My Father’s Place in the Mountains: An Education Elsewhere

Abstract

In this chapter, the author uses autoethnography and narrative inquiry to examine her father's relationship with hunting as an exercise in actualizing rural literacies to identify opportunities for place-based learning. This chapter explores the connection to nature, hunting traditions, the literacy and discourse communities, and the lessons learned from the mountains where he hunts. The author uses a critical place frame to ask how we might incorporate this culture as meaningful, instructional practices into K-12 schooling. The author takes issue with decontextualized curricula and asks if schooling perpetuates ways of being at risk when it fails to value place and the home knowledge students bring to the classroom. This issue is examined within the narrative of her father's relationship with hunting.