4.05 Places In The Community Writing Assignment

Conceived, researched, and developed by Alex Ramey, THV Student Conservation Associate, summer 2016.

Classroom ideas

Where I'm From is a widely-used exercise based on a poem by former Kentucky poet laureate George Ella Lyon. It inspires students to think about themselves and their places. Multiple iterations of this project are available online.

A Week's Worth of Journaling Prompts: A Sense of Place, for instructors and students from Amber Lea Starfire's blog, Writing Through Life.

6 exercises in place-conscious writing by author/professor Karen Babine on her blog, State of Mind: Adventures in Place-Conscious Teaching, Nov. 2011.

Writing about Place: The Boundaries of a Story, Bill Mitchell, The Poynter Institute, Aug. 2002.

Reading, Writing, and Rising Up, (Linda Christensen, Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2000, 182 pp) is full of activities, prompts, strategies, and samples from students as well as established writers.

Readwritethink.org

Features writing activities filtered by grade, topic, theme, and more. Here are three:A Journal for Corduroy: Responding to Literature (K-2) encourages reflection on homes, lives, and personal histories;Letter Poems Deliver: Experimenting with Line Breaks and Poetry Writing (3-5) gets students thinking about the effect of structure on meaning in poetry;Connecting Past and Present: A Local Research Project (9-12) does just what the title suggests

For educators

Several workshops got participants up and writing. Photo by Bill Urbin, National Park Service.

Educators writing at the 2015 institute. (Bill Urbin, National Park Service)

Brooke, Robert. Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing. NYC/Berkeley: Teachers College Press and the National Writing Project, 2003.

Teachers share strategies for incorporating place-based writing and connecting students with their communities and heritage. Focus is on the particular promises and challenges of rural areas.

Esposito, Lauren. Where to Begin? Using Place-Based Writing to Connect Students with Their Local Communities. National Council of Teachers of English: The English Journal, Vol. 101, No. 4, 2012, pp 70-76.

McClanahan, Lauren. The Greening of the Language Arts: Sustainability Outside of the Science Classroom. Prescott, AZ: The Journal of Sustainability Education, Feb. 2015.

Dr. McClanahan, currently professor of secondary education at Woodring College of Education, Western Washington University, starts with the importance of acknowledging and exploring environmental issues across all disciplines. Focusing specifically on language arts, she argues that it is imperative for all students to reflect critically on their relationship to the natural world and to observe how its destruction affects their own lives.

Winter, Dave, and Sarah Robbins. Our Communities: Local Learning and Public Culture. National Writing Project and National Council of Teachers of English, 2005.

Ready-to-use classroom resources emphasizing student inquiry and writing. Student engagement with community becomes the centerpiece of the book, an engagement that takes place across disciplines through projects involving history, environment, culture, and more. Easily adapted to different teaching levels and settings.

The National Writing Project works to strengthen literacy instruction in classrooms. It has two affiliates in our region: Capital District Writing Project, SUNY Albany, and Hudson Valley Writing Project, SUNY New Paltz.

Reading to write — students & teachers

One way to inspire place-based writing is place-based reading. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Local authors. Here's a list of about 20 books — for all levels — by local authors or illustrators. School and children's librarians can point you to more.

Primary sources such as family letters and diaries. THV's blog has a series of posts on finding and using primary materials. For more personal assistance, contact one of our experts or your local historical society. If you need a contact for the latter, email THV.

Celebrate local poets and storytellers. Here's a list of seven contemporary Hudson Valley poets. Check out Orange County poet/rappers Saul Williams and Decora and this list of the best rappers from Westchester County. Notable poets in the Valley include John Ashberry, Robert Kelly, and Ed Sanders. Among the Valley's best known poets of previous generations are Edna St. Vincent Millay and Djuna Barnes.

Oral history. Invite family members, writers, and storytellers into your classroom; record them to develop new literature for future generations. The Sound & Story Project of the Hudson Valley offers advice plus hundreds of recordings searchable by location, topic, and keywords.

Hudson Valley Authors

John Burroughs in a post card by Clyde Fisher. (Hudson River Valley Institute)

T. Coraghessan Boyle won the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction with World's End, which explores the history of the area around Peekskill (Westchester) where he grew up.

John Burroughs spent a great deal of time in Ulster County and often wrote about the Hudson Valley and the Catskills. Burroughs's life and writing are explored inThe Hudson River Valley Review, Vol. 25, No. 1.

Akiko Busch lives in the Valley and writes about design, culture, and nature for a variety of publications. Her books include Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live, Nine Ways to Cross a River, andThe Incidental Steward.

Washington Irving (1783-1859) spent much of his life at Sunnyside in Tarrytown and set much of his writing in the Valley, e.g.,The Legend of Sleepy HollowandThe Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

A Hudson Valley Reader: Writings from the 17th Century to the Present(Bonnie Marranca, editor, Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 1991) features easily digestible pieces by artists, writers, and thinkers.

The website of the Hudson River Valley Institute at Marist College has a list of regional writers with titles and links. Its journal,The Hudson River Valley Review,often features book reviews and essays on writers.

Other outstanding place-based writing

Brady, Irene. The Redrock Canyon Explorer. Talent, OR: Nature Works, 1999

Caplow, Florence, and Susan Cohen. Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, & Place-Based Writing. Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 2010

De La Peña, Matt, with pictures by Christian Robinson, Last Stop on Market Street. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2015

Dungy, Camille T. Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009

Kingsolver, Barbara, and Paul Mirocha. High Tide in Tuscon: Essays from Now or Never. NYC: Perennial, 2003

Lopate, Phillip. Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan. New York: Crown Publishers, 2004