Finding, Defining, & Understanding Our Place:
A Teacher Modeling Community Research for Her Students
by Linda Templeton

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged.
Missing me one place search another,
I stop some where waiting for you.

-from Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

No matter where we live today---rural, suburban, or urban---the land where our homes exist began simply... as land. Community inquiry emphasizing rural traditions captures the stories and preserves the heritage, while revealing the intricacies of a community structure. A valuable result of such an investigation generates a greater appreciation of our places in this community structure.
I live and work in Paulding County, a small rural community located in northwest Georgia. Since I am not from Paulding County, I knew that I needed to know more about my community before I could ask my students to do a research project. My own research, which I hoped would provide both entryways and a model for my students, would draw, in particular, on a core KCAC principle: "To become proactive citizens, we should recover and critique community texts reflecting the dynamic values of local and larger (imagined) communities. Then we can use that 'keeping' process to shape our own 'creating' of new texts that represent the kinds of communities to which we want to belong."
One of the first steps I took in establishing community-based inquiry led me to visit the Paulding County Historical Museum.

The museum--sponsored by the Paulding County Historical Society and housed in a one-room schoolhouse--displays many artifacts that have been donated by various individuals and families. I saw old school desks--one from the Black High School (and that is its real name), donated personal family treasures, clothes dating back to the 1800s, and much more.

 

As I looked at those pieces of clothing, I wondered how those hardworking people could ever complete their chores in such confining clothes. Button-up shoes and brogan boots do not look inviting either. As I examined the museum's contents, it is the absence of presence that I noticed---not the many items that it contains. (The phrase absence of presence comes from the KCAC group visiting New Echota-former capital of the Cherokee Nation. As our group walked around the tourist site, we felt that something/someone was missing, so we coined the phrase absence of presence because we felt that many of the Cherokee views, opinions, and stories were absent, yet the State of Georgia continues to reap the rewards from New Echota as a tourist stop.)

Now as I stood in the middle of this museum, those same feelings of absence returned. Where are the stories? Where are the farmers? Where are the African Americans? Where are the Native Americans? I ask these questions because when I examined the recorded history of Paulding County, the writers mentioned how it was a farming community, how there were slaves at one time, and how the Creek and Cherokee were a part of the territory at one time. However, the details behind such stories seemed to be missing.

Part of what alerted me to seek out those missing stories was the reading our whole KCAC community of teachers had been doing about Georgia's rural heritage. During my first year of KCAC, I read several books directly associated with early twentieth-century rural life in Georgia. Those literary and historical narratives sources told some of the missing stories of the farmers, African Americans, and Native Americans. For example, we read and discussed Caroline Miller's novel Lamb in His Bosom--a 1934 novel telling the saga of the struggling people of the Georgia backwoods, who never owned a slave or planned to fight a war. It explores the social customs and harsh realities of the Georgia dirt farmer through the poor existence of one family. Another text read by our group was Jimmy Carter's An Hour Before Daylight--a non-fiction account of his life growing up on a farm in south Georgia in the years between the two World Wars. While his family's existence was more comfortable than most, Carter gives the reader insight to the demanding life of a farmer in the first half of the twentieth century, revealing the trials and tribulations of the time through his relationships with sharecropping families and their children who became his best friends. Likewise, Raymond Andrews' memoir Last Radio Baby captures the same elements of rural life in south Georgia, except it is from the perspective of an African American family like those working on farmland owned by Carter's father. Andrews gives his first-hand remembrances of how his family struggled as sharecroppers in south Georgia.

In addition, two novels read by our whole KCAC group, Diane Glancy's Pushing the Bear and Robert Conley's Mountain Windsong, retell events associated with the removal of the Cherokee and the Trail of Tears, so the events they depict occur in the nineteenth century. But these books still provide important information as to the eventual formation of Georgia farms (i.e., the land lottery). Both novels use historical events and documents as narrative tools, creating substantial historical fiction.
With this reading as part of my knowledge base, my trip to the museum in my own community raised many questions-questions I wanted to explore to better understand the rural heritage of Paulding county.

 

After I visited the museum, I ventured onto the Internet and found a website for the genealogical society and therein I found a way to email the members explaining my project and asking for help. I received several emails from people all over the Southeast, offering people's names, titles of books, and even phone numbers and addresses of people I could contact for help. One individual suggested that I use a two-volume set of Judge Foster's Paulding County--Its People and Places. Also, one person let me know that the public library has a heritage room. One individual, Lynn W. Sylvester of the Paulding County Genealogical Society, sent me a list of genealogy websites. All of these sites provide ways to search for families, ancestry, and roots.

Student Research
Now that I had completed my own preliminary research, I was ready to share my inquiry goals with my students. I chose to allow them to do more general, wide-ranging research on the community, rather than focusing just on rural heritage at the turn of the century, because I wanted them to develop a sense of community through their own self-directed research during this first year. As I introduced the community-based research project to my freshmen students, I established the framework by asking the following questions:

1) What do you know about your school?
2) What do you know about your community?
3) What do you know about your county?
4) Why should you are to know this information?
5) Why should this knowledge make a difference in you?

Some of my student responses to these questions:

"My knowledge of the community is low. I can't blame this on not growing up in Paulding County because I moved here when I was six. It may be because many teachers knew little on the subject and never passed it on to others. This information could be useful in that you can understand where older people of the county come from. I could know what they had been through and things like that."-- Ricky

"...my community is a very friendly and traditional environment. . . .one of the fastest growing counties, but that true southern traditions still remain intact."--Kelly

". . . Knowing this information gives me a sense of belonging."--Chase

"I like knowing where I am from because it gives me a rich knowledge of where I live." --Holly

Later on, Ricky shared one more piece of information that he discovered: "I know that a long time ago when we drew up the map of Georgia why the counties are so small compared to other states. I believe this is because of an old law stating that a person should be able to walk to the main city such as Dallas to Paulding County. Remember, they didn't have cars when they mapped Georgia."

With these questions and answers, I was able to justify the need for my community-based research project and my students began their research.

Conclusion
At the beginning of this inquiry report, I borrowed from the words of Walt Whitman, where he explains to readers that he is bequeathing himself to the dirt so that he can grow from the grass that he loves. If my students are to find the answers to their research topics, then they are going to have to dig into the past and find those roots that were planted there many decades ago by past generations. By exposing those stories from the past, my students will form an appreciation and respect for what has come before them: therein lies both the heart and the best outcome of my research project.

 

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Rural Community Inquiry: Reflecting on Research Processes
by Sarah Robbins

Studying Community in Canton, Georgia
by Peggy Corbett

A Bridge to the Past:The Euharlee Covered Bridge a pdf document (Acrobat Reader needed for viewing)
by Amanda Closs, KSU Honors Student


The Shields-Ethridge Farm a pdf document (Acrobat Reader needed for viewing)
by Stacie Janecki, KSU Honors Student

 

Content Design/Management: Traci Blanchard,Stacie Janecki and Marty Lamers

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