English course brings unique opportunities to connect with Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Reading allows people to mentally transport themselves into the places they’re reading about. Students enrolled in the course ENGL 411 have the special opportunity to visit these places in person as they appreciate and learn more about the area surrounding Penn State's University Park campus. 

Funded by the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence in Penn State Undergraduate Education, the “Reading and Writing Place in Central Pennsylvania” course has students read literature that depicts Centre County and engage with their coursework through field trips.

Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Liberal Arts Professor of English, explained the process of why she wanted to design and teach this class.

“This is only the second time in my 22 years at Penn State that I’ve had the chance to teach an honors seminar in creative writing,” Spicher Kasdorf said. “The first time I taught it, I taught a course in reading and writing documentary poetry.

“I taught it first and realized I could practice documentary poetry, so it led to a five-year project that produced a book called ‘Shale Play.’ A lot of the work done for the book looked like me getting into my car, driving up to northern Pennsylvania, sitting in a diner and talking to the people, and driving around the roads trying to understand what is happening to the environment,” Spicher Kasdorf said.

As a result of that experience, Spicher Kasdorf said she had a much clearer sense of where she grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania and that it also gave her a sense of how everything is connected.

“Every personal choice I make in some way is connected to much larger trends in the earth, the lives of other people, and it also gave me a deeper awareness and gratitude for the place I lived,” said Spicher Kasdorf. 

Spicher Kasdorf designed this course so students can become curious about the history, culture and ecology of Penn State because she believes that the more we know about particular places and peoples, the harder it will be for us to destroy them.

“Ultimately, the bottom line was a sense of connection: to the earth, to other people,” Spicher Kasdorf said. “The more that you know something, the more you feel connected to it.

“All of that influenced my choice to design a course that would attempt to bring some Penn State students into a deeper awareness of this place and history. And by this place, I mean our campus and our county. It seemed especially important since coming out of this time of being so separate from one another and so much of what we’ve experienced in the world has been mediated through technology, so a lot of the work is just showing up.”

Kiera Sargent, a third-year student majoring in English from Clifton, Virginia, enjoyed learning more about Centre County from a resident perspective, rather than a student perspective.

“Not only was I able to explore Centre County and the surrounding community of Penn State's campus, but I was also able to talk to the people that live within these areas, hear about their experiences, learn and discuss the history of the region, and understand how Centre County came to be what it is today,” Sargent said. “I think the most important opportunity from this class was the actual conversations we had with community members that have lived here for decades, rather than hearing the typical college student rhetoric about what State College is and why it's such a valuable town.”

Sargent, a Paterno Fellow and Schreyer Scholar, was able to connect with the area around her by reading the required texts and attending the various field trips the course offered.

Spicher Kasdorf said the students in the class read some “odd texts from all times.”

“We read from the 19th century all the way to ‘Fun Home,’ which was written in 2006,” Spicher Kasdorf explained. “We read texts in many different genres.”

Some of the field trips included visiting Eagle Iron Works and Curtin Village; taking a walking tour of Bellefonte, Aaronsburg and Salem Church; and exploring the “Fun Home” house at Beech Creek and Spring Creek Canyon. These visits, as Spicher Kasdorf explained, were all made possible due to the funding provided by the Schreyer Institute.

Sargent explained that she would “definitely recommend this class” to those interested.

“This class was much different from other courses I have taken as a student for so many reasons,” Sargent said. “The most obvious difference is that I was able to go on field trips — like I was in elementary school again. But also, our conversations had immediate real-life applications.

“Other courses talk about large, vague, abstract topics that don't directly impact me or my surrounding life. This class, however, talks about the community that I live in, the people that I interact with, and the history that has allowed me to attend school here. It really makes you think about everything around you when you have a class that asks you to question exactly that.”

“I don't think there is another course offered here that will give students an experience like this class has given me.”