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.”