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CHAPTER 1
Unrooted: Dislocation and the Teaching of Place
Jennifer L. Case
Whether and in what sense I experience a particular location as a "place" will be further affected by such factors as how rooted or peripatetic my previous life had been, what kinds of surrounding I am conditioned to feel as familiar or strange, and so forth. So place-sense is a kind of palimpsest of serial place-experience.
— Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism
My first spring as a graduate student in English, thirteen other graduate students and I took a seminar on environmental criticism. We met in a basement classroom at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a land grant university located next to the banks, businesses, and restaurants of the capital city's downtown. Though UNL is known best for its football team — and the football stadium becomes the state's third largest city on game day — our classroom had little sense of pretense. The walls were off-white, the fluorescent lights flickered, and the desks were too small for our books. From the tiny window high on the back wall, a faint light struggled to make its way past the shrubs and the footsteps of pedestrians. As my colleagues and I congregated in the still-dark evenings of early spring, what we returned to, more than anything else during pre- and post-class discussions, was the subjectivity of our environmental perceptions and, more specifically, our perceptions of beauty in nature. The draft from the lone window made us pull on sweaters and jackets, an act that invariably led us to complain about the weather. We'd just read Lawrence Buell's The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005), and we all felt nostalgic. The students from Alabama and Georgia said it was too cold in Nebraska. When the wind blew, as it did then, they couldn't breathe. In response, those of us from farther north belittled Nebraska's winters. The flakes that fell and melted within two days, we told the group, weren't snow. They were dandruff. Real snow would stay all winter, forming mini-mountains in the corners of parking lots. And as for the landscape: depressing. The woman from upstate New York missed trees; I said that I missed the lakes and the rivers that surrounded all the cities I'd lived in before moving to Nebraska. Only the sole Nebraska native defended treeless environments. Trees, she said, made her claustrophobic. She said she'd like to take a chainsaw to them all.
I mention these conversations not only because they demonstrate how much place affects us (though this, arguably, was a group predisposed to an interest in sustainability and place-based scholarship), but also because they demonstrate how "place" plays out in the academic experience. Though the demographics of the graduate students and faculty at any particular university will vary, one could plausibly say that very rarely will everyone come from the same place. Academia encourages us to move around — to new cities, new counties, new states — sometimes even new countries. This reality means that at universities such as UNL, each year graduate students and faculty come together from multiple regions of the United States and from multiple countries in the world. The university is new. The place is new. The bioregion, the flora, and the climate are new. We, effectively, have been uprooted, and as we acclimate to a particular program, we must also acclimate to the culture and nature of that particular city and state.
Although I am most interested in the ways this dislocation affects the ability of composition instructors — specifically graduate students and contingent faculty — to engage in sustainability education and teach about place, the paradox has in fact served as the impetus of much place-based thinking. Many place-based compositionists and educators begin their treatises by acknowledging the placelessness of academia. Robert Brooke introduces Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing (2003) by describing the displacement he felt as an academic, moving from his homeplace in Denver, to the eastern United States for school, and then to eastern Nebraska to teach. Laird Christensen and Hal Crimmel open their edited anthology Teaching about Place: Learning from the Land (2008) by recognizing their own geographical nomadism:
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.
Outside of place-based composition, scholars of sustainability education more broadly conceived have made similar statements. In Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World (2005), environmental educator David Orr writes that the typical college disciplines don't address "the art of living well in a place," a fact that influences the kinds of lives academics lead: "Place is nebulous to educators because to a great extent we are a deplaced people for whom our immediate places are no longer sources of food, water, livelihood, energy, materials, friends, recreation, or sacred inspiration." Such comments, in fact, are common in introductions and personal anecdotes across the interdisciplinary field, pointing to a general dissatisfaction with the lifestyle and geographical placelessness contemporary academia seems to call for — a placelessness that affects both students and local communities.
Indeed, it is this disconnect between academia and local communities that propels much scholarship on place-based pedagogy, whether in environmental education or first-year composition. The educational system, many place-studies scholars argue, now emphasizes state and national standards to a degree that overshadows local knowledge and threatens local cultures. "The local places that students and staff and faculty go home to after leaving the university behind," Derek Owens contends, "remain largely invisible, supposedly unrelated to the activity of the academy, despite mission statement rhetoric about serving community and helping students become responsible citizens." Similarly, Eric Ball and Alicia Lai argue in "Place-Based Pedagogy for the Arts and Humanities" (2006) that the educational system privileges a "(trans)national agenda" that ignores and does actual harm to local areas. It encourages displacement by "failing to cultivate care for places among students" and, instead, "providing students with a credential that enables pursuit of careers that do actual damage to local communities" — thus weakening the communities from which students come and in which instructors teach. In other words, academia's emphasis on the cognitive has worked to harm local regions — not only by overlooking their significance but also by physically luring students away.
The latter concern remains particularly important in highly rural or undervalued regions, such as Nebraska. Place-based scholars and writers such as John Price see place-based writing as a means to "counter the culturally informed notions of the grasslands as a place to move through and beyond." Price does not want to see his students move from Nebraska in search of economic opportunities in Chicago. He does not want academia to endorse a worldview that would deter cultural, artistic, and economic sustainability in the Great Plains states. Instead, he works to help students appreciate the places they come from and recognize the ways they could use their education to improve, or at least participate actively in, those communities. Moreover, many place-based compositionists argue that focusing on the local, especially in rural or undervalued areas, can address institutional learning goals better than the place-blind practices that university systems and national educational agencies have typically promoted. Brooke's work for the Nebraska Writing Project and the Rural Institute has done much to establish place-based composition as a noteworthy pedagogy in rural areas, and the following passage from his Rural Voices offers an especially rich explanation of place-based composition's key goals and tone:
Learning and writing and citizenship are richer when they are tied to and flow from local culture. Local communities, regions, and histories are the places where we shape our individual lives, and their economic and political and aesthetic issues are every bit as complex as the same issues on national and international scale. Save for the few of us who become senators and CEOs and National Geographic reporters, it is at the local level where we are most able to act, and at the local level where we are most able to affect and improve community. If education in general, and writing education in particular, is to become more relevant, to become a real force for improving the societies in which we live, then it must become more closely linked to the local, to the spheres of action and influence which most of us experience.
This sense of local communities, whether urban or rural, as a rich site for inquiry — one that can help prepare students to be better citizens — is a prominent thread across the place-based pedagogies that have emerged in writing classrooms at the university level.
Interestingly enough, most of the graduate students in my ecocriticism seminar in the basement classroom at UNL were not particularly linked to our own local community but instead exemplified Price's concerns about a lack of place attachment in the "heartland." Though we shopped at farmers' markets, participated in community gardens, and trekked to the Platte River to observe the annual Sandhill Crane migration, we did not change our cell phone numbers or consider Nebraska "home." We did not know the names of the elected leaders who represented our neighborhoods. We had come to Nebraska primarily for a graduate degree; we did not expect to stay long. Even more telling: although we recognized that any geographical preferences would severely limit us during the job search, few us of would choose to remain in Nebraska. Our dream jobs were elsewhere.
Indeed, it continued to surprise me that I was trying to teach place-based courses that emphasized sustainability when I felt little personal attachment to Lincoln or the landscape surrounding it. The endless fields of corn I drove past when moving to Lincoln and the flat, concrete landscape of the city (where what I would call a "ravine" was labeled a river) appealed to me little. I sighed in relief whenever I left the state for holidays, and I slouched in my car as I drove back toward the brown plains. In essence, I manifested the central concern of most scholars in the discourse: disinterest in the material environment. To paraphrase Nedra Reynolds, I had been conditioned to take space for granted and instead focus on the capitalistic gains of my graduate education. It became easy for me, then, to separate myself from the environment. Although I recycled everything I could, shopped at the local co-op, and walked or biked to the university rather than drive, I did this blindly and out of habit — not out of a concern for the Nebraskan landscape or the ecological problems the region faced. The place was negligible; I ignored how the classrooms I taught in, the city streets I commuted on, and the farmland and prairie I hiked near affected and were affected by discourse. In the words of Price, I, like so many instructors, struggled "to find a reason to care."
Nonetheless, my commitment to the place-based pedagogies promoted by Brooke, Jonathan Mauk, Orr, Owens, and Price, and my belief that place-based writing can help students find their footing in academic discourse could not help but become part of my classrooms. As a result, I began my freshmen composition courses the following year with a personal narrative on place. The assignment asked my students to write about a place that was particularly memorable or significant to them. By asking my students to consider how that place continued to affect them — how their identity or personality or history had been shaped by the materiality of the place and their experiences of the place — I attempted to defamiliarize them from their surroundings, to help them recognize, as Owens has said, "that who we are and what we have to say is in so many ways interwoven, directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously, with our local environs." Certainly, my reasoning then was (and today remains) ideologically based. I designed the course around "place" because of my interest in place-based composition and my belief that helping students locate themselves within a place would not only give them more ownership/authority of their work, but also make it easier for them to become active members in the writing community. I shared Owens's concern for sustainability; I wanted my students to care about the health of their communities. Aside from that desire, however, I also, like Mauk, recognized the value of place-based writing as a means of validating student experience and integrating academic thinking with that experience. As first-year students transition into college, place-based writing allows them to carry with them the knowledge and authority they have acquired, thus helping them situate themselves within the academy and develop their own senses of agency.
This emphasis on agency, I found, gave my students courage as writers. My students responded positively to the place-based personal narrative; they were excited to write about hometowns, family cabins, favorite vacation spots, or relatives' houses. Even more important: they thought about their places in sophisticated ways and recognized how those places shaped them. For instance, Javaun used the project to explore his childhood in inner city St. Louis. Though he recognized that he came from a rough, sometimes violent environment, where many of his classmates would not want to live, he also embraced the lessons he had learned from his cousins and neighbors. His family, he said, enjoyed each other's company even though they did not have many material comforts, and he hoped to replicate that value in his own life. Another student, Michael, wrote about the golf course he worked at while attending high school. Because Michael's family moved each year from military base to military base, high school was the first time he stayed put for more than two years. In writing about the golf course, Michael realized that it was this emplacement, just as much as the coworkers he became friends with, that made the golf course so important to him. Such projects and realizations quickly validated my reasons for designing the course as I had. Students, by investigating the places they had come from and the related societal and community issues present in those places, gained the confidence and authority they needed to enter into the more complex discussions that surrounded them.
As the semester progressed, we tackled the other genres common to first-year composition courses: the rhetorical analysis, the argument, and the research essay. With each, I again asked the students to ground their topics in issues important to the communities and places they knew well. Although I didn't require students to write about the same place the entire semester, many did. A student who used the personal essay to write about her high school later found it empowering to analyze and create arguments related to her school's referendum. A political science major who wrote about his grandparents' farm later researched how political leanings differed in rural and urban areas. An ecology major whose "significant place" was the Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium in Omaha contrasted the zoo's conservation policies with policies promoted by other environmental agencies.
As a result, I didn't wade through stereotypical essays on abortions, the death penalty, or stem-cell research — polarized topics entirely devoid of the students' voices, interests, and senses of agency (though those topics, too, can be approached effectively through a place studies perspective). Rather, I read essays that clearly linked with the students' current interests and future career goals. In this way, we managed to build a platform from which they could connect their individual lives with the livelihoods of their local communities, as well as with national and global concerns.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Narratives of Educating for Sustainability in Unsustainable Environments"
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