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I think that I've tried to incorporate that idea of students doing the thing that they're studying
in many different ways, in many different classes.
For instance,
So I'll just give a different example from a different class.
My summer class that I often teach called "Writing Nature,"
we do a lot of nature writing and going outside and various things.
But also I like to take them to Dungeness Spit, because Dungeness Spit is one of my favorite places to go.
There's a poem that David Wagner wrote about a guide to Dungeness Spit,
which is basically a walk out onto Dungeness Spit.
And there's a man named Laurie Ricou who teaches up at the University of British Columbia who wrote a book called,
"A Guide to a Guide to Dungeness Spit."
It's a field guide to the poem.
And it's a thin little book.
And this field guide has photographs and it has passages of,
David Wagner mentions a bird he might give a kind of natural history of one of these birds of various kinds,
or some of the history.
I was thinking, so how do I teach a poem?
Say if I wanted to teach David Wagner's poem to a class.
Well, we could read the poem, then we could look at the book that tries to give this field guide,
but then we could also go to Dungeness Spit ourselves.
And students could actually write their own poems about walking out on Dungeness Spit and back.
So the value of that is in multiple ways.
One is that the students get inside the experience that you've been talking about.
They won't have the same experience that David Wagner did, they won't write poems like David Wagner,
unless you ask them to imitate it.
But they'll have their own experience; Dungeness Spit will mean something.
They will have an experience that's in their body and in their minds, all kind of interwoven.
And if we do it together as a class, it's collective in that kind of way too.
So we have a shared experience.
But also it brings them back, you can also come back to David Wagner's poem.
After you've done, when you're all the way done, you come back and you say,
"Now, read this poem again and what is it that you see in this poem, what is it that's going on."
And students now are speaking about their experiences of Dungeness Spit,
and their experiences of reading it through Laurie Ricou's book,
and their experiences of what they see in David Wagner's poem.
So the student work is, their own individual work, is essential, in a way, to their own reading of the poem.
So to me, that's an exciting thing to do and you could translate that into many other different assignments.
I think that, particularly with the arts, and I'll include literature and writing in that too,
that what happens when children are young, lots of children, at least in this country, do all those things.
They sing, they can do art, they do artwork, they dance, and they write poetry.
And something happens in their middle years where some of them keep doing it and lots of them stop doing it.
Some because they're not asked to in school anymore, it's not valued.
And at a certain point, lots of them feel very uncomfortable doing any of that kind of creative work because
they're not good enough, because they don't do it well enough or they haven't devoted themselves.
So there's a sense that only those who are trained highly can sing, or do art, and various kinds of things.
Which doesn't make any sense to me at all, I mean, because people are creative, people have a kind of creativity in them.
And if it's fostered.
So when you get them in college, all the sudden at this age in college,
you get students who have suppressed all kinds of creativity in them, or it has been,
or they feel bad because they can't do artwork the way that they should.
And I think part of my job is to reawaken some of that, to remind them,
to give them experiences that they can see that when...