Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing

Editor: Robert E. Brooke

From the preface (p. ix): “In short, we believe energized writing is, at core, place-conscious. To write well—to want to write well—writers of any age must feel “located” in a particular community and must feel that their writing contributes.”

The book contains nine essays from English teachers involved with the Nebraska Writing Project’s “Rural Voices, Country Schools” team. Each essay is written by a single teacher and is focused on their attempt to include “place conscious-learning” within their curriculum. While the line-up of teachers does include one Elementary School teacher and one teacher at a Community College, the majority of the essays take place within high school classrooms. That is not to say that the students and teachers remain in their classrooms. The goal for all of these teachers is to find ways for their students to get out of the classroom and connect with the people and places that make up their communities.

It makes absolute sense that this book is so narrowly focused on one population—teachers and students participating in the RV, CT project in rural Nebraska. By doing so, the project and book in itself becomes evidence of it’s thesis that by paying closer attention to the people and places that directly affect us we will better be able to understand and interpret the larger world. While all of the teaching examples in this book are born out of and relevant to students in rural Nebraska, I think that all of them can be adapted to communities of students throughout the country and world.

Small Wonder

Author: Barbara Kingsolver

For class we were asked to bring in examples of words/sentences that we love/loathe. I just finished this book of essays and mostly really enjoyed it. For the assignment, I decided to quote from it in order to show that love and hate are often right next to each other.

A sentence I love:
On p. 197 Kingsolver quotes a line from Robert Frost’s poem, “Death of a Hired Man”: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” I like the ‘universal truth’ of this sentence. Kingsolver comments, “Frost captured in just a few words the most perfect definition of home I’ve ever read” and I agree. There is something really inclusive about the simplicity of words used and the complexity of the term “have to.” He doesn’t say that home is good or bad, he just says it’s there, and I think it’s kind of profound.

A word I love:
“Home.” The only synonyms for ‘home’ are words for a physical place, and each of these words sounds like an object (house, residence, domicile) whereas home sounds more like a feeling.

A sentence I loathe:
On p. 126 Kingsolver writes: “If there’s anyone who still thinks eating organically is a bland, granola-crunching affair, he or she must have missed the boat back around midmorning in the Age of Aquarius.” Kingsolver really pulled me along with her throughout this essay on the importance of being more conscious about what we eat and where it comes from, until I got to this line. Mostly I hate her use of the word organic here because I don’t think it supports her main argument (that we should eat locally), and secondly I think she really distances any reader here that doesn’t believe in eating organically, but does believe in eating locally, (as I do). In other words, I was totally on the boat, until she told me I missed it, “around midmorning in the Age of Aquarius”… whatever that means.

A word I loathe:
"Organic." It’s overused, simplified, misunderstood, and romanticized. And I probably need to just buckle-down and write the essay on why I believe so.

Genre: Nonfiction, Essays