Hi all, 

Katy Connolly here from The Right Question Institute -- I don't know every single person in this group but have chatted with many of you virtually while facilitating the "Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Primary Source Questions" course and have also spied on some of the great conversations in this group over the years. The Right Question Institute has loved every minute of collaborating with the Rural Experience in America program and we would like to invite those of you who will be in Boston for the 2024 conference to join us for a happy hour reception on Sat, Nov 23 from 5-7p if you're so inclined. It will be located at the Harvard Club of Boston, which is a 5 minute walk from the Hynes Convention center. If you can make it, we will have a short program starting at 5:45p and live musical entertainment throughout. Let us know if you're thinking of coming here - we'd love to see you!

The Maine Department of Education & National Council for History Education are excited to announce a series of professional learning opportunities made possible by a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program specifically designed for rural Maine PK-12 teachers to acquire strategies for designing and implementing a community civics and inquiry-based project.

Details are included below: 

Part A: Teaching with Primary Sources Online Course (December 2, 2024 - March 31, 2025) - Free, asynchronous, online Teaching with Primary Sources Course to acquire new strategies for analyzing primary sources, incorporating inquiry into your instruction, and accessing primary sources from the Library of Congress and more.

Part B: Saturday Colloquia (March 8, 2025, April 12, 2025, May 17, 2025 from 9am - 2:30pm) - Free, synchronous, online professional learning workshops led by expert historians, education specialists, and spotlight educators related to this year's theme:  Geography of the Place We Now Call Maine.

Part C: Onsite Colloquium (Summer of 2025) - Free, onsite (TBD) professional learning opportunity in the summer of 2025.  Sessions will focus on developing a community civics & place-based inquiry project with students.  15 teachers will be selected and receive up to $750 for project funding.

A flyer is attached with additional information.  If you or someone you know is interested, sign up today to reserve your spot in 1 or all 3 parts.   Stipends available for participation.

Every semester, Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) organizes a virtual book club for graduate students and selects one or two history books to read and discuss together. Those discussions take place in the Bookmarks! group in the TPS Teachers Network, and they are not limited to MTSU students only. This fall, the two selections should be of particular interest to members of the Rural Education Group, so I'd like to invite you to acquire the books and join in! Be sure to click JOIN+ in the Bookmarks! group (if you don't already belong to it), and you can participate at any level you wish - from reading the comments to adding your own to offering up a few primary sources. I've done this several times in the past, and I always learn so much from the discussions!

Read the announcement for Fall Virtual Book Club here. The two Fall 2024 books are as follows:

• A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, by Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe
• The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan

  Kira Duke    Stacey Graham  

  6 - 8    9 - 12    13+    Social Studies/History    Virtual Book Club    Rural Education  

"Explore the many facets of agricultural life firsthand from diverse populations across more than 30 U.S. states in our new exhibit, Stories of the Land. This collection features over 70 public radio and television programs broadcast from 1954 to 2019, complete with an interactive map to search for stories by location and topic."

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017737007/ 

There are 108 recordings in all, including "Divided we plow" (1957), "Death of a Small Farm" (1967), a Black experimental farm in North Carolina (1970), Texas Farm Workers (1977), three farmers in Wisconsin (1978), rural and urban Minnesota differences (1990), a Wyoming ranch family (1994), and dozens more.

I really like the interactive map, too. You can click on any single item (I suggest enlarging the map first) to learn about each of the stories covered in the collection. I would consider using the map as an introductory activity in which students could explore a certain part of the country and report what they've learned and how it relates to the big picture of Stories of the Land in America. You could also project the map full screen and have students choose one story with a personal connection either to the place they live now, the place their ancestors lived, or a place they're simply curious about. 

  6 - 8    9 - 12    Social Studies/History    Vocational/Technical Training    Rural America    AMPB    American Archive of Public Broadcasting  

  Social Studies/History    9 - 12    rural history    farm project    STEM    ELA    LOC    Rural History  

A recent story featured in the National Council for the Social Studies Smart Brief newsletter is near and dear to northerly rural areas like mine. 

A vacuum tube pulls sap from a maple tree in Canaan, Vt. (Bloomberg/Getty Images)

 Full Story: The Guardian (London) (7/2) 

   

As a side note, I'm intrigued by the message that came up in my search, but that was not visible at the page I reached when I clicked through to an interview collected at the American Folklife Center: "The Center asks that researchers approach the materials in this collection with respect for the culture and sensibilities of the people whose ..." I wonder if it is, or was, standard on all interviews collected. Does anyone know?

Harvesting maple syrup.

Library of Congress (.gov)

https://www.loc.gov › item › cmns001824

 

Feb 1, 1996 — The Center asks that researchers approach the materials in this collection with respect for the culture and sensibilities of the people whose ...

Today's poem from an email I receive regularly from the Library of Congress is called Summer in a Small Town. I thought members of the Rural Education Group would appreciate it. 

When the men leave me,
they leave me in a beautiful place.
It is always late summer.
When I think of them now,
I think of the place.
And being happy alone afterwards.
This time it’s Clinton, New York.
I swim in the public pool
at six when the other people
have gone home.
The sky is grey, the air hot.
I walk back across the mown lawn
loving the smell and the houses
so completely it leaves my heart empty.

—Linda Gregg

It's from a Poet Laureate program called Poetry 180. Can you find any other poems there that reflect the rural experience? 

One of my favorite poets of the rural experience was Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006, when then Librarian of Congress introduced him in this way:

"Ted Kooser is a major poetic voice for rural and small town America and the first Poet Laureate chosen from the Great Plains. His verse reaches beyond his native region to touch on universal themes in accessible ways."

Find more poems and presentations by consulting the Library's Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate: A Resource Guide. He's now 85 years old and lives in Ames, Iowa.

U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, 2004-2006. Photo credit: Sarah Greene.

  English/Language Arts    Poetry    U.S. Poet Laureate  

I really enjoyed this article as it deals with issues that I have been facing while teaching multiple grades in a one room school! I appreciated the discussion work on horizontal and vertically spiraling curriculum and having inquiry loops for each grade level. Extensive time and effort has been needed to figure out what standards in Social Studies have been taught to the students over the past several years. Self-paced learning is an aspect of teaching and learning that I try to implement for each of my students.

I was also intrigued by the author stating that she tries to meet the teachers where they are at. New ideas are always stressful for educators and knowing that expectations may be different for teachers based on their knowledge seems to ease some of the frustrations that may occur. By working on the universality and consistency in the language of inquiry, students may be able to understand major concepts with the building of knowledge at each grade level.

Very interesting information that I can definitely think about while teaching my students social studies.

In preparation for our third on-line colloquium in which we will be discussing the Relationship of Global to U.S. Agriculture as part of our continuing series on Change and Development in Rural America, our presenters (Dr. Tore Olsson from the University of Tennessee will be the historian delivering the content, and he will be joined by Rory Dunn, our education specialist, and Kate Van Haren, our master teacher) have selected the following sources as a preview: 

• Exploring the Use of Digitally Archived Folk Music to Teach Southern United States History
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jCEK2cEED6ZiOYy1FUKVz6SPzDstseKb/view?usp=sharing
• IDM Creation (Choose the one that is relevant to you) 
• Running with the Bulls (Elementary Article)
  • https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XJphqoDgXYVC1F0Erg2EqaxWSPRgT5o0/view?usp=sharing
• Inquiry as a Beating Drum (Middle School Article)
  • https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o1PxHpOY1Q-GrYe3AwJePT1PWnMQEoIY/view?usp=sharing
• Making Inquiry Critical: Examining Power and Inequity in the Classroom(High School Article)
  • https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wAXcsYpubFXivMNocGY6888NUKYOTwWp/view?usp=drive_link

After reviewing these sources, please share your thoughts with the members of this group. 

All members of this community feel free to join in on the discussion.   

Frederick Jackson Turner,

"The Significance of the Frontier in American History"

1893

1. How does Turner represent rural places and people in his thesis? 

• Turner represents the rural places and people as true Americans. They live simpler lives than urban inhabitants, but Turner felt the challenges of rural places require the people to create new methods of adapting. They also have to be brave to move away from the established order of the East. Overall, he is fairly positive towards those living in rural landscapes. 

2.   How might this thesis have shaped the perspectives of those living away from the frontier? 

• People living away from the frontier may have been influenced to view westward expansion as a natural and essential part of American progress and development. The essay is thick with allusions to Manifest Destiny, the idea that it was ordained by the Creator for Americans to "bring progress and civilization" to the western territories. His essay could have even served as an inspiration for people who wanted to invest in the economics of the West by participating in industries related to western expansion, such as agriculture, mining, or transportation. They might have become more aware of the importance of understanding and preserving the history of westward expansion as a vital part of the American heritage. This was certainly a romanticized and positive view, at least in terms of Americans moving west. 

3.   How do you think people who lived in the “frontier” would have reacted to Turner’s thesis?"

• If any of them read it, they might have felt pride. Turner validated their role in American history. Most of the time rural Americans are left out of the narrative, but he placed them in a position of importance. He acknowledged their struggles and praised their abilities to overcome them, and many of them could have appreciated that. There might have also been some who could have questioned what he knew about living on the frontier. He acknowledges the conflicts with Native Americans and does not gloss over their existence, even stating the number of conflicts the American military had with them, but he does not go into detail about the repercussions of those conflicts, for either side. He does not describe any of the challenges that could arise from life away from the cities of the east. Although he did grow up in Wisconsin, and certainly had experience, rural readers could have viewed his words as someone who was an Eastern intellectual elite. 

"We're Still Here": Chicago's Native American Community

1. How did policies like the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 influence Indigenous peoples' experiences in urban settings? How did forced relocation impact indigenous communities' cultures, identities, and relationships with reservations and cities?

• Many Indigenous people were uprooted from their reservations and forced to adapt to urban environments. They undoubtedly encountered discrimination, prejudice, and cultural assimilation pressures from those in the cities. This could have led some of the younger generations to abandon their culture to fit in with their peers. Without places where the natives could express and preserve their culture, this impact could have been great. I have a friend whose grandma was sent, along with all of the other children on her reservation, to a boarding school. When the children returned they no longer had an interest in their tribal religion; they had all been forced to convert to Catholicism. They also were forbidden to speak their native tongue, so when the elders died, that language died with them. Today, the people on the reservation are Catholic and all speak English. Similar experiences could have been shared by those who moved to urban areas. 

2. In what ways do urban environments provide opportunities for cultural expression and community building that differ from reservation life?

• Urban environments, while they might not have the traditional landscape that the native Americans traditionally inhabited, have more resources to help protect and preserve culture, such as the American Indian Center which holds cultural events and provides resources to Native Americans. Additionally, being in an urban landscape offers more opportunities to reach people who are not Native, and can learn about and appreciate their culture. 

3. How does acknowledging the diversity of Native life, both in urban centers and rural communities, challenge monolithic portrayals of indigenous peoples?

• Indigenous peoples encompass a wide range of cultures, languages, traditions, and identities. Having the opportunities to learn about that diversity in centers and communities can help people understand that there is no singular Native American culture or even history. Geography influences the culture of all people, and Native Americans in one part of the continent will have different social, economic, and cultural dynamics accordingly.