Part I
Objectives: Students will be able to reveal a culture of any sort through describing a place where memories took place by means of personal writing as well as group discussion.
Agenda
Do Now: What thoughts have come across your mind in regard to writing about a place? Pick one or two reasons to explain why you want to write about the place.
- I write to recapture, to preserve and return to the past.
- I write about loss and feelings unhinged in provisional places where everyone else seems to have a home and a place…
- I may write about a place and displacement but what I’m really writing about is dispersion, evasion, ambivalence…
- I may write about a little parks in New York that reminds me of Rome… and about so many spots in the world that will ultimately take me back to Alexandria…I turn to Alexandria, the mythical home of paradox.
- I write to find out who I am.
- Writing about Alexandria helps me give a geographical frame to a psychological mess…
- I keep writing about places. It is because some of them are coded ways of writing about myself
- I write about diaspora, dispossession but these big words hold my inner tale together, the way lies help the truth afloat.
Mini Lesson:
Create a story map based on “Why I ride” .
- Use a headline-styled phrase to describe scenes that develop horizontally
- Before each scene, name the place with its geographical features
- Use semantic web mapping to show the family history
- Use down arrow sign to suggest vertical development
Independent Practice
According to Barry Lopez,
- There are two landscapes-one outside one self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see- not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals and season, its weather, its geology, the record of its climate and evolution… these are the elements of the land.
- The second landscape is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape… the speculations, intuitions are formal ideas we refer to as “ mind” are a set of relationships in the interior landscape with purpose and order, many impenetrably subtle.
- The shapes and climate of these relationships in a person’s thinking re deeply influences by where on the earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature- the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of falling leaf, are known. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape, the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genres.
Students will-
- 1) Continue writing about “home”;
- 2) Consider in Barry Lopez’s “Landscape and Narrative” (PDF) (How does Lopez define exterior and interior landscapes?)
- 3) Read Gretel Ehrlich’s “From The Solace of Open Spaces” (Consider: How does the exterior landscape of Wyoming shape the interior landscape of its people? Pay attention to the contrasting details of how the wide open landscape is juxtaposed with the narrow-mindness of the people who inhabit the place.)
Reflect: How does the landscape of your place shape its people and culture?
Homework: Writing Prompt: Is there any particular trait of an external landscape that has somehow shaped your “internal landscape”- your views, character, and identity? Describe the particulars about the external landscape that have had profound impact on making you on you are today. The external landscape can be from your childhood where you grew up or the urban landscape you live in right now. What is one part of you that you feel is imprinted by your environment such as your neighborhood? Avoid writing the most obvious or cliché (tough personality shaped by rough neighborhood, etc.) . Delve into the physical specifics of the place and why they have shaped your identity. Think of Michael Dorris’ “Three Yards”, Richman’s “Why I Ride” and Gretel Ehrlich’s “From the Solace of Open Spaces”. To go even further, write about a particular culture that is embedded in certain physical traits of the environment you live in. How is the place unique in its own way although it is part of broad urban landscape? Why is it special to you? Continue to draw connections between what Barry Lopez’ describes as “the shapes and climate of these relationships in a person’s thinking” and “where on the earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature- the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of falling leaf, are known”.
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Part II
Objectives: Students will be able to reveal a culture of any sort through describing a place where memories took place by means of personal writing as well as group discussion.
Agenda
Do Now: Pick one of the following statements by Lopez and respond-
According to Barry Lopez,
- There are two landscapes-one outside one self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see- not only he line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals and season, its weather, its geology, the record of its climate and evolution… these are the elements of the land.
- The second landscape is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape… the speculations, intuitions are formal ideas we refer to as “ mind” are a set of relationships in the interior landscape with purpose and order, many impenetrably subtle.
- The shapes and climate of these relationships in a person’s thinking re deeply influences by where on the earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature- the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of falling leaf, are known. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape, the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genres.
Pair-share.
Mini Lesson:
Read and discuss
- “The Clan of One-Breasted Women” by Terry Tempest Williams:
a. How does each author use the place as a canvas set in a cultural or historical context in which s/he paints its people?
b. What cultural issues does each author explore? How are the issue directly linked to the place? Why do they bear distinctive marks of the places described?
2. Gretel Ehrlich’s “From The Solace of Open Spaces”
a. How does the exterior landscape of Wyoming shape the interior landscape of its people? Pay attention to the contrasting details of how the wide open landscape is juxtaposed with the narrow-mindness of the people who inhabit the place.
Independent Practice:
Create a semantic web to explore the possible ways to writing about your place:
- its landscape,
- its inhabitants
- the relationship between the landscape and its inhabitants
- family/neighborhood history
- tension: visible or invisible, homey yet “homeless”
Writing Prompt: Reframe the place you have been writing about or seek a new place in your memory. Is there a particular cultural or historical context about the place? Do some research and dig it out. How does the cultural or historical context shape who you are or the people who live within? Is there a particular language people use, a health issue people share, ritual or belief they follow, certain attitude, the way they demarcate the place, a shared identity? Do you fit in the culture of the place? Is there a tension among different people who live in the same place? What cause the tension? Where is it going? How do the culture, tension, and changes affect you? Do you want to stay or leave? Do you have conflicted feelings? Why?
Reflect: What really caused the tension in my place? Internal or external? Cultural or economical?
Homework: Continue writing and developing ideas about a place.
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Part III
Objectives: Students will be able to draft their place and culture essay by following the workshopping ideas or an individual conference with the teacher.
Agenda
Do Now: Describe a place where you experienced a cultural clash or conflict. What kind of place was it? What caused the conflict?
Mini Lesson:
Activity 1
In William Harrison’s piece ‘ Present Tense Africa”, –
- What particular places in Africa does Harrison describe?
- What cultural issues does he direct the reader’s attention to either subtly or directly?
- How does he infuse the descriptions of the culture of each place in his essay?
- Does he show his attitude toward the different cultures he experiences? How do you know?
- What do you believe compel the author to write about Africa?
- What does the title suggest his attitude toward the place and its people?
Activity 2
How would you describe your place and reveal the culture within at the same time?
Independent Practice
Workshopping: Share your feedback with the writers in your group(Refer to the heuristics about “Strategies for Productive Workshopping” and “Craft Questions”). You may also consider the following at this point-
- Is there a distinctive theme emerging in your essay (themes as borders, relocation, immigration, resettlement, exile, homelessness, diaspora, pilgrimage, refuge, sanctuary, travel, the environment, urban spaces, suburban and rural landscapes, farming, gardening, architecture, and the emotions and relationships that accompany these many links to place and displacement)?
- Did you explore conflict over a given space between individuals and communities?
- Are there any individual and group encounters that give meaning to certain spaces?
- In your essay, have you started addressed any of the following questions?
- What is culture? How is it linked to place?
- What’s the role of places in shaping culture?
- How do the rules and rituals associated with a place shape the behaviors, beliefs, and bonds of the people who inhabit it?
- How does the history of a place leave its mark on the present?
- What’s the role of culture in leading to certain acts of place-making: i.e., the construction, architecture, interior design, arrangement, and decoration of the place?
- How do our identities and social positions determine our experiences of particular places?
- How much control do we have over our participation in and experience of culture and place?
- To what extent do we construct culture, and to what extent does it construct us?
Homework: Writing Prompt: Unit 3 #7
Even if we don’t travel abroad, we still experience “foreign” culture in our own neighborhood. What makes the culture foreign to you? How does it affect you? Does it conflict with your own culture? How? How has the “foreign” culture played out in shaping the identity of the place (neighborhood) and you as an individual?