Collection Overview
Place-Conscious Education with the Nebraska Writing Project
A NWP Radio Series
Summary:
The final episode of our seven-part series, The Nebraska Experience, explores an approach to teaching argument writing that involves students in researching local issues and presenting advocacy writing live to legislators at the state capitol.As part of a partnership between the National Writing Project and the National Park Service, the Nebraska Writing Project presents its Place-Conscious Education NWP Radio Podcast Series. This series is designed by and features the work of leading place-conscious teachers of writing and their students and draws upon 25+ years of site-based experience of the Nebraska Writing Project.
In this first podcast, “Basics of Place-Conscious Education: The Nebraska Experience”, Dr. Robert Brooke, the Director of the Nebraska Writing Project, outlines the four main concepts of place-conscious education and connects these to a number of initiatives around the state and country.
- Active citizens as opposed to migratory education
- The 3-legged stool of education, community vitality, and environmental quality
- Spiraling out from local community to regional, national, international knowledge
- Watershed and commonwealth as the crucial web of interrelationships
The podcast reviews the history of this work in Nebraska and includes examples of two exemplar projects: the Henderson/Bradshaw school consolidation project; and the Greater Omaha schools Urban Justice Project. The podcast is framed by two place-conscious poems: Don Welch’s “Advice from a Provincial” and Grace Bauer’s “Great Plains Prayer.”
Following this series introduction, subsequent episodes take listeners into specific place-conscious projects, interviewing teachers and learners, and illuminating different facets of place-conscious work. This series extends and updates the work described in their 2003 book Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing, edited by Robert Brooke and published by NWP with Teachers College Press.