Appalachia in the Classroom
Teaching the Region

“Designed to serve as a pedagogical tool for instructors at postsecondary institutions, this book provides how-to strategies for teaching the literature and culture of Appalachia to students who may or may not live in the area…. Summing Up: Highly recommended.”

Choice

“This volume does many things well. Essays in this work serve as primers on Appalachian history, on folklore and the oral tradition, on ecocriticism, and on service-learning.”

Douglas Reichert Powell, author of Critical Regionalism

“The fourteen essays in this fine new collection remind us that ‘teaching the region’ can be about far more than understanding the history, circumstances, and cultural production of a particular set of counties in the eastern United States. … Its broadest value… may be as a meditation on the nature of teaching and learning, and in particular, the teaching of critical thinking and the subversion of unexamined notions of how the world is made.”

Journal of Appalachian Studies

“In this book, (Burriss and Gantt) have engaged some of the region’s foremost post-secondary teachers to share their best ideas for teaching about the region. For example, John C. Inscoe on teaching history, Erica Abrams Locklear and Jeff Mann on teaching literature, Ricky L. Cox on teaching the novel, and Grace Edwards on teaching poetry.”

Appalachian Heritage

Appalachia in the Classroom contributes to the twenty-first century dialogue about Appalachia by offering topics and teaching strategies that represent the diversity found within the region. Appalachia is a distinctive region with various cultural characteristics that can’t be essentialized or summed up by a single text.

Appalachia in the Classroom offers chapters on teaching Appalachian poetry and fiction as well as discussions of nonfiction, films, and folklore. Educators will find teaching strategies that they can readily implement in their own classrooms; they’ll also be inspired to employ creative ways of teaching marginalized voices and to bring those voices to the fore. In the growing national movement toward place-based education, Appalachia in the Classroom offers a critical resource and model for engaging place in various disciplines and at several different levels in a thoughtful and inspiring way.

Contributors: Emily Satterwhite, Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, John C. Inscoe, Erica Abrams Locklear, Jeff Mann, Linda Tate, Tina L. Hanlon, Patricia M. Gantt, Ricky L. Cox, Felicia Mitchell, R. Parks Lanier, Jr., Theresa L. Burriss, Grace Toney Edwards, and Robert M. West.

Theresa L. Burriss is the Chair of Appalachian Studies and Director of the Appalachian Regional & Rural Studies Center at Radford University, Virginia. She is the contributing senior editor of Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, and her publications on the Affrilachians have appeared in the journals Appalachian Heritage and Iron Mountain Review, as well as in the books An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature and Encyclopedia of African American Literature.   More info →

Patricia M. Gantt is Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of English at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.  She is the editor of the five-volume Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers. Her work on Appalachian writers has appeared in Iron Mountain Review, An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature, Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women’s Poetry, and Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Regional Writing.   More info →