Overview
Our team of KCAC teacher-researchers
had been working together for well over a year when we tried out this
lesson, which was designed to help us think about how to introduce
others, unfamiliar with our program, to KCAC. As we had done so many
times during our KCAC workshops, we played the role of students, trying
out activities that we could adapt to our own classrooms or with other
teacher audiences for in-service.
The particular instructional sequence below was inspired,
like many of our activities, by a posting to our project list-serv.
Cooper Middle School social studies/science teacher Bonnie Webb alerted
us that the local paper had run a story we should all read: “Senior
couple to sell last farm in Dekalb” (Atlanta Journal Constitution,
1/21/02, D1-2). Bonnie recommended the story because it related directly
to at least two of our inquiry themes—“Cultivating Homelands” and
“Shifting Landscapes, Converging Peoples.”
Through “Cultivating Homelands” we had been studying
the heritage of rural life in American culture, especially in northwest
Georgia (our own “homeland”)
in the early twentieth century. Through “Shifting Landscapes, Converging
Peoples,” we had been looking at the suburbs today—at how suburban
sprawl and the constant comings-and-goings of suburban residents are
changing American communities.
The article Bonnie had found described a long-time
family farm in Dekalb County, a metropolitan Atlanta area that has
become highly urbanized. The current owners of the farm, ninety-year-old
S.B. Vaughters and his wife Rebecca, had just signed a deal to sell
it. And one element in the story had struck Bonnie’s attention: the
sale would be to the state of Georgia,
for “green space,” rather than to a subdivision developer.
I brought copies of the newspaper’s coverage to our
next KCAC workshop, because the AJC’s treatment of the sale
included several of the diverse kinds of “texts” our project team
had been using to study community life: a photograph, a map, records
of oral interviews, social statistics, and descriptions of a particular
place. I wanted to see if we could imagine ourselves as pre-KCAC
learners and practice using the article as a springboard for introducing
program concepts, research approaches, and writing strategies. I
also wanted to see if, after we tried out ways of using the article
as a teaching tool, we could also write effective reflections on our
own thinking processes, a step which our national advisory board member
Randy Bass had been urging us to follow as a way of analyzing our
KCAC-based teaching and learning.
Instructional Sequence
Note: While copies of the article originally
used for this exercise can be secured through the AJC’s online “stacks”
service, newspapers in every community regularly run similar pieces
on area spaces that were rural but are becoming suburban/urban.
1. I asked everybody to scan the “apparatus” of the
article—to begin “reading” it without reading any of the main copy
of the feature—by looking instead at the photo (of Mr. Vaughters
leaning against a bale of hay near an old tree), the headline
(“Senior couple to sell last farm in Dekalb”), the headnote
for the picture (“56 Years of Memories”), the maps (showing
the location of the farm in relation to the city of Atlanta and the
surrounding suburbs), the “pull-quote” (“If Mr. Vaughters had
not been willing to do this, it would have become a subdivision, no
question about it,” from the president of a “green space” community
group), the continuation headline (“Dekalb County’s last farm
selling for $2.8 million”), and the caption/cutline for the
photo (“Why is this man smiling? S. B. Vaughters, 90, has just agreed
to sell his 141 acres for $2.8 million. His farm is slated to become
green space that may connect Arabia Mountain Park with Panola Mountain
State Park.”)
Using the handout,
workshop participants wrote about their responses to the newspaper
story’s support apparatus. The questions participants could consider
when responding included prompts that I hoped would encourage a “close
reading” of the photograph’s and maps’ details. I also hoped that
the initial response writing would capture ways in which the elements
printed around a newspaper article (e.g., headlines, pull-quotes)
can guide our interpretation before we begin reading—e.g., can introduce
themes and establish a point of view.
2. In whole-group discussion, we shared some of our
responses to the start-up reading prompts. We discussed ways in which
some of our responses were shaped by our belonging to the KCAC team
(e.g., our familiarity with issues like zoning and the role of community
groups in preserving local heritage). We brainstormed ways that,
if we were using this article with students just being introduced
to KCAC concepts, we could frame discussion questions to get them
interested and to promote careful reading for detail in “texts” (e.g.,
photos, maps) they might not study often in other classes.
3. Everybody skimmed the article, using the
second prompt’s questions on the response-writing guide to help us
generate individual “jot notes” for discussion.
4. We discussed our reading notes. First
we identified elements in the article that could have been written
only after doing some type of research, and we also speculated
on how the reporter would have done that research (e.g., interviewing
the Vaughters couple to learn about the history of the farm, interviewing
some grandchildren to get a different perspective on that history,
interviewing area “green space” supporters and state officials, visiting
the farm in person to gather details for the article’s vivid descriptions,
reading a book about the Vaughters’ farm that is referenced in the
article). Then we discussed ways that students (or we ourselves)
could extend the article’s range (or deepen it) in a variety
of ways, based on additional research and writing.
Some of the ideas we had for research included:
● Interviewing current neighbors of the farm;
● Doing a follow-up interview with Mr. Vaughters
about what it was like to work on the farm when he was a young man;
● Studying maps showing the nearby green spaces
referenced in the article to see how possible the “connecting” of
the parks might be;
● Taking pictures of areas around the farm;
● Visiting the Vaughters’ homestead to write
descriptions and take photos;
● Looking in our own neighborhoods and in
other Atlanta counties for similar farmsteads still operating as farms
or preserved/recognized in some form;
● Interviewing Dekalb county officials about
their plans for preserving the farm and also creating a park there.
Some of the ideas for writing coming out of this
research included:
● A performance based on oral histories (e.g.,
of people who grew up on farms)
● A map of area farms still “in place” in
suburban areas
● A scrapbook of pictures of such farms, with
short descriptions and anecdotes;
● A feature story on another farm
● A before/after picture and story of a “lost”
farm (e.g., now a mall or subdivision)
● A graph of land values/land sales over time
in a particular area with rural heritage
● Response writing based on a group visit
to the Vaughters’ farm or a similar site
● A dramatic piece based on possible “stories
behind the story” of the newspaper article (e.g., Did everyone in
the Vaughters family agree on accepting the state’s offer? What kinds
of arguments would subdivision developers have made to the Vaughters?
What experiences in their past might have led the Vaughters to want
the farm to stay intact?)
● A design proposal for the park to be created
on the farm land, with a written rationale.
We discussed ways we could use the article to explore
KCAC principles:
(e.g., How might reading a
newspaper article like this one contribute to a sense of community
among readers? How might the writing ideas we came up with contribute
to community-building?)
That we can do meaningful, community-based
research in multiple disciplines both inside and outside the classroom,
and/or that authentic research can involve more than traditional library
research
(What are some ways that we
read and responded to the article itself from a researcher perspective?
How might young kids continue to research topics associated with the
article without leaving their school? What different ways of doing
research would this lesson have introduced kids to, and how?)
(What are some of the ways
that studying an article like this one would lead students to think
about connections between local and state government? Between citizens’
groups and individuals? Between particular places and general community
trends going on around those spaces? Between families and governments?
Between neighborhoods and institutions?)
That authentic citizenship often
involves asking ourselves about our values and trying to act upon
those values—which may also involve creating new “community texts.”
(What are some of the personal
and community values evident in someone’s choosing to sell their land
to the state for “green space” rather than to a developer, who offered
more money? What kinds of collaborations were needed to turn the land
into a community space? In what ways would a preserved farm itself
be a “community text”?)
Note: See our project website for additional information
about our guiding principles.
http://www.kennesaw.edu/english/kmwp/AmerCommunities/gprinc.html
Teacher reflection
I was excited when I saw Bonnie’s listserv posting,
because just based on her description of the article, I could tell
it would be interesting to our KCAC group of teachers. I was glad
to see her taking ownership of our shared learning by recommending
the story to us. Also, the language she used to describe the article
showed that she reads the newspaper differently than she did before
this project began. She reads the newspaper (and probably other “texts”
around her, including things like signs for new subdivisions) through
the lens of our project’s content and learning strategies. Bonnie’s
listserv posting made me think about how we might invite other teachers
to get excited about “reading” their communities too.
Another important aspect
of this lesson for me was the chance it gave me to integrate reading,
writing, research and reflection in one activity. Everybody attending
the workshop the day I first taught the lesson wrote reflectively
before reading, during reading, and after reading the article itself.
We also used writing to project/imagine MORE research and writing—sort
of like an athlete projecting/imagining his at-bat or his golf swing.
We could draw on our past experiences as KCAC researchers and writers
to envision ourselves doing new research and creating new texts from
our community-based inquiry. Watching that process in action reminded
me how the lines between writing and thinking can be productively
blurred to promote learning, and how setting our research in a meaningful
context related to our daily lives can be very powerful.
Handout:
Response-Writing to Focus Reading and Imagine Researching
pre-reading around a newspaper article:
BEFORE you read any of the body copy of the article, carefully examine
two or more of the elements on the list below and jot down some thoughts
about details there that cue you into the article’s content, theme(s),
point of view, and/or tone.
Photograph
Headline and/or continuation headline
Maps
Headnote/title above the photograph
Cutline/caption for the photograph
“pull-quote” underneath the maps
reflecting during your reading: As you skim
the article the first time, try to read like a writer. Ask yourself
what different types of research the reporter has done in order to
write the article, and how s/he might have carried out that research.
Remember that authentic research often involves activities far from
the library stacks! Make another jot list, as you read, with your
“teacher” or “I am a researcher” glasses on. What additional research
could you (or your students) do to extend and/or deepen this story?
What creative and interesting kinds of writing/reporting/presenting
could you do to share the results of that research, and how?
