| Foxfire Teaching Excellence |
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Posted By: Scott Weber |
06/30/2005 @ 09:01 AM |
When do students learn BEST? For most educators, that is the $64,000 question and sadly the BEST environment will never be created by most teachers. In my 25 years of education experience, I saw it all – the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful… And when I saw the BEST education environment it was magic!
After I finished my career in my classroom at Dublin High School, I had a unique student publishing job where I did nothing but drive from high school to high school in northern Ohio and teach and interact with all kinds of students all day long all year long for over ten years. If you pay attention, you see ideals in education. You see master teachers who make a difference and light up kids’ worlds like the Vegas Strip. They show the way and they create a life-long desire for education.
One day I might be at Shaw High School or South High School in East Cleveland where all of the lockers were ripped off the wall and security was tackling and handcuffing students, to sitting with kids at University School where they talked of a recent admission to Harvard or Yale. The contrast was alarming. It was night and day in those sectors.
So, after having observed closely in these contrasting schools, what is the best environment for learning? As a young teacher back in the 70’s I was exposed early on to what I considered to be the ULTIMATE learning experience for kids. Its principles have stuck with me to this day.
While still in college, I had read a book called “Foxfire” which explained a whole new learning concept – once in my own classroom in Wyoming, I quickly rewrote all of my writing, English, photography and journalism classes to adopt its principles. Here’s how this teaching revolution came about: In the tiny district of Rabun Gap, Georgia, a frustrated English teacher by the name of Eliot Wigginton (a very boring English teacher I might add - the kids set fire to his notes and carved in his desk with their jackknives while he lectured) - literally threw the textbook out the window and sent his students out into the lower Appalachian mountains to interview their grandparents about log cabin making, old folk tales, home remedies, planting by the signs, making banjoes, hunting, trapping, making moonshine, etc.
Wigginton’s English students had great fun transcribing the tapes and taking pictures of their relatives that lived way, way back in the hollows and suddenly English class with Mr. Wigginton was fun. English class went from being a total bore to a total obsession. The students’ interviews were so good that Mr. Wigginton made a magazine of them. The initial press run of 600 copies quickly sold out and other “hill folk” contacted his class for a chance to be interviewed about their particular way of slaughtering a hog, ghost tales, carving, making banjos, faith healing, etc.
After a couple of years of doing interviews, somehow the “Foxfire” magazine made its way to Madison Ave. and caught the attention of an enterprising editor at Double Day Books. She flew Mr. Wigginton and several of the student editors to New York and a book contract was negotiated. The students did all of the negotiations and had control of the manuscript.
To make a long and colorful story short, the “Foxfire” books sold over 8.5 million copies at near $20 per copy and were not only the largest selling book in Double Day’s history, but the entire project must stand as the most successful educational project ever conceived. The kids’ “Foxfire” books grossed nearly $150 million for Double Day Books!! The tiny school’s take was nearly 20% - a foundation was set-up to deal with the cascade of money. Students involved in the project went to college free, they bought an entire Georgia mountainside and began moving old log cabins onto the property and installed state-of-the-art computer systems so they could communicate with their New York publisher better. There are now 12 volumes of “Foxfire” and at least ten other books they have written about Appalachian culture.
When I was teaching, I too had a “Foxfire” project – first in Wyoming where my students interviewed mountain men, Indians, rodeo riders, taxidermists, hunting guides and ranch women – many nearly 100 years old who could recall the Indian Wars, life on the frontier and the early rodeo circuit. Later at Dublin High School here in Ohio, I sent my kids out with tape recorders and cameras to interview persons nearly 100 years old about life on the farms of central Ohio near the Scioto River. We published our work as a 150-page magazine that went throughout the country – we scored grants from Ohio Arts Council, National Endowment of Humanities, Ohio Humanities Council, Ohio Historical Society and The Foxfire Fund. Our efforts caught the attention of the “Foxfire” teachers and one day I received a hand-written letter from Eliot Wigginton inviting me down to Rabun Gap, Georgia to do a workshop with him for some University of Alabama students and professors.
What I saw down in the tiny school district of Rabun Gap, Georgia was PURE education. The students ran the multi-million dollar enterprise which transcended the classroom. Their old log cabins looked rustic outside, but inside each one was a virtual workshop with the nicest large screen computers I had ever seen – all teeming with images of stories and photo layouts that were being tweaked before being sent to New York. There were three or four books and magazines and workshops/speeches being created at once! Kids were doing all of the work and teachers were facilitators only. Kids bounced ideas off teachers and then teachers helped their dream become a reality.
What was “Foxfire’s” secret for success? Here’s the formula: The community was in the classroom and the classroom was in the community! Ever wonder how education can be at its very BEST? It’s when the community teaches the children and the children teach the community. Both bring out the very best in each other when properly nurtured. And then they work in concert with each other and all kinds of magical things happen! Here’s the best one: EVERYONE gets educated and everyone contributes to something special and unique and feels GREAT about their contribution.
In backwoods Georgia, I went out on the “beat” with the kids when they conducted their interviews. We bounced along rutted dirt roads in four-wheel drives and then hiked the rest of the way to get to some of the hill folk. These people had no TV, no electricity, no plumbing – they were living off the land – stuck in 1850. The kids knew what to do – they asked great questions, took excellent pictures – I watched the “Foxfire” books happen in front of me. It was extremely impressive – students took entire ownership of their project and saw it from the brainstorm session to national publication.
Mr. Wigginton, of course, received many, many requests to speak all over the country, so he seized this as yet another opportunity for the education of his students. When he accepted a speaking engagement, he insisted that at least two students came along and be given free airline tickets and hotel rooms. Why? Because the students gave the speeches when they got to the universities and educational groups! Imagine the educational experience that alone provided! Kids 15-years old were instructing college students, master secondary school teachers and college professors!
All of the “Foxfire” kids designed their own curriculums. In all the time I spent with them, grades were never talked about – the kids were way, way past and above the grading system! It was assumed everyone was going to get an “A” and that you would dedicate and produce – after all, there was a publishing deadline and millions of dollars at stake. Now that was motivation! And not only that, if you did well as a student you got a full ride scholarship to any of the top universities in the country! What was most interesting was major universities were studying the “Foxfire” project and were clamoring to get these kids into their schools. I’d never seen anything like it – it was as though I had entered some kind of lost world that had sprung up in the Georgia mountains… A part of me didn’t want to come home; the other part of me couldn’t wait to put the principles I had learned into my own classroom. Again, I had shared my experiences in community journalism and they had shared theirs and it was a win-win situation!
Think of all the disciplines the kids were learning while doing a “Foxfire” project: Writing, business, photography, graphics, computer skills, accounting, public speaking, money management, debate, conflict resolution, working as a group, travel experience, design, art – nearly every course the school had to offer! And what’s more, they pulled the community into the inner workings of the school.
True education occurred and true motivation was in evidence – after all, anything they produced was nationally published – and that made the kids burn with energy and desire. Students stayed until late at night and wouldn’t leave until the teachers made them go home. Contrast “Foxfire” with the normal English assignment where the student writes, say a biography on Edgar Allan Poe and it’s graded and then filed or thrown away. At “Foxfire”, all of their writings went through multi-revisions until publishable and then the kids worked one-on-one with their New York editors to further perfect the prose. Photos were reprinted multi-times until they were just right for publication – the students learned what excellence really meant and the high standards that the real world requires.
Wigginton’s “Foxfire” kids were doing what most classrooms fail to do: They fully involved a segment of the community that normally would not have any interest in school activities (in the case of the older Appalachian folks – most were uneducated and hated school) and made them champions of the school system. Everyone won on this approach! Many times I observed old hill folk making the long journey to spend a day at the students’ high school – they spent several hours being interviewed while they demonstrated their craft, ate with the kids and then were helped home by the kids. Now that’s real school PR!
For dedicated professionals, the “Foxfire” project is a model of excellence that cannot be ignored. That it has prospered for nearly 40 years in a tiny Appalachian community is testimony to its effectiveness. There’s something every educator can learn in its unique approach to education.
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