Place-based writing activities and resources

Frames for Analyzing the Construction of Space from Place

Frames: Subjective

Frame: narrative or autobiographical experiences with place

Frame: Time and space

Frame: Categories: regions/groups

Frame: affiliation markers: Perry: lawn art

Frame: Discourses: defining ideological orientations

- ways of knowing/thinking that position people in spaces

- Discourses of gender, class, race position people in spaces

Frame: activity and space

- Activity driven by objects

- Tools employed to achieve objects: Language, narratives, social genres, images

Frame: Power in space: Positioning/stance

How am I being positioned to respond to this experience, event, or the text? 

Do I accept or reject how I am being positioned to respond?   

Frame: spiritual space

- “sacred spaces”

- Solitude/meditation--”one with nature”

Frame: ecological perspectives on space

- concern for environmental aspects of place/space

Frame: Issues, Dilemmas, Questions 

Inquiry-based Instruction: lots of inquiry-based lessons: http://inquiry.uiuc.edu

- Immersing in a social world

- Identifying concerns, issues, or dilemmas

- Contextualizing: purposes, roles, norms, beliefs/attitudes, or history of a world

- Representing: using tools of narratives, genres, images, etc. to portray a world

- Critiquing representations of worlds

- Transforming worlds

Frame: Different Spaces: Competing Allegiances

-identities attempting to negotiate differences between different social worlds

Books about Growing Up in Places/Spaces

James Welch, Fools Crow

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues

Edward Abbey, Fire on the Mountain

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Wallace Stegner, Big Rock Candy Mountain

Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child, House Made of Dawn, The Way to Rainy Mountain

Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

James Welch, Winter In The Blood

Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It

Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples

Richard Wright, Black Boy

Ernest Hemingway, Nick Adams stories

Carson McCuller, Member of the Wedding

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Willa Cather, My Antonia

Boyer, D. & Isherwood, D.  (Eds.) (1998).  A Place to Which We Belong: Wisconsin Writers on Wisconsin Landscapes.  Madison: 1000 Friends of Wisconsin Land Use Institute.

Moore, M.  (Ed.).  (2003).  Genocide of the Mind: New Native American Writing. New York: Avalon.

Place And Identity

Barbara Kingsolver, "The Memory of Place" in High Tide in Tucson

Edwin Way Teale, "The Lost Woods" in The Norton Book of Nature Writing

Leslie Marmon Silko, "Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination"

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

David Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous

Vine Deloria,  "Thinking in Time and Space" in God is Red

Linda Hogan, Power

Vandava Shiva, Staying Alive

Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps

Paula Gunn Allen, Coyote Was Here: Essays on Contemporary Native American Literary and Political Mobilization

McPhee, J.  (2002). The Founding Fish. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

McMurtry, L.  (2003).  The Wandering Hill: The Berrybender Narratives, Book 2. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Busch, A.  (1999).  Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live.  Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press.

Koop, C.  (2002). The Ecology of Home.  Discourse, 24(2), 50–60.

Aitken, S.  (2001).  Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity.  New York: Routledge.

Edmondson, J. (2003). Prairie Town: Redefining Rural Life in the Age of Globalization.  Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield.

Gordon, G.  (2003).  Landscape of Desire: Identity and Nature in Utah's Canyon Country. Logan, UT: Utah State UP.

Reaves, G.  (2001).  Mapping the Private Geography: Autobiography, Identity, and America.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Wold, R., & Koloc, B.  (1999).  American Mosaic: Prose and Poetry by Everyday Folk.  New York: Oxford.

Milkweed Press: The World As Home series: books about place

http://www.worldashome.org/aboutus.asp

includes: William Morrish and Catherine Brown, Planning to Stay: Learning to See the Physical Features of Your Neighborhood

Savoy, A. & Lauret E., (Eds.).  (2002).  The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and

the Natural World. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.

Theories of Space/Place

Chow, R.  (2002).  Suburban Space: The Fabric of Dwelling. Berkeley, CA: U of California Press

Clifford, F.  (2002).  The Backbone of the World: A Portrait of the Vanishing West Along the Continental Divide.  New York: Broadway.

Cross, J.  (2001).   What is "Sense of Place"?

http://www.western.edu/headwtrs/Archives/headwaters12_papers/cross_paper.html

Crang, M., & Thrift, N.  (Eds.). (2000).  Thinking space.  New York: Routledge.

Harvey, D.  (2000).  Spaces of Hope.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Davis, M.  (1999).  Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Vintage.

De Certeau, M.  (1984). The Practice of Everyday Lie. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dorst, J. (1999).  Looking West. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Harvey, D.  (2001).  Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge.

Duany, A., Plater-Zyberk, E., & Speck, J.  (2000).  Suburban nation: The rise of sprawl and the decline of the American dream.  New York: North Point Press.

Fleming, D.  (2004).  Subjects of the Inner City: Writing the People of Cabrini-Green.  In M. Nystrand & J. Duffy (Eds.), Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life: New Directions in Research on Writing, Text, and Discourse.   Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Giroux, H.  (2002).  Public Spaces, Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/11/. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield.

Low, S. M.   (2000).  On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture.  Austin: University of Texas Press.

Low, S. M., & Lawrence-Zuniga, D.  (Eds.).  (2003).  The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture.  New York: Blackwell.

Massey, D.  (1994).  Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McDowell, L. (1999).  Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Miller, D., et al. (1998).  Shopping, place, and identity.  New York: Routledge.

Mueller, R.  (2002). The City and Its Other.  Discourse, 24(2), 30-40. (a feminist analysis of the false binary between city and country).

Norquist, J.  (2000).  The Wealth of Cities-Revitalizing the Centers of American Life.  New York: Perseus Books.

Scharff, V.  (Ed.).  (2003).  Seeing Nature through Gender. Lawrence: U of Kansas P.

Scollon, R. & Scollong, S.  (2003).  Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World.  New York: Routledge.

Soja, E.  (1997).  Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory.  New York: Verso.

Tuan, Y.  (2001).  Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tuan, Y.  (2003).  The Good Life.  Madison: U of Wisconsin P.

Wilson, C., & Groth, P. (Eds.).  (2003).  Everyday America: Cultural landscape studies after J. B. Jackson. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Place-based literary/ecocriticism

Branch, M.  (2004).  Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden.  Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Branch, M. et al. (Eds.)  (1998).  Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment. Moscow: U of Idaho P.  

Buell, L.  (1995).  The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Buell. L  (2001).  Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and the Environment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Coates, P.  (1998).  Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times. Berkeley: U of California Press.

Cohen, M. (2004).  Blues in the green: Ecocriticism under critique.  Environmental Education (critical analysis of ecocriticism)

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/9.1/cohen.html

Elder, John. Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996.

English, J. A.  The Poetics of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada

http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/5.1/binder.html?coverweb/english/index.html

Fetterley, J.,  & Pryse, M. (2002).  Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women and American Literary Culture. Urbana: U of Illinois Press.

Glotfelty, C. & Fromm, H.  (eds.).  (1996).  The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology.  Athens, GA: U of Georgia Press.

Lopez, B. “A Literature of Place” http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itsv/0896/ijse/lopez.htm

Murphy, P.  (2000).  Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia Press.

Norwood, V.  (1993).  Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P.

Payne, D. G.  (1996).  Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics. Hanover, NH: UP of New England.

Quantic,  D.  (1997).  The Nature of the Place: A Study of Great Plains Fiction.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Ronald, A.  (2003).  Reader of the Purple Sage: Essays on Western Writers and Environmental Literature.  Reno, NV: U of Nevada P.

Rosendale, S.  (Ed.).  (2002).  The Greening of Literary Scholarship. Iowa City: U of Iowa P,

Slovic, S. (1992).  Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P,.

Suarez, R., (1999).  The Old Neighborhood--What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration: 1966-1999.  New York: Free Press.

Ward, G.  (2002).  The Writing of America: Literature and Cultural Identity from the Puritans to the Present.  Malden, MA.: Blackwell.

Place-based writing/literature teaching

Beach, R. & Myers, J.  (2001).  Inquiry-based English Instruction,  New York: Teachers College Press.

Brooke, R.  (Ed.).  (20030.  Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing.  New York: Teachers College Press.

Ellsworth, E. (2004, November).  Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy.  New York: Routledge.

Haas, T., & Nachtigal, P.  (1998).  Place value: An educator’s guided to good literature on rural lifeways, environments, and purposes of education.  Charleston, WV.: ERIC Clearinghouse on Rural Education and Small Schools.

McComiskey, B., & Ryan, C.  (Eds.).   (2003).  City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices.  Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Orr, D.  (1992).   Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Owens, D. (2001) Composition and Sustainability: Teaching for a Threatened Generation.  Urbana, IL: NCTE methods used by Owens:

http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/english/tbw/owen/Neighborhoods,%20Communities,%20and%20Teaching%20Writing.htm

Rous, E.  (2000).  Literature and the Land: Reading and Writing for Environmental Literacy, 7-12.  Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Silverman, J., & Rader, D.  (Eds.).  (2003).  The World is a Text: Writing, Reading, and Thinking about Culture and its Contexts.  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall (textbook).

Smith, G. A., & Williams, D. R. (Eds.) (1999). Ecological education in action: On weaving  education, culture, and the environment. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Sobel, D.  (2004).  Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities. New York: Orion Books.

Stevens, R.  (2001).  Homespun: Teaching Local History in Grades 6-12.   Portsmouth: NH: Heinemann

Steinberg, A., & Stephen, D.  (1999).  City Works: Exploring Your Community, A Workbook.   New York: The New Press (particularly useful for middle-school students/analysis of architecture). 

Sumara, D.  (2002).  Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters: Imagination, Interpretation, Insight.  Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (explores literary response as anthropological autobiography).

Sunstein, B. & Chiseri-Strater, E.  (2002).  Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research, 2nd ed.  Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Theobald, P.  (1997).  Teaching the commons: Place, pride, and the renewal of community.  Boulder, CO: Westview.

Films/media about place:

Bale, John. "Virtual Fandoms; Futurescapes of Football." http://www.efdeportes.com/efd10/jbale.htm

Carney, G.  (Ed.)  (1995).  Fast Food, Stock Cars, and Rock-n-Roll: Place and Space in American Pop Culture.  New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Couldry, N. & McCarthy, A.   (Eds.)  (2003).  MediaSpace:  Place, scale and culture in a media age.   New York: Routledge.

Fraim, John. "Battle of Symbols: Space vs. Place" http://www.symbolism.org/writing/books/bs/place/

Gauntlett, D.  (1997). Video Critical: Children, the Environment and Media Power. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hochman, J.  (1998). Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory.  Boise: University of Idaho Press.

Ingram, D.  (2000). Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Lauter, P.   (2001).  From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, & American Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.

MacDonald, S.  (2001).  The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place.   Berkeley: University of California Press.

Martin, D. G.  (2000).   Constructing place: Cultural hegemonies and media images of an inner-city neighborhood. Urban Geography 21(5), 380-405.

Morley, D.  (2000). Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London: Routledge.

O'Neill, E. "The Dichotomy of Place and Non-Place in You've Got Mail." http://www.brynmawr.edu/hart/oneill/299/g_1.pdf

Owens, L.  (1997).  Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Rosembaum, J.  (1995).  Moving Places: A Life at the Movies.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Zonn, L.  (Ed).  (2000).   Place Images in the Media: A Geographical Appraisal.  New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Films about Midwestern places:

Badlands, Breaking Away, The Bridges of Madison County, A Christmas Story, Continental Divide, Dances with Wolves, The Day After, Days of Heaven, Fargo, Field of Dreams, Footloose, Freckles, Hoosiers, A League of Their Own, The Magnificent Ambersons, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Northern Lights, Rachel River, Raintree County, The River, Roger and Me, Rudy, Taps, A Thousand Acres, Thunderheart, What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

Thomas Dean, Moorhead State University  http://www.asle.umn.edu/archive/biblios/midwest_films.txt

Nature/environmental movies:  http://www.esf.edu/ecn/films.htm

Rural Voices Radio I, II, III,  National Writing Project, CD’s with students and teachers reading poems, stories, and essays about life in rural America.  http://www.writingproject.org

Websites on place/space

(Lawrence, D.  (1999). The Community as Text: Using the Community for Collaborative Internet Research.  English Journal, 89(7))

Megasite: lots of links  http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~janzb/place/geography.htm

Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (extensive bibliography):

http://english.ohio-state.edu/organizations/asle/

Center for American Places http://www.americanplaces.org/intro.html

City Lore; Placematters http://www.placematters.net/

Wisconsin Folks http://arts.state.wi.us/static/folkdir/index.htm

Ecotone: Writing About Place http://www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl

Sense of Place   http://www.carts.org/

Place Matters Project http://www.placematters.net/

My History is Your History: studies of Chicago neighborhoods

http://www.chicagohs.org/DGBPhotoEssay/mhyh.html

Literature and Place site  http://www.literatureandplace.org.uk/project.htm/project.htm

Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment http://www.asle.umn.edu/

ARC Place Research Network http://www.utas.edu.au/placenet/

Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes To Town  http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/

Quality of Life: lots of links to different sites rating quality of life http://www.econdata.net/content_quality.html

Michael Perry’s web site (Population: 485) website http://www.sneezingcow.com/

Larry Watson’s web site http://larry-watson.com/

Montana Heritage Project www.edheritage.org/articles/senseofplace.htm

Fieldworking (for the textbook, see above) www.fieldworking.com/home.html

Pedagogy of Place Guide www.uky.edu/RGS/AppalCenter/publications/ docs/Pedagogy-of-Place.pdf

Scholastic site on Neighborhood Folklore teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/mff/folklore_your.htm

Star Tribune: Voices of the Land Project  http://www.startribune.com/news/variety/voices/

W. W. Kellogg Foundation Study: Perceptions of Rural America in the Media

http://www.wkkf.org/pubs/FoodRur/MediaCoverage_00253_03795.pdf.

Street as Method: Teaching documentary and observation techniques http://www.xcp.bfn.org/streetasmethod1.html

Course on surburbia:http://www.dickinson.edu/~gill/images/suburbs.pdf

Lots of links on topics related to suburbia:  http://cscl.cla.umn.edu/courses/5256/links.html

Soul of Los Angeles Project http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/religion_online/commonground/

Betti-Sue Hertz and Lydia Yee Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960

http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/magazine/bronx.html

Street-Level Youth Media: Chicago youth study their neighborhoods http://streetlevel.iit.edu/

Geo-literacy: Forging New Ground http://glef.org/php/article.php?id=Art_1042&key=037

Document Durham: Neighborhood Projects http://cds.aas.duke.edu/docprojects/durham/ek_powe.html

Exploring Your Community (grades 6-8). http://school.discovery.com/lessonplans/programs/harlemdiary/

Webquest: studying an urban neighborhood

http://www.whitney.org/jacoblawrence/resources/webqst_neighborhood_6.html

Virtual field trips: online explorations of places

Bellan, J., & Scheurman, G.  (2001).  Actual and virtual reality: Making the most of field trips.

In R. Stevens, R. (Ed.).  Homespun: Teaching local history in grades 6-12.  Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.  

Virtual field trip to Ft. Snelling, Minneapolis, MN:  http://www.mnhs.org/places/sites/hfs/tour/tour.html

Urban Field Trip: Lincoln, Nebraska’s Historic Haymarket  http://incolor.inetnebr.com/gnelson/haymarket.html

Virtual tours of lots of sites  http://www.theteachersguide.com/virtualtours.html

Lots of virtual field trips  http://www.pitt.edu/~poole/VirtualFieldTrips.html

Lots of virtual field trips  http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic35.htm

Lots of virtual field trips http://score.rims.k12.ca.us/virtproj.html

Virtual tours: Chicago http://www.chicagotraveler.com/chicago_virtual_tours.htm

Videoconference Field Trips, Berrien County School District  http://www.twice.cc/fieldtrips.html

Monroe County: Virtual Field Trips  http://scnc.misd.k12.mi.us/distlearning/fldtrip/

WWLearnNet: Field Trips  http://www.cesa4.k12.wi.us/programs-services/WWLEARN/videofieldtrips/list.htm

Virtual field trips: Northern Michigan  http://www.nmecatm.net/VTA/resources.html

Lesson Plans

Sacred Space: Learning About and Creating Meaningful Public Spaces

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20030207friday.html

Perception of Place http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/04/g912/place.html

The Evolution of Cultural Landscape  http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/06/g912/cultural.html

Explore the Spatial Patterns of Your Hometown

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/03/g68/hometown.html

Cultural Symbols and the Characteristics of Place http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/06/g68/symbols.html

School Space: An Analysis of Map Perceptions http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/02/g68/space.html

Sprawl: The National and Local Situation http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/12/g912/sprawlnational.html

There's No Place Like Home: Examining Tourism and Cultural Opportunities in Your State

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20011105monday.html?pagewanted=all

Places in the West http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/places/

Spaces and Places (younger students) http://www.getty.edu/artsednet/resources/Sampler/b.html