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9780761854739

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In times when schools and educators are under fire, too often the impulse is to imagine a rhapsodic past while chasing tomorrow's next idea to fix the present. Perspective is lost. But this portrayal of one-room schools in rural Virginia restores perspective through its rich account of another time in America's educational history. In that time, school was a source of exciting possibilities for both teachers and students. This is not a melancholic journey to a past that never existed; rather, the voices that Susan Leist captures here speak with poetic authority about one-room experiences. Children and their teachers bent the arc of history then with their belief in each other and the learning made possible in an intimate community. Modern-day educators can learn much by placing themselves in this American story and rediscovering their inheritance.--Margo A. Figgins, Ph.D.

Susan Leist has produced an exceptional 'first hand' account of the rural one-room school experience in early twentieth-century Virginia. This accessible, indeed -- graceful -- volume goes a long way toward filling a scholarly void created by our cultural propensity to examine urban circumstances before all others. -- Paul Theobald, Ph.D. In times when schools and educators are under fire, too often the impulse is to imagine a rhapsodic past while chasing tomorrow's next idea to fix the present. Perspective is lost. But this portrayal of one-room schools in rural Virginia restores perspective through its rich account of another time in America's educational history. In that time, school was a source of exciting possibilities for both teachers and students. This is not a melancholic journey to a past that never existed; rather, the voices that Susan Leist captures here speak with poetic authority about one-room experiences. Children and their teachers bent the arc of history then with their belief in each other and the learning made possible in an intimate community. Modern-day educators can learn much by placing themselves in this American story and rediscovering their inheritance. -- Margo A. Figgins, Ph.D.

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Susan M. Leist is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor who teaches English at the State University of New York College at Buffalo. She has more than thirty years of teaching experience, primarily in higher education settings, and has been recognized with numerous teaching excellence awards. She is the author of Writing to Teach: Writing to Learn in Higher Education and Writing to Teach: Writing to Learn in Secondary School, both also from University Press of America.

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