Blog
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Face-to-face
Leslie Norris, Welsh poet and teacher and long-time resident poet at my university, often described activities his primary school teacher designed to open the children’s minds to sensory experience. Norris’s teacher had students cut a small square from a piece of paper and use the frame to look at objects inside or outside the classroom. Gazing through this window, students learned to focus their attention. Another time, during a windstorm, this teacher took the students outside to hold their arms one-by-one around a large tree in front of the school house. Cheeks against the bark, they each felt the wind humming through the leaves, twigs, and branches.
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Mining Memory
Outdoor writing students need to be trained to find material about their own lives that they will share with others in writing. Telling stories to friends is easy and natural, but when someone in authority says, “Today we’re going to write about ourselves,” students freeze up, forget that they have a life, and can’t think of a single story. Even on threat of death or a bad grade they are unable to open up.
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Experience + Reflection = Meaningful Experience
We are with a group of students in the Uinta mountains south of Evanston, Wyoming, settling into the Bear Claw yurt. We skied in three miles with backpacks, too short for some of our group, but a comfortable stretch for our novice skiers.
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Field Study on Campus
Teachers of natural history writing and teachers of outdoor recreation on urban campuses sometimes have difficulty giving their students direct experience with the natural world. The process of composition, as described in the introduction to Words from the Land, should be to research in the field and reinterpret at the desk. This matches what modern natural history writers, the British Romantics, and the American Transcendentalists promote—that humans can read themselves as they read forests, mountains, and rivers. However field trips with a writing class can seem an unnecessary extravagance, especially when budgets are tight and risk management seems insurmountable. Part of the difficulty is our traditional dichotomy between nature and civilization, which prevents campus-bound teachers from conceiving that they can help students access nature locally in significant ways. We think of the campus as a means to an end, the place where we study the world’s information; for the humanities, this is a non-experiential kind of study. But writing teachers can reverse this thinking and study campus as an environment or even a landscape.
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