Family Nature Journal
Option 10

"If we are going to get back, we need to look first at where we are now. Katie Avery, third grade teacher in the White Mountain-encircled town of Gotham, New Hampshire, got at the crux of the problem during a curriculum planning meeting when she asked, 'Why are we using textbooks that focus on landforms in Arizona when we have such amazing resources right here in our backyard?' Good question." – David Sobel, from "Distance from Beauty," Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities







Teaching a place-based curriculum to students in school, or to our children at home, without imparting a strong sense for local history, is a little bit like trying to study the unique quartzite bluffs at Devil's Lake, WI by merely looking at a small quartzite rock taken from that park. A simple question would come to us, in terms of getting young people interested: what is more fascinating, the history of this one particular rock, or the history of the place, as it stands out as a feature in southwest Wisconsin, as an ancient home to native inhabitants, as remnant of glaciation, as a landscape of erosion, beauty, spirit. In the study of history, the key in modern times is first of all, not to ignore it. Sometimes history is the very first thing to go in education because we have, at times, done a poor job of teaching it and bringing it to life. Very often we stress bringing history to us, but it can also be an exercise in historical imagination to go back to it. To do this, it's important to steep ourselves in the place itself, its features, its cultural patterns, its food routine, the work involved, the leisure, educational tendencies and attitudes towards the land. Far too often we treat our history as though it has virtually nothing to offer us in a highly modernized, tech-driven, and commercial culture which is currently struggling with finding a viable system of belief.  Ironically, what we crave is not necessarily more, better, faster, (we already have this) but counter measures that provide quality experiences like making things, finding out how to grow things, creating small edible gardens, considering who our local farmers are so we can buy from other hands-on producers, natural restoration projects. We notice that as school curriculum become more sources of complaint for students, what is longed for is experiential learning – get outside, learn skills, apply, connect mind to reality. Although it can seem at the outset a dull project, it can be very fascinating to look at certain sources of history that might otherwise be skipped, such as Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of

Virginia, a kind of pioneer work of place-based study, in which the eventual third president makes a years long study of everything from geography, waterways, farming, currency, founding, population, birds, located in his state. It is quite fascinating to compare some our tendencies in determining climate with his own, observed through study in the years 1772-1777...."I will presume it not improper nor unacceptable to furnish some data for estimating the climate of Virginia. Journals of observation on the quantity of rain, and degree of heat, being lengthy, confused, and too minute to produce general and distinct ideas." How did climate affect growth on farms? "Besides these plants, which are native, our Farms produce wheat, rye, barley, oats, buck wheat, broom corn and Indian corn...The gardens yield musk melons, water melons, tomatoes, okra, pomegranates, figs, and the esculent plants of Europe." When we talk about going back to history, or bring history to us, information like that written by Jefferson becomes a kind of fascinating prospective two-way street in education. If we were assigned to read portions of Notes on the State of Virginia, first of all we would be reading an original work of place-based research and education. Questions abound: what would it be like to live at this time in American history, a time that deem this information as useful? What would it be like to enter into this mindset of utter curiosity for our place, our state, our own town or neighborhood? Has our interest waned truly because there is nothing interesting or new to observe, or does it have more to do with simply forgetting about that curiosity or giving it over to other forms of information? To use these queries, as Jefferson called them, as a source for our own 'Notes,' it becomes an exercise in historical relatability – what I am doing now is something that Jefferson (and obviously others at that time, late 18th century) was doing and thinking. The place-based historical mind needs exercise and practice, things that would have come completely naturally then, but that we have to work at today, as the reaching back becomes washed out not just by the reaching forward, but to the reaching of all those things that might prevent us from doing either, mere modern distractions, which serve little function other than keeping us busy and moving through our hours.  To take a brief look at the historical recipes of George and Martha Washington at Mt. Vernon offers a similar function of exercise, imagination, education and opportunities for place-based education. We don't have to necessarily relate to the pomp and circumstance of formal dinner program at Mt. Vernon, but it is a very connective exercise in learning history if we follow the recipe for Green Peas with Cream, and see that this simple staple was highly valued: "Delicate green peas were a favored spring vegetable, eagerly anticipated by Virginians after long winters during which fresh vegetables were at a premium. Washington noted in his diary on May 25, 1785, that the family 'Had Peas for the first time in the season of Dinner.'" As we might take down our own notations on fresh food, culled from

our own local source, it might strike us also what this kind of anticipation for the fresh and flavorful might be like. In the meantime, our connection to history might become a little more down to earth, a little more approachable and outside of the more standard lens of contentious politics.  In the end, place-based education has to start with a dual approach of observation and some research. It needs some guides who are willing to initiate the sometimes hard but always rewarding process of reconnecting our lives to what we are surrounded by. Our cities can obviously become nothing more to us than a wash of passing concrete dotted by green spaces, or our cities can become touching points of stories connected to stories, connected to stories, all of which tends to have some original touchpoint to the land itself.  Where topography meets garden, meets the kitchen, and finally meets at the nightly meal is history in the making if we can see it step by step.

Nature Journal 10: Follow the trail of place from farm to table.  Pick a trusted local organic farm and do some web sight research on the farm history, its topography, its crops and its practices. Write a brief report, call it a note. Choose one of the products that the farmer grows, find a recipe with that product, write it out, and make the dish. Write a brief description of how it was.