 | Writing Suburban Citizenship In the past century, more and more Americans have been migrating from rural areas and urban centers to suburban communities. As a result, the majority of American youth are educated in the suburbs, and the ways in which they learn to be citizens are shaped by their suburban surroundings. Because many of these communities are designed to support a "placeless" lifestyle of a transient yet demographically similar population, they are often disconnected from a regional history and culture. For practitioners of place-conscious education--education that seeks to ground the curriculum in local experience, both natural and cultural--this presents a challenge. Robert E. Brooke is professor of English at the University of Nebraska and director of the Nebraska Writing Project. He is the author of Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing. |
