Carrying on Traditions, Sharing Knowledge: Communities in Midwestern Families and College Classrooms
Document Type
Report
Publication Date
2-15-2006
Department
Humanities
Abstract
Since both of my grandmothers were teachers in one-room schools and both my mother and my father attended one-room schools through the eighth grade, I grew up listening to stories about what it was like to teach and to go to school in these rural educational settings. I think it was these stories, along with the knowledge that I would be carrying on a family tradition, that largely motivated me to choose teaching as my profession. And I've always felt that in some way I was doing that--continuing the work that my grandmothers did and continuing the tradition of small-community learning. Yet there's not much obvious continuity between what I do and what my grandmothers did and my parents experienced.
Lois Barbee and Nellie John Robinson taught 20 or 30 local students of multiple levels in log and plank buildings in the 1920s in rural communities in downstate Illinois, and June Lane and Jerry Kuykendall studied with their neighbors and learned the basic elementary curriculum of the 1930s and 1940s in similar schools. I teach writing to non-native speakers at a large east-central Illinois community college. The only connection I could see at first was a superficial one: The word "community" could be used in reference to all three cases. When I was granted a sabbatical for Spring semester of 2005, I decided to take that word, "community," as a starting point for exploration of my professional roots and my philosophical orientation in the classroom.
Rights
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Kuykendall, Sue, "Carrying on Traditions, Sharing Knowledge: Communities in Midwestern Families and College Classrooms" (2006). Sabbaticals. 35.
https://spark.parkland.edu/sabbaticals/35
