Geography/Place
The study of geography is quite frequently divided into five themes: location, place, human-environment interaction, movement, and region. In the past, I have worked with my students to better comprehend geography through these themes. These youngsters begin to understand at a basic level that a geographer examines a place by examining the human and physical characteristics of such place. For these young ELLs, they are most likely to list examples such as bridge or house as human characteristics and mountains or volcano as physical characteristics. This is a good beginning but what I really want for them to be able to do is to delve deeper into the meaning of a place. Not just the tangible of what we can see such as house or a volcano but the intangible, that which exists only in connection with something else connection with meaning? 1 In the seminar syllabus, our seminar leader Joe Roach points out that United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defines intangible heritage to include "oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe, and knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts." 2 This intangible heritage is passed down from generation to generation. "This living heritage, known as intangible, provides each bearer of such expressions a sense of identity and continuity, insofar as he or she takes ownership of them and constantly recreates them." 3 This intangible heritage is "fragile" 4 in that it could be very easily lost especially for these students who may not return to the place where these originate. These examples are what I would like for my students to think, reflect upon, talk and write about in regard to their area of origin. I would like for them to capture the specialness of these places in their descriptive writings.
One commonality that my students have with each other is that although they may be from various countries in Latin America, they all share a deep allegiance to where they are from. In our classroom, one sees countries' flags on notebooks, jackets, t-shirts, and baseball caps. When one reflects on where they come from, whether it is a city, homeland, area, or town, there usually is a strong sense of emotion – perhaps good or not so good, depending on the situation. When I ask my students to talk or give me details about their "home" they usually refer back to where they originated from, not where they live now no matter how long they have been in the United States. For them, despite their young age, there is still a strong sense of emotion, connection, belonging, much like you might feel about a loved one or family pet. In Piazza's, Why New Orleans Matters, he writes about the love people feel for the city is much like the love one feels for another.
"New Orleans inspires the kind of love that very few other cities do. Paris, maybe Venice, maybe, San Francisco, New York….The list is not that much longer. New Orleans has a mythology, a personality, a soul, that is large, and that has touched people around the world. It has its own music (many of its own musics), its own cuisine, its own way of talking its own architecture, its own smell, its own look and feel." 5
How can students express their feelings about their homeland, the equivalent of the author's "city" in such a way that preserves the uniqueness of the place beyond the displays of their countries' flags? This deep allegiance, love, soulfulness is again expressed as written in Piazza's work,
"A friend told me of a conversation she had had with an Australian journalist in which she had begun enumerating some of those problems –terrible poverty and hard living conditions for so many of the residents, often within a block of opulent mansions, one of the highest murder and crime rates in the nation, public schools falling apart physically and socially, a police department that in some seasons can be scarier than the city's criminals, official corruption at every level, not to mention weather that for at least seven months a year is equivalent to wearing a towel soaked in steaming hot water wrapped around your head. The Australian listened to the list with mounting alarm, finally saying, 'My God, it sounds like a horrible place to live.' 'Are you kidding?' my friend said. 'It's a great place to live!'" 6
This reminds me of my Peace Corps tenure. Looking back at my personal journal, I have entry after entry of trauma, drama, and angst. Yet, I walk around telling people it is undoubtedly the best experience of my life, the richest time in which I learned so much, most of all how to love my town, Fernandez Salvador. Entries below explain what I felt about my town right before leaving and upon my return to the United States. Using these with my students will help them to know that others, their teacher, may have feelings similar to their own. My students should have an opportunity to think and write about the good and the bad that come together to create the distinctive nature of their place of origin and of where they are now. Discovering the uniqueness of Delaware, of what it has to offer them will also help them to create a place for themselves. These personal Peace Corps entries demonstrate that with time, one can come to love a place for the good and the bad.
November 20, 1988
1. Fix living room curtain so people do not look in
2. Sew button on green shirt
3. Put out venom and peanut butter to kill the rats
4. Burn trash
5. Give food scraps to neighbor for her pigs
6. Get plastic bag back from Carmelina to use for market in San Gabriel
I have to do all of these things. I mean really, really…buy poison to kill the rats living under the floor boards of where my bed is located? Of where I am sleeping each and every night with a flashlight next to my head in the hope of keeping them off of my head – aaaah! How can this be my life? What am I doing here? I miss everything and everyone from home. I cannot believe that I have so much longer to go – how many months…let's see 23…, to live in this town where everything is so hard…washing my clothes, talking to these people, trying to figure out what my work should entail.
October 13, 1990 I felt a little weird today – about the fact that I will soon be leaving. I think I need to read the letter I had sent to Eileen about change and how it is good…it seems every time I get used to my life and seem to like it – it changes. I feel sad about leaving this town, my town. In some ways, how easy-going the life is here. How, in realidad (reality), my work is easy or I have what I do under control. I like it here – my friends, the people. I think about all this and it still doesn't seem real. I can't believe that I'm leaving here in one week – FOREVER. Of course I'll come back to visit. But it can never be as it is now. I won't have my bed, my house, my things, my job, my position in the community. When I spoke with Lisa and she said to me, "But, you will be able to visit", I realized that even one of my best friends couldn't understand how I feel about all that has occurred to me here.
January 12, 1991 I think about everyone and everything down there – A LOT. What am I to do? It's hard to explain to anyone. It's as if something has been ripped from my heart…like I can actually feel my heart hurting. Two and a half years of my life were spent there in that small town. Fernandez Salvador was my town and no one here can ever understand fully what I experienced there – no words are sufficed to explain Carmelina, Jorge, or Hernan to anyone. All that I learned from them, all that I experienced with them, how funny they are, how wonderful and that makes me sad that this wonderful and very big part of my life cannot be a part of anyone's life here.
Perhaps for my students I can begin much like seminar leader, Joe Roach did at the beginning of our seminar. He had us look at maps of New Haven to orient ourselves to the "mapping" of a city, this city, this place. From the landmarks where people would gather to the nodes in which two or more pathways connect, to the boundaries or borders, the invisible lines that separate neighborhoods or parts of the cities developed over time by customs. Then, we walked outside of the classroom to see these landmarks, nodes, and boundaries. Comparing a 2-D map – the physical layout of the city – to the 3-D map – the pop-up map according to Roach is a transition that I can make with my students. Referred to as a map of desire, this type of map is one constructed in the mind involving all of the emotion that is connected to the memories one has of the place. Each place not only can be described physically such as by giving an address, the coordinates or so but more importantly it can be described by the sensory details vividly remembered such as the medicinal aroma of the eucalyptus as the wind blows gently through the lined up trees on either side of the cobblestone road or the heat of the aji pepper sauce the neighbor makes as it stings the nose and mouth as it is eaten. A map of desire evokes emotion because it is personal in nature and reflective of one's thoughts, ideas, and memories. This experience of going from the concrete, 2-D, to the abstract, 3-D, would be beneficial for my adolescents.
Comments: