By Giulia Weeda
May 1, 2025
Images provided by the author
Students deserve to be heard in their educational spaces, and listening to how students talk about their school experience in conjunction with examining their writing can reveal valuable patterns of perception. Especially in rural areas, where class sizes are small and teachers and students share several years of classes together, we have opportunities to capitalize on the complicated sense of community in our place.
As a language department of one in a rural Montana high school, I am constantly searching for ways to incorporate the uniqueness of our place into my curriculum in a way that values students’ lived experiences. Our town is situated in the central region of the state, nestled on the bank of the Missouri River as it snakes its winding route out of the canyons to the south of town before it reaches Great Falls—one of Montana’s major cities—about twenty-five miles to the north. Comprised of approximately 600 people, Cascade is known for its fishing and hunting tourism in addition to its agricultural roots, and our community extends beyond the town boundaries into the surrounding areas. The public school is the heart of Cascade and its surrounding communities, serving students in a school district that spans 180 square miles. Approximately 100 students attend the high school, and I teach every single one of them every single day as the only high school English and Spanish teacher.
Influenced by rural education scholarship by Azano, Comber, McInerney et al., Petrone & Wynoff Olsen, Smith, and others, I set out to explore how my students would experience a place-based literature study that drew upon rural identity, students’ written expression, and community and archival resources. In English III, one of our central texts is The Bartender’s Tale by Ivan Doig, a novel set in our region of Montana that explores childhood, memory, and storytelling. Rusty, the 12-year-old narrator, brings readers along on his adventures growing up in the backroom of his father’s small-town bar, all while navigating family discoveries and new friendships. Since I teach the same students year after year, I was able to design a place-focused unit for English IV in which we revisited part of Doig’s novel, studied excerpts of other place-based texts, went on a field trip, and worked toward a culminating writing assignment where students were able to explore place in writing in a very personal way. The following diagram outlines the flow of the place unit.

To begin thinking about the concept of place, the way place impacts people, and how people impact place, we read an excerpt from Horace Mitchell Miner’s “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” in which he anthropologically describes various routines and habits of a group of people that is later revealed by reading “Nacirema” backwards. We used Miner’s ethnography to introduce the concept of making the familiar strange and unpacking the perhaps unnoticed uniqueness that surrounds us. We continued applying the lens as we revisited Doig’s novel, discussed our place, and visited our town museum. Finally, students worked on a final writing assignment: 500 words that discussed their understanding of place in some way accompanied by a rationale that described their choices.
I was initially leery of assigning a writing assignment with so few parameters, but my students, as they so often do, impressed me with their creativity and willingness to take academic risks. Students wrote across genres, styles, and content, submitting fictional narratives, poem collections, reflective essays, and setting descriptions that addressed social structures, everyday life, and ranching/Western themes.
Since students engaged with a wide range of topics, their intelligently-written rationales provided key insight into their thinking. Tyson (all names are pseudonyms) wrote, “I have spent my entire life finding my place,” and his writing submission described all of the different “places” he has considered to be his. Joe chose to write a local memoir because he “wanted to tell people that our town isn’t just some boring town and that some really cool people have visited.” To support his ranching memoir, Liam explained that “every place that a person lives and loves builds the person they become.” Lily described one of her poems as an attempt “to bring justice to the beauty of cowboying.” In thinking about who does and does not belong in her community, Ivy wrote that “there’s not much diversity in our town and most people dress and sound the same and have the same morals and lifestyles.” She went on to explain that an “oddball out” who doesn’t fit this mold would mostly likely fit in just fine somewhere else. These examples reflect the students’ ability to justify and take ownership of their writing as well as explain how their writing engaged the concept of place in their own unique ways.
Additionally, I created the following image to highlight how two students with opposing views of the unit both found success in writing about place. At the beginning, Evan found the project to be boring, but he ended up writing a memoir with rich descriptions about his summer job at a nearby boat loft. He later shared that he thought that hearing about what his classmates were writing was interesting, too. Josie, on the other hand, really enjoyed the unit of study. She wrote a series of haikus that focused on our class field trip, and she explicated each in a paragraph. In addition to discussing the joy she found in writing, she also expressed finding value in hearing her classmates’ ideas as we experienced the unit together.

Takeaways
The advice I would give to rural teachers after completing this project boils down to two things: trust students to choose and make time for talk.
As a teacher, I understand the inclination to provide strict parameters for assignments; after all, standardizing requirements allows for quicker grading and seamless alignment with state standards. Nevertheless, I urge teachers to resist prescribing writing topics and genres, at least for some assignments. My students showed decisiveness and creativity when I allowed them to choose for themselves, and they reflected positively on being afforded the freedom to write in a form that fit what they wanted to express. Trust students to choose their topic and genre. If the students are like mine, they will make thoughtful, intentional choices about their writing.
Making the time and space for students to talk to each other is equally significant. While every teacher has their own tolerance for noise during work time, it is worth it to set aside time—at least some time—when students can share ideas, learn from each other, and, yes, have off-task conversation. These moments of connection stood out to students, and its recurrence across student responses when I asked them about their experiences with the unit is unignorable. If we truly want students’ voices to be heard in a variety of conversations, we need to allow them to practice by talking to each other.
Community, relationships, and connection were at the heart of the unit, just as those are the heart of our rural place. Through harnessing the people that make the place, teachers can empower students to write with confidence and authority. While this study represents the unique perspectives of just one group of students, it offers key considerations for teachers hoping to incorporate place-based education into secondary English classrooms. Students finding joy in each other, listening to each other’s ideas, and appreciating what they each brought to the conversation—in person and in writing—gives me a renewed sense of hope in the power of knowing one another.
Giulia Weeda is a high school English and Spanish teacher in Cascade, Montana. She is from Manhattan, Montana and received her BA in English–Teaching and MA in English Education from Montana State University.