Reading and Writing Place

Erika L. Bass is assistant professor of English Education at the University of Northern Iowa.Amy Price Azano, is a professor of rural education and adolescent literacy and director of the Virginia Tech Center for Rural Education.

Bass and Azano come together to advocate for more attention to the rural student experience in high school classrooms. They are specifically interested in the tension between the perception of rural places and the reality of living there. The framework for the curriculum combines Freire's work on cultural literacy with place-based pedagogy. The book focuses on two rural high school classrooms in different regions of the US: Appalachia and the Midwest. Both regions deal with negative stereotypes associated with their rurality. The authors juxtapose these very different rural regions to show that this pedagogy allows students agency in the classroom and an opportunity to think critically about their communities and their sense of place within discourse communities. The book follows these English classrooms through a 14-section unit on narrative writing and memoirs. The units help students learn about externalized and internalized relationships to place. The text provides student work examples from both high schools and thorough lesson plans and rationales. Recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.

• Foreword, Robert E. BrookeAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: Making Place MatterChapter 2: Reading and Writing PlaceChapter 3: A Nuanced Theory of P/placeChapter 4: Rural Contexts ExploredChapter 5: Constructing a Critical Placed UnitChapter 6: Externalizing PlaceChapter 7: Internalizing PlaceChapter 8: Exploring P/place Through Place NarrativesChapter 9: Place and Meaning Making for Rural StudentsReferencesAppendix A: Texts Used in Memoir UnitAppendix B: Research MethodologyAbout the Authors