Long-Term Inquiry
As we stated earlier, inquiry over time is an important factor to successful place-based writing. Gruchow (1995) explained the importance of ongoing inquiry:
All history is ultimately local and personal. To tell what we remember, and to keep on telling it, is to keep the past alive in the present. Should we not do so, we could not know, in the deepest sense, how to inhabit a place. To inhabit a place means literally to have made it a habit, to have made it the custom and ordinary practice of our lives, to have learned how to wear a place like a familiar garment, like the garments of sanctity the nuns once wore. The word habit, in its now-dim original form, meant to own. We own places not because we possess the deeds to them, but because they have entered the continuum of our lives. What is strange to us—unfamiliar—can never be home.
This mode of inquiry that Gruchow (1995) described often grows into long-term inquiry as students become increasingly invested in the place they select to study. Long-term inquiry enhances the possibilities for content area learning through place-based writing. One of Mellinee’s (first author’s) students majoring in political science decided to use the place-based writing assignment as a springboard to documenting the gentrification of a nearby neighborhood over a year’s time.
Long-term inquiry can also be embedded in thematic learning with an entire class. For instance, Mellinee has used place-based writing to investigate longer thematic inquiry with undergraduate students enrolled in her secondary-level content area literacy courses. Given the region of western Texas where Mellinee teaches, she created a thematic unit on the Dust Bowl as a means to incorporate place-based writing (Lesley et al., 2007). As part of this thematic unit, students engaged in place-based writing and content area inquiry pertaining to the history of the region with artifacts and local residents who lived through the Dust Bowl.
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