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ONE WAY to strengthen students' ties with their rural homes is to root the school curriculum solidly in the community-which is another pillar of the overall Annenberg Challenge vision of good teaching and learning. What Rural Challenge leaders call the "pedagogy of place" connects the intellectual ' work of students with hometown issues, nurturing their academic skills in a rich cultural and environmental context that incorporates the arts, language, history, economy, natural resources, and citizenship. The approach pays off handsomely in increased student engagement as well as community revitalization, rural schools have learned. The small community of Big Springs, Nebraska, for instance, galvanized itself to renovate its 1885 Phelps Hotel, a landmark for early pioneer families, railroad workers, and cowpunchers traveling through this prairie town. What began as an architecture project in a school technical drawing class turned into a major town cause over several years, with volunteers painting the building and transforming it into a bed-and-breakfast, cafe, museum, and gallery. The high school's Class of 1997 adopted and restored the hotel's Sage Room; other students, staff, families, and businesspeople raised money to fix up the original fire stairs, hot water tanks, even an old "two-bit bathtub," the locked lid of which guests once paid a quarter to open. Curriculum like this-typically integrated projects that combine research, writing, mathematics, and science with hands-on cooperative work-may not look like "schooling," its advocates say. It may take place outside school walls, calling on expert adults who are not formal teachers, or on community agencies that serve children and youth in other ways. Likewise, such schools serve as resources and centers of learning for people of all ages-places to see plays and exhibits, use research tools, meet visitors, and explore the surrounding area. Just as important, they honor old-fashioned but powerful ways of learning: imitation and practice, stories and legends, even informal watching and doing. In the Alaskan villages of the Rural Challenge, for example, the Northwest Arctic Borough schools have begun restructuring the curriculum to keep their Inupiat dialect and culture alive-starting by organizing school around a native 11 subsistence calendar" of food gathering, indigenous traditions, and the like. To teach effectively in native Alaskan cultures involves building on this cultural heritage as a strength, observes Oscar Kawagley, a Rural Challenge leader there. The Yup'ik people, he notes, use the parts of the body as measuring instruments when they make clothing and tools; when they travel, they measure time, terrain, and conditions, not meters or miles. In this cultural context, proportionality matters more than precise numerical accuracy when children learn mathematical concepts. As Western scientists grow more attuned to interrelationships through the study of fractal geometry, chaos and complexity, Kawagley points out, they come closer to the Native thought-world that rests on pattern and form in space and place. This may help in teaching Native students, he says, who often have difficulty visualizing abstract mathematical concepts and their application to real life.
WHY SHOULD WE STUDY PLACE? Among the abstract concepts that make up a typical school curriculum, "place" has no particular standing, David Orr observes in his essay "Place and Pedagogy." Yet integrating place into education has critical importance: It requires students to combine intellect with experience, applying their knowledge to direct and tangible problems. It underscores the interrelated nature of the disciplines, by bringing together the social, historical, economic, political, scientific, and other aspects of any place in a complex mosaic of understanding. It helps people learn to live well where they are, solving local problems and increasing stability. It promotes maturity and wisdom. People learn who they are by studying where they are and where they come from. Condensed from David Orr, Ecological Literacy (Albany, NY- State University of New York Press, 1992).
PEDAGOGY OF PLACE aims at more than just individual learning or even the use of community resources, in the Rural Challenge view of things. It goes hand in hand with a vital civic life, in which school and community exist to serve each other. Both share the same goals: a sustainable local economy, a clean and safe environment, a rich political discourse, and a quality of life high in tangible as well as intangible ways. And though children are to be nurtured, they are also regarded as citizens with a place and function in their community.
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The "pedagogy of place " connects the intellectual work of students with hometown issues, nurturing their academic skills in a rich cultural and environmental context.
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As relevant in the barrio as it is at a barnraising, this viewpoint can galvanize any small community around actions that naturally involve its student members. "Our school doesn't exist to create high school graduates," declares Luis Garden Acosta, co-director of El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Brooklyn, New York. (See sidebar, this page.) "It exists not to meet state academic standards but to create leaders for our community in a democracy. We succeed when our students share our goals--peace and justice, collective self-help, creating community, safety, respect-and can develop the tools they need to get there: yes, literacy and academic mastery, but also unity, creativity, mentoring." School should not follow the social service model of treatment and rehabilitation of problems, Garden Acosta argues. It should center instead on community development, which depends on trust and respect for humans' ability to live on common ground. In Chicago, the exterior walls of James Johnson Elementary School are scrubbed clean of graffiti and the neighboring park is safe and clean, thanks to years of elbow grease, phone calls and dogged legwork by principal Mattie Tyson and her team of teachers and community supporters. With busloads of parents and kids, Tyson and the neighborhood priest, Michael Ivers, petitioned the city to tear down an abandoned building next door and let them start a Child-Parent Center for younger children. Trained parent mentors go into homes to help families with early learning, and Tyson is hoping to extend her students' small-school experience by building an alternative high school on an adjacent lot. "It's not a bag of money that'll leave this community better off," she says, noting that Challenge funds are used to support teachers working together on improving their practice. "It's the human resources that get us working together to create a gleam of hope. Annenberg helps that happen." Far from the cities, rural activists are mobilizing around the same philosophy-notably, in the work of the Texas Interfaith Education Fund, which trains community organizers and which the Rural Challenge helps support. In the Rio Grande Valley near the Texas and Mexico border, for instance, civic and school life today is largely led by the Hispanic people who make up most of the population. Still, teachers and administrators alike describe a childhood of fragmented identity, in which they were punished for using their Spanish language in school-and those attitudes have died hard in schools. ("Did we not exist then?" asked one Mexican-American student after studying the school textbook's treatment of the Civil War.) Now the small towns of Elsa, Edcouch, and La Villa are uniting to reclaim their history and create new opportunities for success close to home. Teachers are revising curriculum to explore and preserve the cultural complexity of the South Texas heritage and experience. And a matching effort through a Federal Empowerment Zone grant has already helped launch a health occupations program to address a sore shortage of medical services. Such a shift involves a fundamental rethinking of the purpose of school, these organizers concede. But when parents and community members take on educating roles as opposed to thinking of themselves as "clients" of the schools, Challenge stories show places building new strength in every way-economic, political, and cultural. People who work, play, grieve, and celebrate together develop "communities of memory," as sociologist Robert Bellah calls them. When they regularly meet to work out their differences, "public engagement"--that elusive school reform goal that smacks of ad campaigns and focus groups-becomes as natural as a Saturday afternoon ball game on the school field, a barnraising, or a New England Town Meeting.
The 'Empire State Building of garbage' was threatening the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn when a tiny school-community organization decided to unite its community against it. A tall order: resentments ran deep among the Latinos, Hasidim, and African -Americans whose struggles over housing, law enforcement, and redistricting formed a bitter backdrop for joint action. But the El Puente after-school and health program had grown deep roots among the Latino young people who since 1982 had been working with activists Frances Lucerna, a dancer, and Luis Garden Acosta, both raised in this community. By 1993, El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice became a small New Visions public high school in the New York Networks for School Renewal. And the little school had a big mission: "to find common ground in the ground itself," as Garden Acosta says,	by fighting the 55 story hazardous waste incinerator that would make their neighborhood "the most toxic place in New York City." Delving into the scientific and governmental issues the incinerator presented, El Puente students began to educate local residents and to organize them in protest. Just as important, they started exploring the history and culture of their Hasidic neighbors, whose enmity everyone had taken for granted. When both sides mobilized to testify at government hearings and march together through the streets of their neighborhood, they embodied, Garden Acosta says, the school's mission "to develop the potential of young people in a community of leaders." It's already working. In June 1996, the Governor signed legislation to ban the incinerator, a former El Puente student graduated from Harvard, and another won a Tony Award for his role in "Rent."