Nestled in the tree-covered, red-earth mountains of rural northern Georgia is the Rabun Gap High School. As the late winter afternoon fades, the ringing of the school bell draws teenagers in faded jeans and high-tops toward their fifth-period classes.
Mary Sue Raaf and Shane Holcomb head for language arts in the Foxfire classroom. Uniform, molded plastic student desks are clustered near the blackboard, the teacher's desk in a corner.
A hand-sewn friendship quilt is stretched over one of the painted, cinder-block walls; a map of southern Appalachia covers another. Cabinet tops and window sills are display cases for tools, a butter churn, weathered straw baskets, and statues carved from local trees. Brick and board shelves are heaped with artifacts, folklore books and magazines, and SAT exam materials.
Mary Sue settles in with her composition folder. Shane rewinds a tape in the transcribing booth. Two other students discuss visiting a log cabin in a neighboring county.
An eclectic environment
The learning that takes place in the Foxfire classroom is as eclectic as the environment. Basic grammar, composition, and comprehension skills are mastered by students during the hands-on tasks of writing the stories of Appalachian life--plowing a hillside field, hunting wild plant foods, hide tanning, and toy making.
The seventh- through twelfth-grade editors assemble the stories into Foxfire series magazines and books, guided by their teacher, Eliot Wigginton.
Integrating student-produced publications into a language arts curriculum may not be a new idea. But it is uniquely effective in Rabun Gap because, while students are mastering language skills as they write, they are also preserving their own cultural heritage. Narratives from their neighbors, grandparents, or the country midwife on various subjects--including how to build a log cabin and treat a snake bite--are recorded, transcribed, printed, bound, and shared with Foxfire readers from Los Angeles to New York and New Zealand.
It's an educational process that started out as an experiment by Wigginton. When he graduated from Cornell twenty years ago with a teaching certificate, he took a job teaching ninth- and tenth-grade English in Rabun Gap for $4,280 a year. He chose Rabun Gap because he wanted to live in the mountains where he had spent segments of his childhood. Fond memories of arrowhead-hunting excursions and woodland hikes drew him back to Georgia and to people's lore and tales that he and his students would record.
Yet his first months of teaching were frustrating. Wigginton had difficulty holding his students' attention long enough to teach them something about language. He wrote to a college friend, "I am continuing to have a struggle; . . . they [the students] enter my class, turn off their ears, turn on their mouths, and settle down for a period of socializing." The teacher alternately tried being friendly and cracking down--kicking kids out of class and lowering grades--to generate cooperation in his classroom. Nothing seemed to
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