Place and Sacredness
The umbrella concept of Place is an outstanding vehicle for children, of any age group, to explore the world in which they live from both an external and internal vantage points. Doing so hinges on the child’s ability to think on more than one level. Nine and ten year olds can do this. Developmentally, they have enough socialization to begin to move beyond an egocentric point of view. Fourth graders are generally in a sustained period of equilibrium, beyond the tricky idiosyncrasies of the same sex pack mentality and before the onset of the maelstroms of puberty. This lull period allows them the psychological energy to engage in more abstract considerations. Cognitively, they have reached a level in their academic abilities to be able to manipulate information, without having trouble with the acquisition process itself, if the information presented is leveled correctly and within an accessible framework. Finally, fourth graders are incredibly curious about the way things are put together. As a teacher, I can use this curiosity to ignite the kind of critical and reflective thought these children can use to explore the structure of their own world view.
The external framework of Place, as designated by the National Council of Teachers of Social Studies (NCTSS), is composed of five distinct, but interwoven, elements. These elements are listed below along with a shortened definition. Please take note that the word “place” represents two things in this format. It is the overall name of the whole schema itself, Place, and it is also the specific name of the first NCTSS element, Place.
Ø Place: A general space taken up by a place or thing.
Ø Location: The exact (absolute) location, by a given specific criterion, of a place or thing.
Ø Human Interaction: How humans affect the environment and how the environment affects humans.
Ø Regions: How areas are grouped together according the certain cultural, political, or physical characteristics.
Ø Movement: The travel of goods, ideas or large populations over time or space.
What Place means has subtle differences according to the group who is defining it. Within an English literature context, Place represents the setting in which the action and the characters of a piece of poetry or prose are situated. Subtle, and not so subtle clues found within the language, offer indicators of the physical environment of the setting as well as its relationship with the characters and action. The interaction between these elements is fluid and can change over the course of the text. The NCTSS concept of Place, when compared to the English literature, is more delineated and broader in scope. It can be viewed as a tiered schema. The most general and readily applicable base unit also called Place. It is the space taken up by an object. Many different applications and examples can be found. However, as one goes up the tier, the applications and examples that the succeeding concepts can be applied to start to narrow. The NCTSS Location and Human Interaction elements are slightly less broad than the element preceding them but still retain a marked degree of concreteness. By the time the Regions and Movement elements are reached, their applicability to bodies of knowledge has decreased as well as increased in their levels of conceptual abstraction. Although NCTSS elements are interrelated, information can be viewed differently dependant upon the element given primacy.
When I compare these two different definitions of Place, I believe that the English literature model can integrate with the NCTSS schema at the first three tiers level but makes the best fit in the Human Interaction. This element deals specifically with how humans affect, and are affected by, the environment in which they live just as the characters are affected by, and affect, the settings in which they are placed. I see the English literature definition as a subset of the Human Interaction element of the NCTSS definition. Of the two, I prefer and use the latter. I value the element of abstraction that NCTSS holds and find the conceptual framework to be more applicable to the students I teach.
The whole Piagetian premise of accommodation/assimilation, coupled with Vygotsky’s idea of proximal approximations, means that children can learn high level concepts if they can first explore them in tangible and known ways. Once this is done, they can adapt their understanding to encompass new information with increasing levels of abstraction if they have formed a solid beginning foundation. I have formulated the units I have to teach from the most known and concrete to the most abstract using the NCTSS Place elements as the bridging super–structure. The first semester deals with exploring the specific space in which we live. After a general overview of the five concepts for the first two weeks, usually through a short literature book, we dive into our immediate environment. We start with what causes, and effects are, of specific Japanese volcanoes. Quite an immediate thing given the amount of weekly tremors and earthquakes we have. We chart earthquakes around the world using latitude and longitude coordinates. Next, comes weather and how land forms cause changes in our immediate environment. As you can see from this short synopsis, the children have had a through grounding in the concepts of Place and Location. We have done experiments, research projects, and fiction and non-–fiction literature groups. Their concrete academic foundation is more than set. The insertion of the Sacred Places unit comes at a precipitous time in the school year. The students are ready cognitively, academically and affectivity to tackle the knowledge at a more abstract level. The concept of a sacred place is an interesting and thought provoking intersection of the two Place definitions-- for it is at once global and abstract, as per the NCTSS construct, yet quite personal as specified by the English literature model. The Continuum Dictionary of Religion (1995) defines sacred as persons, places or things set apart or having some religious significance, and so are accorded worship, veneration or respect. The article goes on to recount that there are specific behaviors that people undertake when they view an item as sacred and synopsizes Emile Durkheim’s position his The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) relationship of an object, or place, and sacredness this way, “The term sacred and profane are seen as classificatory concepts; they do not stand for the intrinsic properties of persons, places or things. By defining them in terms of the behavior of religious persons…the sacredness is “superadded” and “superimposed” upon the object or places.” However, I see it as another form of people interacting, under specific dictates, with their environment. It is this idea of human imposition of sacredness upon a place, and in what context, that forms the philosophical heart of the Sacred Places unit. What I am not doing is having the students make a value judgment of one religion over another or even upon the degree to which organized religion should play a role in their lives or the lives of their classmates. I find that to be rather sticky ground considering the array of religious beliefs to be had in my class. What I do want them to do is think about what they hold to be sacred to themselves, whatever that might be, and recognize and value other levels and types of sacredness for others. This study ties directly into the affective goals I set for the class, understanding and valuing the viewpoints of others while learning cultural tolerance.
The main questions for the Human Interaction element are: How does a land’s place change its culture? How does where I live change me? These two questions can be applied to the Sacred Places unit with a little modification. Thus, the first two umbrella questions to be used with the poetry unit are: How does the poem’s place change its people and culture? If I lived in the poem’s place, how would it change me? As simplistic as these questions seem, a great deal has to be considered before the students can answer them. First of all, the poems have to be looked at from three different viewpoints– sociological, level of sacredness, and from poetic structure. Each will highlight, and shape, differing aspects of the poems. Sociologically, in the Human Interaction unit, the students will have already been introduced to, and manipulated, a hierarchy of human psychological constructs (Richardson) before the Sacred Places unit begins. Starting from the first developmental aspect, these constructs were introduced to the class so that they understood the psychology behind the development of cities, which is one of the major content units I am required to teach.
Ø The Self
Ø Us/Them
Ø Family Groupings
Ø Social Transmission of Information for Survival of the Group
Ø The Soul
Ø Control over One’s Environment
Ø Rights– to possess, to record history, formation of laws of society, and methods for communicate between different groups
Ø Development of Leaders
Within the context of teaching these constructs, the class will have learned how humans transitioned from nomadic hunter/gathers to subsistence farmers to city dwellers. Cities are defined by their functions as social institutions; by their ability to shelter; by their adaptations to the environment around them; and by their reflection of the needs of the people who live in them. There are four major types: the religious, the administrative, the mercantile and the combination. As the students are to be studying comparative religions concurrently to the introduction of the Sacred Places unit, they should have a variety of information at hand for them to poems into a contextual framework. Yolen has done a remarkable job on making sure that her background research for her poems is accurate and intellectually intriguing. The poems are rich in historical linkages. From a purely secular and objective point of view, the relationship between the people and the place they inhabit within the context of a Human Interaction focus provides a substantial amount of data for the class to deconstruct. They will have to identify the actual physical space the poem happens in without any “superadded” elements.The level of abstraction and symbolism they will have to grapple with increases, however, when the “superadded” element of sacredness is entered into the mix. Every one of the poems in the Yolen’s Sacred Places and Jerusalem poetry books are set in locations that are sacred to various different religions. Places that are deemed sacred are “ the major external matrices and foci through which religious systems make contact by what they deem holy.” (The Continuum Dictionary of Religion, 1995) The physical space can vary. It can be found within nature in the forms of specific mountains or regions of water. It can be a place important in the history of a religion––such as the city of Jerusalem. Sometimes, there is no permanent defined place, but a temporary one that is created for a specific rite to occur, say for an outdoor wedding. Shrines, temples, or churches, however, provide an established place for worship. Time also becomes a factor when dealing with sacred places with each religion has its own temporal markers. The class will then have analyzed the relationship of people and their environment through a sacred perceptual lens both personal and global. My students will use all of the varied concepts–both secular and sacred, to answer open– ended questions about Place in which they will have to take a position and then back it up with logic. To do so, they will have to analyze what they currently believe, and know, and apply it within the context of the given question shifting between the two different applications.
Yet, these poems are more than just a vehicle for clarifying worldviews. They are well–crafted bits of wordsmithing as well. To say something beautifully is an art––one that my students need to learn. For this reason, the third major question the unit will be: How do the words used to describe Place influence the feeling of the poem? To be able to answer this question, several things must take happen structurally and in regards to word choice. Structurally, the students will analyze parts of poems for rhythm and meter to determine how each change the mood of the piece. As a poet, Yolen often changes the meter of the poem in the middle of the work. We will be studying this to see what dramatic effect it provides as well as looking at repeated word patterns within a given poem. Yolen creates distinctive moods and tones by repetition either to bracket the beginning or ending of a poem; as common sentence stems; or to provide the total framework of the whole poem. Finally, each poem will be analyzed to see what specific place words Yolen has included to give the reader a sense the characteristics of the setting of the poems. By seeing the overt and the subtle use of words to convey set the tone of the environment, the students should become more aware of how to do the same thing in their own poetry.
To recap, there will be three key questions that will guide our study of the poems in the Sacred Places unit. They are tied to the major semester questions for the year and integrate into the whole year long thematic focus of Place. The questions are listed below.
Ø How does the poem’s Place change its people and culture? (secular and sacred)
Ø If I lived in the poem’s Place, how would it change me?
Ø How do the words used to describe Place influence the feeling of the poem?