landscape, weave a fabric, tell a story, and chip away at a quarry just as their mentors—and mentors before them—taught. This is community heritage, and wherever we live or teach, we have more of it than we realize. With each time, each product, each performance, each person adds a creative tweak, a dash of knowledge, a dab of contemporary material to make the tradition stronger and more lasting. In each newly tweaked work, there is a unique mixture of disciplines: art, music, science, history, math, physics, biology, critical theory, literature. I think the very best in teaching and learning exists in these scenes. It is private teaching, unremarkable and unmeasurable. It is the folk in folklife. Out-of-school experience is the great unspoken curriculum. Its main purpose is to conserve culture in an environment as precious as its citizenry . Its student-teacher ratio is often one to one, its final exam is proof the tradition stays alive, and its “outcomes assessment” is the next generation of mentor teachers and apprentice learners. Tradition in this unspoken curriculum—“the way it’s always been done”—links itself comfortably and quietly to change, to another curriculum—“the way this version will be this time, in this place, with this stuff.” Human knowledge, creation, and transmission constitute a delicate ecosystem. [3.133.160...