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.