The teacher or facilitator places the text and images throughout the room evenly to avoid congestion in one area. They can be placed on walls on their own or attached to chart paper for participants to write on.
When the images are ready, participants are instructed to either write comments on a post-it note and place it next to the image/text, or write on a piece of chart paper under the image. A question can be posed at the beginning of the gallery walk to focus participants on a specific aspect of the content. For example, “As you are walking around, think about where you see the impact of go-go in DC.” Participants are asked to walk around the space as though they were at an art gallery. There is no talking during the gallery walk. This gives participants a chance to reflect silently. Give participants 10-15 minutes to write down their thoughts. Allow more time if necessary.
The teacher or facilitator places the text and images throughout the room evenly to avoid congestion in one area. They can be placed on walls on their own or attached to chart paper for participants to write on.
This is an introductory lesson to acquaint students with key people and issues in a unit of study on go-go in the DC metro area. It serves as a pre-reading activity for books and articles on go-go.
Following the lessons, it is our hope that students will want to learn more and generate their own list of questions for further study. The lesson format is a “mixer” or “meet and greet” where students take on the role of a key person, place, institution, or object. In their role, they try to find answers to a designated list of questions by interviewing their peers, who are also in role. They begin with informational questions and then regroup for questions that require critical thinking and analysis, such as:
- What role does go-go play in understanding gentrification?
- Why did go-go emerge in DC and why is DC one of the few cities in the U.S. to have its own music form?
Public historian Marya McQuirter wrote the bios. She provided this description of the multiples goals she had for them:
"First, I wanted to use the bios as a way to tell smaller stories about go-go that would add up to a big story (or bigger stories) or history about go-go. Second, I wanted to show that the history of go-go is not simple, it is complex and that it involves musicians, singers, educators, politicians, history, money, property owners, a desire to dance, etc. Third, I wanted to place go-go within a history of music. I wanted to give weight to the idea that go-go is a true musical form. And to emphasize its musicality, its use of a wide range of instruments (particularly in the first decades) and that go-go musicians also played, enjoyed, influenced and were influenced by other music genres. Finally, I hoped to provide a context for teachers and students to appreciate how go-go is such a beloved music and culture in the city and to create a space to think critically about its past, present and future."
For classes where some or all the students are not familiar with the go-go beat, we recommend beginning by introducing students to some audio clips. For all classes, we recommend playing go-go music during the mixer activity. Go-go cannot be understood on paper alone.
Materials and Preparation
- Music clips: Have clips of these two songs cued up and ready to play: “Bustin' Loose, “Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers & “Welcome to DC,” Mambo Sauce
- Name tags
- Handout #1: Brief Bios.” There are 38 biographies in this handout. Print the handout and cut the paper into individual strips, with each strip displaying one biography. Each student or workshop participant and the instructor should receive one bio each. If there are more bios than participants, you can either give two bios to a few participants or reduce the number of bios distributed. If you reduce the number of bios, reduce them in multiples of six and delete the respective names from Handout No. 2.
- Handout #2: Questionnaires: What’s My Name? What’s My Story? There are six (2A-2F) versions of this questionnaire to ensure students receive different questions. Print all six versions and make enough copies to cover the total number of students who will participate in the activity. Each student will receive one of the six versions of the handout.
- Do a quick check-in with questions such as:
- Who's heard of go-go? (If quite a few have, ask what bands/songs they can name or that they like.)
- Who's seen a live go-go performance?
- Whose parents/grandparents listen(ed) to go-go?
- Explain that go-go has a multi-generational history in DC, so there are more people and places than the ones they named and luckily today you will get a chance to “meet” them.
- If one or more students have not heard go-go, play two music clips: “Bustin' Loose” by Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers and “Welcome to DC” by Mambo Sauce. Ask students: What do you hear? What are the similarities? What are the differences?
Meet and Greet
- Distribute one bio, questionnaire, and name tag to each student. Explain that for the rest of the class, they will take on the identity of the person, place, or thing on the bio they received. Point out that these biographies are simply brief introductions; the full stories could fill entire books.
- Ask them to take a few minutes to read their bio. Then have them respond to the first two questions on the top section of the questionnaire, and to let you know if they have any questions. The two questions are:
- What is your name?
- What is one thing of significance about your own identity?
- Have them put their role play name on their name tag and put it on.
- Explain to students that they have the rare opportunity to attend a conference on go-go. In order to make the most of their time at this conference, they have a brief questionnaire to complete. This questionnaire will help them meet and learn about others at the conference. As they participate in the conference, they should stay in role, responding to questions from other participants, and in turn ask them questions. Each student should try to “meet” the people or places on their questionnaire that can help them answer their questions. Their conversations with each other should reveal the necessary clues for the student to figure out the names and fill in the blanks.
- Launch the activity. At the beginning, you may need to remind students to stay in role. (If you have not done a mixer like this with your students before, you could model some interactions so they get the idea that they should meet and talk with people to try to find the answers to their questions.)
- Once you have determined that most students have had enough time to complete their questionnaire, have everyone return to their seats.
- Ask for a couple of volunteers to share what they found to be most surprising and/or interesting during the activity.
Deepening Our Understanding of Go-Go
- Explain that now the conference participants have been asked by the media to respond to some challenging questions. You can group participants so that they have the background needed to grapple with both questions. Group them according to what works best in your class. There is not a definitive answer to either question, so the challenge is to develop an informed response based on the knowledge and experience of the roles represented in each group.
- What role does go-go play in understanding gentrification? (Bios 2, 7, 13, 35, 37)
- Why did go-go emerge in DC and why is DC one of the few cities in the U.S. to have its own music form? (Bios 2, 5, 6, 8, 15, 19. 21, 33, 37, 38)
- This is the conclusion of the activity. There are many possible next steps. For example, students can
- Conduct research on the person, place, or thing they represented in the activity. They can share what they learned in the form of an essay, bulletin board display, a children's book, Wikipedia entry, radio theater, or iMovie.
- Draft a description of go-go for the DC history textbook. If they were given one page in the book, what should it say?
- Teach others in their school or community about the history and culture of go-go.
Bios and questions developed by Marya McQuirter. Lesson developed by Deborah Menkart based on a “meet and greet” format used in many pre-reading lessons.
On July 9, 2011, the D.C. community convened for a beat, the Go-Go beat. The Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum hosted Evolution of the Go-Go Beat in Washington, D.C., the second program in a series devoted to Washington, D.C.’s homegrown genre of music. Go-Go music, the history of which has been carefully chronicled in The Beat! Go-Go Music from Washington, D.C., has West African roots and is recognized for its infectious heartbeat-based rhythm courtesy of its signature instruments, the congo, cowbell, and drum.
Kip Lornell and Charles Stephenson, Jr., co-authors of The Beat!, invited the D.C. community-at-large to listen to talks from Go-Go artists.
Sweet Cherie, Howard University Graduate and keyboard player of the all-female Go-Go band Be’la Dona, spoke highly of the Go-Go community describing it as “family.” Having just returned on a red-eye flight from a performance with the Godfather of Go-Go, Chuck Brown, in North Carolina, she warmly presented several audio recordings evidencing Go-Go’s past and continued employ in other musical genres like R&B, Pop, and Gospel. The audience’s response ranged from toe-tapping to nostalgic grins as Sweet Cherie played excerpts of Grace Jones’ Slave to the Rhythm, Jill Scott’s It’s Love, Beyonce’s Crazy in Love, Kirk Franklin’s Before I Die, Karen Clark Sheard’s Prayed Up, Cee Lo’s I’ll Be Around, Kelly Rowland’s Bump Like This…the list goes on like the beat.
Gregory “Sugar Bear” Elliot, lead talker and bass player of Experience Unlimited (E.U.), whose ’80s hit, “Da Butt” featured in Spike Lee’s School Daze and gave Go-Go music one of its first national platforms, detailed the group’s quick rise from playing in small local Go-Go venues to performing in 20,000-person capacity stadiums. He also expressed disappointment with the school system’s removal of music programs from public education claiming “there may be many Miles Davises among us, but we’d never know it” for the lack of access to standard musical training.
Similar to the sun’s unrelenting blaze on this hot D.C. afternoon, Faycez U Know gave a smoking live performance on the grassy area of the Anacostia Community Museum’s grounds as approximately 20 teachers stayed indoors to attend to the business of developing a Go-Go curriculum. The goal of the meeting, led by Teaching for Change, was to build a collaborative community of educators who will develop, field test, and promote lessons centered on Go-Go.
Teachers separated into groups of three to brainstorm interactive and effective ways to address the five core areas of knowledge based on Go-Go music and using The Beat! Go-Go Music from Washington, D.C. as a primary textual source. As the teachers regrouped, they shared many well-constructed ideas inspired by the homegrown sound. Three teachers (Michele Bollinger from Wilson Senior High School, Monét Cooper from Capital City Public Charter School, and Michael Bolds from Cesar Chavez Public Charter School for Public Policy) talked about engaging students in a long-term multi-media project in which the students would create documentaries to include original photos, interviews, and primary documents. Felecia Wright from Anacostia High School thought students could use research and critical thinking skills to explore the relationship between Hip-Hop and Go-Go including why one has gained more national attention and the relationship between the musical/cultural forms.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, a creative writing teacher, will entitle his lesson Rhetoric: The Art of an Illusion, exploring incidents of violence and Go-Go’s perceived association with them. Payne Elementary School teacher Mary Johnson is planning a lesson, The Language of Go-Go: Poetry and Figurative Language, Regional Language, Biography, and City Culture. Other ideas that surfaced included developing a business plan to promote a band as well as creating the social media and publicity for the band. Students would also learn some aspects of marketing by creating web pages, flyers and other promotional materials.
Teaching for Change Associate Director, Allyson Criner, ended the gathering by asking teachers to name a student they will have in mind as they develop their ideas into actual lessons plans.
The lessons will be field-tested. Teachers can still get involved by emailing firstname.lastname@example.org
The Beat: Go-Go Music from Washington, DC
by Kip Lornell and Charles Stephenson, Jr.
University Press of Mississippi in 2009.
One of the first books on Go-Go, The Beat set the stage for how we understand Go-Go. The Beat was originally published by Billboard Music in 2001.
In some very fundamental respects, a go-go bears striking parallels to an African American Pentecostal church service. Both events, for example tend to be long, extending for hours with no predetermined endpoint. Nor do they hand out nearly printed programs detailing the event when you enter a Holiness church or as they check your ID when you come through the door at Deno's Club in Northeast. A go-go and a sanctified church service also blur the clear demarcations that separate performers from the audience. ...both a go-go and a Pentecostal church service succeed only when the majority of the people in attendance fully participate and become integrated into the event.
The Washington Post, in particular, generally continues to report only negative stories on go-go. The Washington City Paper sometimes covers go-go events, mainly live performances and the occasional compact disc release. The city's other daily, the Washington Times, doesn't even seen seem to now that go-go exists.
The latest information about D.C.'s go-go scene can be found on the internet....most folks turn to Kato's [ Kato Hammond's] "Take Me Out to the GoGo" website. Most go-go fans, have TMOTTGoGo.com bookmarked.
I am a woman who happens to love and appreciate go-go music. I happen to be a woman involved in music. I also happen to be a woman at the go-go. My being a woman should not be an issue in go-go, but it is. Go-go is a man's world, a man's music, according to men. They may not say it, but they think it for sure. I'm here to dispute that, to debate it and to prove that the men are wrong about the women in go-go....
Percussion, not only the conventional drum and traps set but congas and timbales, remains one of go-go's core elements. Here is where the educational system in the District of Columbia helped to further the cause. In the 1960s the rivalry between the city's high schools really heated up, particularly on the athletic field. In the District of Columbia, marching bands are as much a part of the football field as the team itself. A Darryll Brooks observed, "There used to be a lot of competition between uptown bands and Southeast, like Spingarn and Eastern bands. We were very educated, musically." Go-go benefited from this phenomenon because so many of the students were involved with marching bands....
The role of the D.C. public schools did not cease with the involvement of young men (and they were mostly males) with percussion. The junior and senior high school marching bands at Taft, Woodson, Coolidge, Cardozo, Dunbar, McKinley, and others included horn and reed players...and many of the first generation of go-go bands utilized saxophones and trumpet players (part of the soul and funk legacy).
The high school band experience helped the aspiring musicians in a number of ways. First, it taught them how to read standard musical notation. Secondly, they were placed in a context where they made music in large ensembles that required a great deal of cooperation. Finally, it reinforced the (essentially African American) concept that motion and music are highly compatible.
The public schools' musical instruction received strong reinforcement from the D.C. Department of Recreation, which also played a vital role in educating D.C.'s aspiring musicians. The Department of Recreation also provided music lessons, especially for horn players, and assisted in sending a "Showmobile" with musical groups into the city's neighborhoods.
Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City
by Natalie Hopkinson
Duke University Press 2012.
Go-Go Live explores the place of go-go within the development of Washington, DC since the 1970s. It is an important reference for teachers who are unfamiliar with go-go and for teachers who are seeking content on how go-go is part of a larger and international history of black music and culture. The book contains photographs and extensive excerpts from oral histories Hopkinson conducted
Indeed, three generations of Washington-area residents had been grooving to go-go ever since the guitarist [Chuck] Brown had created the sound in the mid-1970s, borrowing the Caribbean flavor he had picked up playing for a Washington Top 40 band called Los Latinos. Go-go has been compared to everything from funk to hip-hop and reggae, but it is best described as popular music--party music--that can take many forms. When you hear it, you know it's go-go by the beat: slow-boiling congas, bass drums, timbales, cowbells, and rototoms layered with synthesizers and a horn section. You also know it's go-go because the audience is part of the band. Together the musicians onstage and the people below it create the music live--always live--through a dialogue of sounds, movements, and chants.
...the essence of go-go is the live show....It is live and direct. Simple. True. For lives (and deaths) that are often made invisible in the mainstream media, go-go rituals comfort and reassure the crowd that they exist, that they are part of a community, able to hear news that may not necessarily be black and white.
The violence and mayhem that erupted following King's death set the physical stage for the birth of go-go. The rebellion of 1968 reflected a distinctly consumerist, capitalistic, and hedonistic rage. The go-go scene filled a power vacuum, bringing together a steady crowd of Washingtonians in and around the city's core for fellowship, communion, and the expression of a postriot, post-civil rights movement urban reality. This new musical form helped bring new life to the charred urban core.
Go-go flourished both because of and in spite of the decades of adversity that preceded the riots and intensified after them. Go-go established musical spaces in the ruins of social upheaval: in crumbling historic performance spaces such as the Howard Theater, in hole-in-the-wall nightclubs, such as the Maverick Room; in backyards, community centers, and parks.
Once black and youth cultures possessed regional quirks, textures, and accents that reflected the places of the music's creation. Thanks to the dynamic rise of hip-hop, that is now less frequently the case. Go-go took such a wildly different trajectory to hip-hop that it could be seen as counterdiscourse to this standardization of youth culture. Both art forms have roots in urban youth culture, and their origins are both a byproduct of the urban centers' sociopolitical outlook following the collapse of the industrial economy in the 1970s, which caused middle-class flight and required the emergence of new urban public spheres. This power vacuum led to the rise of underground economies that snatched their own cultural and economic power. In the mid-1970s Bronx, that was hip-hop. In the mid-1970s Washington, D.C., it came in the form of go-go.
Go-go's divergent path allowed it to maintain its function as a uniquely black public sphere. Its fidelity to time-honored cultural scripts such as live call and response, as well as its locally rooted distribution and economic system, makes a statement about how a public sphere should be structured culturally, aesthetically, and economically. Simply put: go-go never sold out. Go-go, with its live, heavily percussive instrumentation and discursive, non-linear narrative forms, remains aesthetically faithful to a long history of uniquely black public spheres. It lacks the polish and sheen of the high-tech production of contemporary hip-hop recordings or other kinds of popular music. There is a grit and texture to the music that accurately reflects, represents, and speaks to the communities of its creation, the communities where it is consumed and from which profits are taken. The content of the recordings are aggressively zoned toward individuals and neighborhoods otherwise ignored by mainstream news media. The lyrical content is not devoid of the negative influences that exist in all communities. However, the individuals both calling and responding to the messages reflect on black life in a way that is not distorted by multinational profit motives or the international gaze.
- Two to four 50 minute periods to read, collect information and organize it
- One to three 50 minute periods to draft a statement and present it.
- Is anything ever completely independent of the influence of others?
- In what ways do we connect with each other?
- Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
- Analyze in detail how an author’s ideas or claims are developed and refined by particular sentences, paragraphs, or larger portions of a text (e.g., a section or chapter).
- Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning.
Students will be able to identify elements from other musical and cultural traditions that have been incorporated into go-go. (Identify elements that influence the creation of something new)
Students will be able to make an argument for which elements adapted by go-go were the most influential and necessary in the development of go-go music.
One page outline for argument that defends student statement around the most important musical influences on gogo this argument should include: a clear position, a statement describing go-go, quotes from the text, references to video or audio clips
Students should be prepared to present their statements in whole class or small group presentation, or formal class discussion.
Before embarking on this lesson students should already know how to identify valid supporting evidence, know the structures used in class for formal discussion, and how to craft a clear a clear position statement.
Lesson Plan - Hook
Have students create comparison charts in which they compare themselves to parents and/or grandparents identifying features both physical and behavioral that they have inherited and then identify those elements that are strictly their own.
Show images of a modern instrument and its predecessors allowing students to identify the elements that were kept and those that are unique to the modern instrument.
(This comparison will allow the teacher to facilitate a conversation, where students are able to notice how particular elements taken from one place can influence the development of something new.)
counterpart, syncopation, antiphony, lineage, vernacular, disenfranchised, predecessor, secular, traits
Teachers will provide students with student friendly definitions of the terms above and then have them provide examples and non-examples of each. As they read students will locate and record sentences in the text where the words are used.
Read Aloud and Modeling
Teacher will provide students with a chart/timeline/or map, that allows them to record the different types of musical traditions influential to the development of go-go, mentioned in the text. Teacher will read the first two paragraphs of “The Roots and Emergence of Go-Go” Pg. 11-12 and model his/her thinking:
She/he will identify the musical tradition, then list the elements of that tradition that can be found in go-go music. The teacher should chart this example so that students may use it as a reference.
The teacher will ask students to read pages 12-15 and identify either a new musical tradition that influenced Go-Go or a particular element within the already identified musical tradition to add to the list already charted.
After a set period of time students will be broken up into groups and assigned a section or sections of the chapter and tasked with looking for musical traditions and the elements in these that were influential in the development of Go-Go, they may also identify similarities in the development of other musical styles.
After students have read their sections they should chart and post their findings and present to the class. Students listening to the presentation should have a format for collecting the information presented by their classmates.
Teacher will then show students clips of the different types of music mentioned in the chapter and students will add to their lists based on the visual and/or audio clips presented.
Video Clips and Audio Clips of Live performances from each of these genres: West African Ju-Ju http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC0Tw4PmarA, R&B, Afro-Cuban/Latino, DC High School Marching Bands, Funk, Hip Hop, Latin, Go-Go
Once students have collected all of their information they will be asked to choose one of the musical traditions that they believe was the most influential in the development of go-go and prepare for discussion by identifying textual evidence as well as evidence from the video and audio selection that will support their claim.
Students will organize this information into an outline and use this outline as a guide for a class discussion (format to be determined by teacher).
This outline and notes from the discussion may then be used to develop on page papers that show students ability to state a claim and support that claim with evidence.


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Experiential education is a philosophy of education that describes the process that occurs between a teacher and student that infuses direct experience with the learning environment and content. The term is not interchangeable with experiential learning; however experiential learning is a sub-field and operates under the methodologies of experiential education. The Association for Experiential Education regards experiential education as "a philosophy that informs many methodologies in which educators purposefully engage with learners in direct experience and focused reflection in order to increase knowledge, develop skills, clarify values, and develop people's capacity to contribute to their communities." Experiential education is the term for the philosophy and educational progressivism is the movement which it informed.
John Dewey was the most famous proponent of experiential education, writing Experience and Education (1938). It expressed his ideas about curriculum theory in the context of historical debates about school organization and the need to have experience as central in the educational process; hence, experiential education is referred to as a philosophy. Dewey's fame during that period rested on relentlessly critiquing public education and pointing out that the authoritarian, strict, pre-ordained knowledge approach of modern traditional education was too concerned with delivering knowledge, and not enough with understanding students' experiences.
Dewey's work influenced dozens of other prominent experiential models and advocates in the later 20th century, including Foxfire, service learning, Kurt Hahn and Outward Bound, and Paulo Freire. Freire is often cited in works on experiential education. He focused on the participation by students in experience and radical democracy, and the creation of praxis among learners.
John Dewey was an educator, but he was foremost a philosopher. His interests included political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, logic, and philosophy of education. Political philosophy was one of his many philosophical interests. He saw weaknesses in both the traditional and progressive styles of education. He explains in length his criticisms of both forms of education in his book, Experience & Education (1938). In essence, he did not believe that they met the goals of education, which he defined as obtaining freedom of thought. Dewey did not believe in freedom of thought in any kind of absolute sense.
Dewey advocated that education be based upon the quality of experience. For an experience to be educational, Dewey believed that certain parameters had to be met, the most important of which is that the experience has continuity and interaction. Continuity is the idea that the experience comes from and leads to other experiences, in essence propelling the person to learn more. Interaction is when the experience meets the internal needs or goals of a person. Dewey also categorizes experiences as possibly being mis-educative and non-educative. A mis-educative experience is one that stops or distorts growth for future experiences. A non-educative experience is one in which a person has not done any reflection and so has obtained nothing for mental growth that is lasting (Experience & Education, Dewey).
In addition to the notions raised by Dewey, recent research has shown that experiential learning does not replace traditional methods of learning. Instead, experiential learning is designed to improve one's understanding by giving one the freedom to explore and find the learning path that is most suitable for him or her.
The methodologies reflected in experiential education have evolved since the time of Hahn and Dewey. For experiential education to become efficient pedagogy, physical experience must be combined with reflection. Adding reflective practice, allows for personal introspection of challenges and key learnings. That is, physical challenges provide a gateway in which we can observe qualities about ourselves, and those whom we are working with. Further, for the efficacy of experiential education, experiences must be separated, giving the learner sufficient time to process the information.
Experiential education informs many educational practices underway in schools (formal education) and out-of-school (informal education) programs. Many teaching methods rely on experiential education to provide context and frameworks for learning through action and reflection.
- Outdoor education uses organized learning activities that occur in the outdoors, and uses environmental experiences as a learning tool.
- Service learning is a combination of community service with stated learning goals, relying on experience as the foundation for meaning.
- Cooperative learning alters homogeneous groupings in order to support diverse learning styles and needs within a group.
- Active learning, a term popular in US education circles in the 1980s, encourages learners to take responsibility for their learning, requiring their experience in education to inform their process of learning.
- Environmental education is based in educating learners about relationships within the natural environment and how those relationships are interdependent. Students participate in outdoor activities as part of their learning experience.
Experiential education serves as an umbrella for linking many diverse practices into a coherent whole. Its philosophy is closely linked to numerous other educational theories, but it should not be conflated with progressive education, critical pedagogy, youth empowerment, feminist-based education, and constructivism. The development of experiential education as a philosophy has been intertwined with the development of these other educational theories; their contrasts have clarified differences.
Fellowships and other training programs are available for experiential educators; but, formal training in experiential methods is lacking for K-12 undergraduate teaching programs (see Wendel, A. and Mantil, A., (2008) and the National Society for Experiential Education).
Examples of experiential education abound in all disciplines. The educator Lucy Calkins writes,
If we asked our students for the highlight of their school careers, most would choose a time when they dedicated themselves to an endeavor of great importance...I am thinking of youngsters from P.S. 321, who have launched a save-the-tree campaign to prevent the oaks outside their school from being cut down. I am thinking of children who write the school newspaper, act in the school play, organize the playground building committee.... On projects such as these, youngsters will work before school, after school, during lunch. Our youngsters want to work hard on endeavors they deem significant.
Writing journals proves to be quite effective as part of English classes. Specifically, by writing "personal" and "text-related" journals, students find meaning in their own thoughts as well as in concepts learned in class. Personal journaling is the recording of past and present personal thoughts and events in the student's life to enhance self-awareness, student interest, and learning. Text-related journaling is writing about concepts learned in class in relation to students' personal experiences, to promote understanding.
High school English classes in Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, Georgia earned national attention for using their research and writing to publish the Foxfire journal. (Wigginton, 1985). Students researched the culture of the Appalachian Mountains through taped interviews with local people. They wrote and edited articles based upon their interviews. Foxfire has inspired hundreds of similar cultural journalism projects around the country.
Christchurch School, in the tidewater area of Virginia, has an experiential program called Great Journeys Begin at the River. The hands-on, skill-based, inside/outside curriculum is based on using the school's location on the Rappahannock River, in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Students recycle aluminum to raise money for the school's oyster farm, which they tend in an effort to help save the Bay.
The Nicodemus Wilderness Project provides an environmental experiential education program with a global reach called the "Apprentice Ecologist Initiative". This scholarship-based opportunity is targeted for youth volunteers who want to help protect the environment. The initiative seeks to develop young people for leadership roles by engaging them in environmental cleanup and conservation projects, empower volunteers to rebuild the environmental and social well-being of our communities, and improve local living conditions for both citizens and wildlife.
Project OASES (Occupational and Academic Skills for the Employment of Students) emphasizes experiential education in the Pittsburgh public schools. Eighth graders, identified as potential dropouts, spend three periods a day involved in renovating a homeless shelter as part of a service project carried out within their industrial arts class. Students in such programs learn enduring skills, such as planning, communicating with a variety of age groups and types of people, and group decisionmaking. In their activities and in reflection, they come to new insights and integrate diverse knowledge from fields such as English, political science, mathematics, and sociology.
Presidential Classroom, a non-profit civic education organization in Washington D.C., is open to high school students from across the country and abroad. They meet and interact with government officials, media correspondents, congressman, and key players on the world stage to learn how public policy shapes many aspects of citizens’ lives. Students travel to Washington and spend a week hearing from prominent speakers, meet with interest group spokesmen and tour the national capital. Students participate in a group project directed by experienced instructors; they have mediated debates on current issues facing the country. The focus of the week is to give students a hands-on introduction to how "real world" politics take place.
The Advantage Foundation, a not-for-profit education organization in Western Australia, helps bridge the gap between university and employment via the Australian Business Icon program. The program engages young and emerging entrepreneurs in direct experience and focused reflection to increase knowledge, develop skills and clarify values. It requires students with innovative, strategic thinking, and analytical skills, to take on four (4) pre-organized innovative and entrepreneurial business-related tasks. The goal is to develop the communication, ethics, innovation and enterprise of students.
Global College, a four-year international study program offered by Long Island University, is based on self-guided, experiential learning while a student is immersed in foreign cultures. Regional centers employ mostly advisors rather than teaching faculty; these advisors guide the individual students in preparing a "portfolio of learning" each semester to display the results of their experiences and projects.
The New England Literature Program in the English Department at the University of Michigan is a 45-day program, in which University instructors live and work together with 40 UM students in the woods of Maine in early spring. They intensively study 19th and 20th-century New England literature, in a program that includes creative writing in the form of academic journaling, as well as a deep physical engagement with the landscape of New England. NELP students and staff take hiking trips into the White Mountains and other parts of the New England natural areas each week, integrating their experience of the landscape with writing and discussion of texts.
The Chicago Center for Urban Life and Culture is the only nonprofit and independent experiential educational program for college students in the United States. The Chicago Center is distinguished by unique seminars characterized by a 'First Voice' pedagogy, its location in the multi-ethnic Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, and development of several hundred internship sites in Chicago. While many of the students who attend Chicago Center grew up in cities, the majority are from suburban, rural and farming communities. Students participate individually in its Semester, May Term and Summer Session. The Chicago Center also designs and staffs programs for groups, what it calls "LearnChicago!", which promise non-tourist experiences in the city.
The Philadelphia Center is an off-campus program based on a model of experiential education. Recognized by The Great Lakes Colleges Association, The Philadelphia Center is currently the only undergraduate level program that supports independent living and encourages the use of the city as a learning space.
Several Australian high schools have established experiential education programmes, including Caulfield Grammar School's five-week internationalism programme in Nanjing, China and Geelong Grammar School's Timbertop outdoor education programme.
Other projects and "capstone" programs have included student teams writing their own international development plans and presenting them to presidents and foreign media and publishing their studies as textbooks in development studies, to running their own businesses, NGOs, or community development banks.
At the professional school level, experiential education is often integrated into curricula in "clinical" courses following the medical school model of "See one, Do one, Teach one", in which students learn by practicing medicine. This approach is being introduced in other professions in which skills are directly worked into courses to teach every concept (starting with interviewing, listening skills, negotiation, contract writing and advocacy, for example) to larger-scale projects in which students run legal aid clinics or community loan programs, or write legislation or community development plans.
The Boys and Girls Club of America provides a framework for youth development professionals to employ experiential learning methods.
Lifeworks International offers experiential, service-learning programs for high school students. Trips combine adventure travel, cultural immersion, community service, and global education during expeditions in China, Thailand, India, Costa Rica, Peru, the British Virgin Islands, and Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands.
Youth development programs have used experiential education methods to reach at-risk youth. An example is "Circus Harmony", based in St. Louis, Missouri. Their mission is to "teach the art of life through circus education". By learning circus arts skills, students come together from diverse backgrounds and experiences and learn from each other as well.
In Legal Education, critical pedagogy is associated with devising more equitable methods of teaching, helping students develop consciousness of freedom, and helping them connect knowledge to power.
Change in roles and structures
Whether teachers employ experiential education in cultural journalism, service learning, environmental education, or more traditional school subjects, its key idea involves engaging student voice in active roles for the purpose of learning. Armstrong (2012) claims that students should be responsible of learning not the teachers. Students participate in a real activity with real consequences for the purpose of meeting learning objectives.
Some experts in the field make the distinction between "democratic experiential education" in which students help design curricula and run their own projects and even do their own grading (through objective contracted standards) and other forms of "experiential education" that put students in existing organizations in inferior roles (such as service learning and internships) or in which faculty design the field work.
Experiential education uses various tools like games, simulations, role plays, stories in classrooms. The experiential education mindset changes the way the teachers and students view knowledge. Knowledge is no longer just some letters on a page. It becomes active, something that is transacted with in life or lifelike situations. It starts to make teachers experience providers, and not just transmitters of the written word.
Besides changing student roles, experiential education requires a change in the role of teachers. When students are active learners, their endeavors often take them outside the classroom walls. Because action precedes attempts to synthesize knowledge, teachers generally cannot plan a curriculum unit as a neat, predictable package. Teachers become active learners, too, experimenting together with their students, reflecting upon the learning activities they have designed, and responding to their students' reactions to the activities. In this way, teachers themselves become more active; they come to view themselves as more than just recipients of school district policy and curriculum decisions.
It is also important to point out that not all learners learn the same. As a result, there are diverse learners that have unique learning styles pertinent to their success as students. Studies have shown that cooperative learning is strongly suggested in a diverse learning atmosphere. “Contemporary views of learning and their pedagogical applications have begun to change traditional classroom interaction patterns, shaping the communicative roles of the teacher and students as participants in a classroom learning community,” writes David Wray & Kristiina Kumpulainen. This paradigm shift in education gives both the student and teacher shared responsibility of the learning process. The teacher’s participation in discussion sessions is to act as a facilitator, maintain classroom decorum, provide individual and group feedback, and alleviate concerns or issues in the lesson.
Critical thinking strategies are pertinent to the success of student oriented learning. When students are engaged in active discussions, high level thinking skills are put into practice to the point where students are synthesizing the information at a deeper level of understanding. According to Elliot Eisner, “We need to provide opportunities for youngsters and adolescents to engage in challenging kinds of conversation, and we need to help them know how to do so. Such conversation is all too rare in schools. I use 'conversation' seriously, for challenging conversation is an intellectual affair. It has to do with thinking about what people have said and responding reflectively, analytically, and imaginatively to that process. The practice of conversation is almost a lost art. The most significant intellectual achievement is not so much in problem solving, but in question posing.” Through experimental education, students are capable of finding their voice through peer-to-peer interaction. Students are now seen as active participants in the learning process. Vygotsky`s social development theory requires students to play untraditional roles as they collaborate with one another through critical thinking and conversational skills. According to Ann Ketch, author of Conversation: The comprehension connection writes, “The oral process helps students clarify and solidify their thoughts. The thinking changes from what it was before the conversation took place. Through conversation, the student is in charge of his or her own mental processing. The teacher acts as a facilitator, pushing the student to rely upon and monitor his or her own comprehension, which fosters critical thinking.” This is very vital because student conversation can elicit new ideas that may not have been mentioned or even thought of by another student. Therefore, student dialogue is very important because it helps individuals make sense of what is being learned. It also helps build respect for other’s opinions while taking ownership of his or her learning process.
In experimental education, students are given the opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills by making connections to the real world. Therefore, effective learning entails active experimentation with a hands-on approach to learning. It is perceived that students learn more by being active. Students are interdependent in establishing group goals and decision-making skills. As a result, students are also capable of developing leadership skills, which can also enhance student motivation and confidence.
When students are given a choice in terms of content to be learned, it ensures the teacher that his or her learners are interactive in the learning process. According to Ernie Stringer, “Action learners move through continuous cycles of this inquiry process to improve their understanding, extend their knowledge, or refine their skills.” When given a preference, students may feel motivated to take control of his or her learning experience. Student incentives are tied to progress in academic achievement. “Research indicates that intrinsic motivation stems from one’s interests and capacities to surmount challenge s when presented or pursued,” says Fenice B. Boyd. Many schools are encouraging teachers to tap into student interests with the hope that they transfer that motivation into the classroom.
Through the continuous cycle of learning, teacher’s often work with students to develop a framework of knowledge, which is to be evaluated based on student input to the lessons content. Therefore, the teacher should establish criteria of what is to be learned as related to the student(s) choice in learning material. Ernie Stringer draws on the importance that “action research provides a process for developing a rich, engaging curriculum relevant to the lives and purposes of students, engaging their interests and abilities, and serving the broad human needs of community, society, and the planet. Creative construction of curricula or syllabi provides the means whereby the needs, perspectives, and/or interests of diverse stakeholders can be incorporated into vital, creative, effective programs of learning.” In essence, a well-planned curriculum is designed for learning that encompasses a broad range of goals and individual needs that ensures the active learning process.
As students and teachers take on new roles, the traditional organizational structures of the school also may meet challenges. For example, at the Challenger Middle School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, service activities are an integral part of the academic program. Such nontraditional activities require teachers and administrators to look at traditional practices in new ways. For instance, they may consider reorganizing time blocks. They may also teach research methods by involving students in investigations of the community, rather than restricting research activities to the library (Rolzinski, 1990).
At the University Heights Alternative School in the Bronx, the Project Adventure experiential learning program has led the faculty to adopt an all-day time block as an alternative to the traditional 45-minute periods. The faculty now organizes the curriculum by project instead of by separate disciplines. Schools that promote meaningful student involvement actively engage students as partners in education improvement activities. These young people learn while planning, researching, teaching, and making decisions that affect the entire education system.
At the university level, including universities like Stanford and the University of California Berkeley, students are often the initiators of courses and demand more role in changing the curriculum and making it truly responsive to their needs. In some cases, universities have offered alternatives for student-designed faculty approved courses. In other cases, students have formed movements or even their own NGOs like Unseen America Projects, Inc., to promote democratic experiential learning and to design and accredit their own alternative curricula.
Other university level programs are entirely field-taught on outdoor expeditions. These courses combine traditional academic readings and written assignments with field observations, service projects, open discussions of course material, and meetings with local speakers who are involved with the course subjects. These "hybrid" experiential/traditional programs aim to provide the academic rigor of a classroom course with the breadth and personal connections of experiential education.
Transitions from traditional to experiential
At first, these new roles and structures may seem unfamiliar and uncomfortable to both students and adults in the school. Traditionally, students have most often been rewarded for competing rather than cooperating with one another. Teachers are not often called upon for collaborative work either. Teaching has traditionally been an activity carried out in isolation from one's peers, behind closed doors. Principals, accustomed to the traditional hierarchical structure of schools, often do not know how to help their teachers constitute self-managed work teams or how to help teachers coach students to work in cooperative teams. The techniques of experiential education can help students and staff adjust to teamwork, an important part of the process of reforming schools.
Adventure education may use the philosophy of experiential education in developing team and group skills in both students and adults (Rohnke, 1989). Initially, groups work to solve problems that are unrelated to the problems in their actual school environment. For example, in a ropes course designed to build the skills required by teamwork, a faculty or student team might work together to get the entire group over a 12-foot wall or through an intricate web of rope. After each challenge in a series of this kind, the group looks at how it functioned as a team:
- Who took the leadership roles?
- Did the planning process help or hinder progress?
- Did people listen to one another in the group and use the strengths of all group members?
- Did everyone feel that the group was a supportive environment in which they felt comfortable making a contribution and taking risks?
The wall or web of rope can then become a metaphor for the classroom or school environment. While the problems and challenges of the classroom or school are different from the physical challenges of the adventure activity, many skills needed to respond successfully as a team are the same in both settings.
These skills — listening, recognizing each other's strengths, and supporting each other through difficulties — can apply equally well to an academic Socratic Method of questioning or problem-solving toward schoolwide improvement efforts.
For example, the Kane School in Lawrence, Massachusetts has been using adventure as a tool for school restructuring. The entire faculty — particularly the Faculty Advisory Council, which shares the decisionmaking responsibilities with the principal — has honed group skills through experiential education activities developed by Project Adventure. These skills include open communication, methods of conflict resolution, and mechanisms for decision making (High Strides, 1990).
Experiential education in other countries
The development of experiential education in Asian countries
Established in 1973, Breakthrough in Hong Kong was the first non-profit organization that applied the concepts of experiential education (though primarily conceptualized in terms of outdoor adventure education) in youth works. Since then, development in experiential education has proceeded in Singapore, Taiwan, Macau, and some large cities in China.
Experiential methods in education have existed in China for thousands of years. However, it should be noted that John Dewey was in China in the early 1900s and his ideas were extremely popular. Interest in Dewey's experience in China and contribution is growing.
Experiential education started in Qatar in 2010 through AL-Bairaq, which is an outreach, non-traditional educational program that targets high school students and focuses on a curriculum based on STEM fields. The idea behind AL-Bairaq is to offer high school students the opportunity to connect with the research environment in the Center for Advanced Materials (CAM) at Qatar University. Faculty members train and mentor the students and help develop and enhance their critical thinking, problem-solving, and teamwork skills, using a hands-on-activities approach.
There are many ways in which experiential education is practiced. Six of them include: simulation-based learning, active-based learning, problem-based learning, project-based learning, service-learning and place-based learning. All of these use the pattern of problem, plan, test and reflect as their foundation for the educative experience. This is by no means an exhaustive list of methods used reflecting the philosophy of experiential education.
Simulation-based learning—A combination of active, problem, project, and place-based learning; Participants are placed in a simulated environment and given objectives requiring constant attention and care.
Active-based learning—All participants in the group must engage actively in working together toward the stated objectives.
Problem-based learning—Provides a structure for discovery that helps students internalize learning and leads to greater comprehension.
Project-based learning—An instructional method that uses projects as the central focus of instruction in a variety of disciplines.
Service-learning—Providing meaningful service to a community agency or organization while simultaneously gaining new skills, knowledge and understanding as an integrated aspect of an academic program.
Place-based learning—the process of using local community and environment as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, and other subjects across the curriculum.
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Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819-1820) begins as a posthumous secret hidden within the collection of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. It reads, “Found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker,” notifying the reader of a long-lost legend. Here an intimacy is formed between Irving and the reader, one that continues to exist almost 200 years later, though Sleepy Hollow is separated from the original anthology. Americans still read and know the text and feel a sense of familiarity with the tale. It is, of course, America’s legend. Irving makes it easy on us by pointing it out in the title. Why wait for a story to become a legend when one can simply authorize it to be so? Hubris aside, Irving’s short story strikes a chord with multiple generations of American readers and viewers due to the fluidity of meaning and multiple cultural contexts associated with it.
As a folkloric element, a legend can morph and change to serve its cultural environment. Irving designated “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” as such in 1819 and due to its revitalization through culture-producer, Walt Disney, the “Legend” takes a new form as a cartoon film. However, a singular message of Americanness remains. Though the function changes, later generations of young people discover the American tale through this popular adaptation released in 1949 as a part of a double feature titled Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and was paired with Kenneth Graham’s Wind in the Willows. Disney’s take on Irving’s tale stays close to the original narrative, illustrating visuals and characters by the American author’s description. In fact, there is little alteration from the nineteenth-century story, aside from the softening that occurred due to its cartoon aesthetics. Three important aspects of the film apply to its public reception: first, the date of release occurs when Americans were moving toward a return to conservative domestic life after World War II; second, Irving’s tale is paired with a story highlighting pastoral England by British children’s author Kenneth Graham, which displays a connection between the two nations fostered by the war; finally, Disney’s portrayal of the American pastoral landscape displays a shift in environmental values and an alteration in cultural perception of man’s relationship with nature.
In Search of a Legend
Like other folk genres, the origin of a “legend” can be elusive. A legend transforms and adapts to meet the needs of the generation who requests its instructions and value. As a result of this fluidity, it requires investigatory skills to discover the starting point of a narrative and trace it through history. A second problem is that there are numerous definitions of a “legend” that depend on its historical origins. In her book, Legend and Belief: Dialetics of a Folklore Genre, folklorist Linda Dégh meticulously considers all of the elements towards what constitutes a legend and determines that there are too many variations to form a succinct definition, while posing further questions to be answered. She summons the reader: "Even if we tried to cite only the most common criteria, chosen at random, they would be disturbingly numerous. Are the sources of a legend a personal experience or folk tradition? How does the teller relate it – in first or third person? Does it concern familial, local, or a more general topic? How far has the story spread? Does it stay within a limited circle or does it tend to migrate? Is it national or international, rural or urban? What kind of belief does it express?" (emphasis mine).
It is too much to exhaustively analyze “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” with all of the questions Dégh presents; so here the primary question of interest is “what kind of belief does it express?” As folklorist Richard Dorson writes, “Folklore is recognized as an expression of its times,” and it is an exploration “of the living, not the dying culture.” What matters is “its adaptability and suitability to the needs of a particular period.” If a legend is a fluid narrative “handed down” through generations and believed to have historical roots that alter and change to meet the needs of the living, then the evolution of Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow” in popular media is an illustration of this occurrence. Its origins are tricky, though, not because of the ambiguity, but because we know exactly when it was created and this knowledge causes problems for the folklorist who expects a legend to be of an equivocal nature. While it may not have been a legend at the time of Irving’s writing in 1819, it develops legendary status in the contemporary American mind through popular films like Walt Disney’s.
Irving’s narrative is enjoyable to read. His writing is elegant, descriptive, and exciting. The tale can be terrifying when told on Halloween night. Certainly, the legend settles comfortably in a lineage of traditional storytelling, but this fact is not the singular reason for its continued veneration in American popular culture. After the “Disneyfication” of “Legend,” the tale acquired a place in the collective memory of twentieth-century children.
The Disneyfication of Washington Irving
Previous scholars such as Laurie A. Meamber define the term “Disneyfication” as “an approach to literature and history that simplifies and cleanses an object of unpleasantness,” and while typically referencing Walt Disney productions, it can indicate other “cleansed unpleasantness.” Here the term is directly applicable to a Disney product. The studio remained within the boundaries of Irving’s very detailed narration of characters and the American landscape, but simplified the images for visual appeal. The illustrated Ichabod Crane of 1949 is a line-by-line recreation of Irving’s depiction, narrated by Bing Crosby: "[Ichabod Crane] was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew."
This description exists word-for-word in both the original short story and the film. Disney employs this narrative method in segments throughout as a sign to the viewer that they have no intention of veering from the original language or plot. The setting also remains close to text, as Disney relies on Irving’s words for guidance on illustrated scenery. Of the Van Tassel farm, Irving writes: "His stronghold was situated on the banks of the Hudson, in one of those green, sheltered, fertile nooks in which the Dutch farmers are so fond of nestling. A great elm-tree spread its broad branches over it; at the foot of which bubbled up a spring of the softest and sweetest water, in a little well, formed of a barrel; and then stole sparking away through the grass, to a neighboring brook, that bubbled along among alders and dwarf willows. Hard by the farm-house was a vast barn, that might have served for a church; every window and crevice of which seemed bursting forth with the treasures of the farm." From here, Irving proceeds to elaborate on the quality of the flora and fauna, proudly proclaiming the bounty of the New York landscape. The Disney illustrators simplify the imagery, but successfully display the lush landscape of abundance. Panoramic views of a cartooned upstate New York serve as a background to the Halloween film: golden fields of grain, quaint Dutch windmills, large oak trees, and a perfectly proportioned red gambrel roof barn. Irving intended for the cultivated American land to be a character within the short story, and in cartoon form it remains the same. Though twentieth-century narrative seems to flow line-by-line, Disney leaves out quite a bit of text in order to portray a very specific message.
Americanist Constance Rourke notes Irving’s ability to create “a comic mythology as though comic myth-making were a native habit, formed early; and [Irving’s] writings show the habitual playing off of one regional type against another." But rather than satirize contemporary characters, Irving reaches to the past for comedy. The setting is post-Revolutionary War America in an isolated village established by Dutch settlers. Irving does not criticize contemporary Americans, but pokes fun at non-English characters of the past. The writer is establishing a new form of American literature, yet by placing the narrative in pre-revolutionary history he is fooling the audience into thinking the past is laden with the values of the present. According to cultural historian Daniel G. Hoffman, the “clash of the regional characters,” and the clash of urban and rural, had “emerged as the dominate types” in literature during the first half of the nineteenth century, but the author managed to conceal it in a historical narrative and through caricatures of Dutch villagers. Though humorous, they come out on top, which both Rourke and Hoffman take note of in their analyses. In fact, Hoffman asserts that Irving’s “Legend” is the first instance of the “Yankee vs. the backwoodsman,” and that “When the Yankee meets the frontiersman instead of English fops or New York dandies, his role is reversed and he now becomes the representative of culture facing the unfettered natural man of the frontier.” Focusing on the backwoodsman, Dorson writes, “First attracting attention as a clownish figure in local legends, some of these slattern characters ascended toward heroic or at least mock-heroic stature.” The Yankee is no longer the hero, and the “city slicker” Ichabod Crane is destroyed. By re-issuing the narrative with little change, the Walt Disney Studios build upon the values presented originally by Washington Irving. While the storyline stays the same, a slight alteration in character emphasis shifts twentieth century values of manhood and wealth to the forefront. Irving intended for Brom Bones to be the sympathetic, heroic character and Ichabod Crane to be the fool. Disney shifts the sympathy to Crane as Bones settles into the background.
In the 1949 cartoon, like Irving’s tale, Ichabod Crane is the primary character, Katrina is the love interest, and there is still competition with Brom Bones. However, in the Disney adaptation, Katrina and Brom are more one-dimensional than originally portrayed. Irving presents Brom as the frontiersman antithesis to Crane’s urban intellect while Disney’s Brom serves comedic purposes and is a channel to relay the tale of the Headless Horseman. Disney’s Katrina is a superficial sketch without a line of dialogue. Granted, Crane does not speak through the film, either, but he is the film’s namesake. Crane is a more sympathetic character in Disney’s adaptation, and the audience empathizes with him through his struggles for love and success, in spite of – or even because of – his comedic fallacies. He is long-limbed, physically and socially awkward, and self-serving. But he sings well, is loved by the ladies of the community, and is endearing in his self-centeredness. All he wants is to be loved by Katrina – and he wants her family’s wealth. He dreams of marrying a beautiful woman, settling down into a comfortable home, and accumulating worldly comforts. After World War II, many Americans felt the same way.
In her celebrated book Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, historian Elaine Tyler May argues that it is too simplistic to think that post-war Americans were only “eager to put the disruptions and hardships of war behind them and enjoy the abundance of home,” which led to the increased marriage and birth rates and economic prosperity. Rather, she argues, the reasons are more complex, rooted in race, gender, and class issues, and encouraged by political policies. It is not my intention to refute her argument because it is a valid and a necessary element to our understanding of Cold War America. However, underlying ideals in Disney’s “Legend” confirm the interest of both men and women to return to the comfortable domestic lives after the war. The relevance of this rush towards a domestic ideal, and the sexual tension that accompanied it, is not simply found in the Ichabod-Katrina-Brom love triangle. Its emphasis is found in the transition – and change – between Irving’s short story and Disney’s adaptation. Through a gender analysis of the nineteenth-century text, historians Laura Plummer and Michael Nelson contend, “the ‘feminine’ in Ichabod is his unmanly, superstitious, trembling, and gullible side – he himself seems, in this tale, begrudgingly to acquiesce to the female sphere of Sleepy Hollow.” Nineteenth-century Ichabod Crane is unlikable to Irving’s contemporary audience due to the juxtaposition of the clueless Yankee to the manly frontiersman Brom Bones. In contrast, Disney’s version of the story places Crane as the likeable – albeit awkward – hero. He is attractive to the twentieth-century American audience for two reasons: first, he embodies the desires of post-war consumerism and prosperity, and second, Americans no longer contend with the wilderness, so there is less importance in the strong backwoodsman. The attainment of worldly goods and the accomplishment of a comfortable married life are the markers of success.
Historian Michael Kammen writes that the post-WWII era had “distinctive manifestations” of nostalgia and heritage: “a growing concern with collective memory on the part of some individuals in response to apparent social amnesia on the part of many; a fitful desire that waxed and waned to recover vernacular culture along with a gradually growing interest in the history of ordinary folk and everyday life.” According to Kammen, Walt Disney was distinctly a part of this movement with the opening of Disneyland in California in 1955, influenced by Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Michigan, and through the historic districts in the theme park Disney “makes the past orderly, sanitized, seemingly innocent, and, of course, fabulously unreal." A false legend, fabricated for the generation of the 1820s by Irving to uphold the symbol of the robust country, is perfectly suitable for continued fabrication of American heritage by Disney Studios. Americans seized anything that allowed them to reaffirm the success of the American spirit. Irving created “Legend” to assert post-War of 1812 values of American stability and permanency by drawing on the strength and caricatures of rural people; Disney illustrated “Legend” post-WWII, and it confirmed American stability and the permanency of democracy. A part of this narrative was the country’s connection to Great Britain as a sister-nation.
Though seemingly a trivial detail, it is significant that Disney paired “Legend” with “Wind in the Willows” by British children’s author Kenneth Graham. Throughout the war, the United States’ close alignment with Great Britain was part of the success of the conflict. The Lend-Lease program between the U.S. and British governments was the first step into war for many Americans and provided a way of participation without sending manpower. Though many were in disagreement with this kind of war involvement before Pearl Harbor, continued support throughout the war signified a connection between the two nations that many Americans linked with historical tradition. Post-WWII viewers would be intimately familiar with the relationship and regard it as a natural one, they would even esteem “Wind in the Willows” as a part of their own national heritage.
However, before 1940, many Americans were not of British lineage, and there was a push toward a more democratic – a more “American” – view of heritage. Kammen argues that after World War I, Americans believed that Great Britain had pushed them into an unnecessary war, causing a great loss of life and exasperating economic struggles. This frustration was a catalyst for changes in the educational system and the "upshot," for Kammen, "was a surge of Anglophobia, nationwide attempts to purge schoolbooks of any positive content regarding Great Britain…Patriotic societies distributed [pamphlets] and belabored school boards to scrutinize potential texts.” Of course, these kinds of sentiments against Great Britain were part of an ebb and flow throughout the years, like a child that wishes to grow out from under the shadow of an older sibling. The back and forth between cherished relationship and independent disinterest swings again toward cultural (and political) bonds at the onset of World War II.
One of the most famous features of WWII is the “special relationship” between the United States and England, symbolized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Historians argue that it is this relationship that allowed for the strength of the Allies. Yet, it was not without tension. In the early years, regular Americans were still not ready for a transition to a close relationship with the British again, and as historians David Dimbleby and David Reynolds point out, articles like that published in Life magazine in 1942 expressed American sentiments about not wanting to fight “to hold the British Empire together.” Through the war, as American and British soldiers fought alongside each other, as American soldiers met British women and families overseas, and as the media portrayed the strength of the British character through the war, American sympathies grew. After the war ended, and subsequently American political/economic support waned, a shock to the “special relationship” occurred. America was no longer in need of a partnership with the powerful Great Britain, but could function as a world leader without help. Following WWII, disputes escalated with the Soviet Union and thus the United States and Great Britain formed the partnership again in 1947. Dimbleby and Reynolds write, “The ‘special relationship’ seemed to work, after all. As the U.S. ambassador to Britain, Lewis Douglas, cabled Washington in August 1948, ‘Anglo-American unity today is more firmly established than ever before in peacetime.’”
What about regular Americans? If the meaning of a legend is to work, the American people must be involved. The significance of a political alliance between the United States and Britain means nothing to the “special relationship” between Irving’s “Legend” and Graham’s “Wind in the Willows” if not for the general public’s interest. Culturally through the war, anglophilia started to rise. Distinguished essayist and former editor of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein, writes (under the pseudonym “Aristides”), "For an American Boy growing up in the middlewest, World War II was fought at the movies. I fought it at the side of such gallant – and elegant – officers as Major Ronald Colman, Colonel Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Captain Noël Coward, Commander Cary Grant and Lieu (actually Lef)tenant Errol Flynn. Even in American movies, the English officers always came off as the most suave, most intelligent, most heroic of fighters."
Though politicians make the “big decisions” of the war, the people make the judgment. Epstein brilliantly expresses how a 1940s child thought about world outside of United States boundaries. The English were heroic, “gallant,” and “elegant.” He could “see” them move through the movies and in his young mind, which how he was a part of the war. Through a different cultural outlet, Epstein connected with another element of British culture: literature. He writes, “In the public schools of Chicago, such literature as was studied, apart from the thin gruel of a bit of Longfellow and Washington Irving, was English literature. Christmas, as I understood it, was practically invented by Charles Dickens.” As patriotic societies attempted to rid the American school system of English influence, children like Epstein would grow to be producers of culture in their own right and delighted themselves in the works of the great British authors. Dickens taught them social struggles and heroism, Shakespeare taught them history, and Irving spoke Americanness. The two cultures melded together. “In America, our conceptions of honor, courage, romance and decency were all imported from England,” explains Epstein. This connection was reaffirmed through the Disney release of “Legend” alongside “Wind in the Willows” in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad in 1949.
The American Pastoral Landscape: An Identity Crisis
When Irving wrote rich descriptions of the American landscape and the people who worked it, he grasped for a mythology of the land that connected to the personality of the United States and lore embedded in history. In 1820, the American people were in the process of rejecting intellectualism for practical, homegrown intuition found in the symbol of Andrew Jackson. Ultimately, Richard Dorson writes, “Folk heroes even more than culture heroes [statesmen] emphasized the manners of democracy…[They were] shaggy heroes of a democratic folk, mocking the genteel dandies of the drawing room.” In the nineteenth century, by scorning tradition and formal learning, Americans rejected Old World Europe and embraced nature and natural wisdom rooted in the landscape. As John William Ward notes, they were forming the American personality. It was an effortless transition for Americans to reach for language that directly connected the success of a nation to the environment, since unlike the Old World’s established monuments and sacred sites, the New World’s cathedrals were mountains, the monuments were trees, and the mythological beings were the animals that roamed through it. An example of this language is Irving’s description of the abundant land in “Legend” – as a character it is more successful in seducing Crane than the coquette Katrina van Tassel.
The land is a “character” in Irving’s tale and a manifestation of symbolic American abundance, prosperity, and promise; thus, the illustrated environment in Disney’s adaptation is a reflection of twentieth-century sensibilities about the purpose of the land. How one portrays the natural environment is a reflection of the worldview. The artists used Irving’s elaborate descriptions to form illustration, but the writers neglected to place emphasis on the unique aspects of the American landscape as Irving did originally. The primary worth of the land in the 1949 cartoon is its monetary value. While Crane daydreams about Katrina, his thoughts shift quickly to the wealth she would bring with her into marriage: a prosperous farm equals a source of abundant fortune. In the film, the golden wheat turns to gold coins and the green heads of lettuce become piles of dollar bills. The value of the land as portrayed by Disney is clear: it is not the unique flora and fauna, it is not the sense of independence and possibility – it is the potential for money-making on the farm that grabs Crane’s attention. While Irving describes the awkward character’s interest in affluence through the narrative, it is not as prominent of a detail as the abundance of the land. In fact, the personality of the landscape in the story stands alone, outside of economics. Only in the later version does it become a primary concern.
During and after WWII, the importance of a piece of land was found in its profit value. After the economic depression of the 1930s, entrenched in the country’s ability to produce agricultural products, the development of a greater number of pesticides, innovations in farm equipment, and the need for agricultural production created a boom in the farm industry. Farm production increased by over twenty percent between 1935 and 1950. In 1946, the federal government passed more legislation to provide funding for agricultural research than years past. According to Julian M. Alston and Philip G. Pardey, the Research and Marketing Act served to “maintain a balanced farming and industrial economy” and “introduced open-ended appropriations for research and linked spending in agricultural research and development to national welfare.” Whereas funding for research remained in the thousands of dollars in the 1920s, it increased slowly through the New Deal Era, and by 1950, $15 million was granted for “new uses” research; $6 million for cooperative research into farm product utilization; and in one year funding increased from $2.5 million to $20 million for marketing research of agricultural products. The United States government placed significant weight behind America’s farming industry, hoping to squeeze out every bit of economic value from the land. This escalation in funds sparked a rising trend in American farming production, assisted by advancements in farm equipment, scientific developments in pesticides, and marketing of products. The increase in population due to the Baby Boom after World War II also encouraged agricultural growth. Though a sign of a healthy economy after the war, the river of funds flowing into America’s agribusiness also provoked concerns over the health of the land.
In the 1940s, biologist and environmental activist Rachel Carson began voicing her concerns about the use of pesticides in farming, particularly DDT, while working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Before her post as editor in chief of the agency’s publications, she struggled to get other national magazines to publish her writings on the matter. “The pollution of the environment by the profligate use of toxic chemicals was the ultimate act of hubris, a product of ignorance and greed that she felt compelled to bear witness against,” writes Carson’s biographer Linda Lear. Cries of warning coincided with advancements in agribusiness and federal funding. It was too much too soon for many environmentalists, but prosperity was in the air. After the war ended, the United States economy was healthy compared to that of their European brothers and sisters. Advertising increased across all markets. Suburban homes were built in record numbers, consuming previously unused land. American men and women returned from war, weary and broken, wishing for comfortable prosperity. Strong sentiments like these found their way to popular entertainment like Disney’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in subtle ways, morphing Irving’s luscious landscape to dollars and cents.
In his consideration of the evolution of historical thought in America, Kammen writes, “At a time when discontinuity seemed so perplexing, a sense of permanence and timelessness carried enormous appeal.” Patriotism of the 1950s connected directly with national heritage, a sentiment that begins to rise in the 1930s, but really reaches a peak after the war, corresponding with a rise in accessibility of automobiles for many Americans and an affinity for vacationing and tourism. Americans knew more about the country’s history from a popular culture perspective by traveling to historic sites and reaching into their past for entertainment. As Walt Disney’s influence upon American culture intensified through film and tourist destinations, he selected narratives that were directly connected to the American spirit. Other scholars have noted the importance of more prominent films, like the blockbuster Cinderella (1950), yet due to its American roots the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” connects to very national themes. Irving invented a legend to meet the needs of Americans in 1820 through humor, conflict between urban and rural personifications, and the natural landscape of abundance. The Walt Disney Studios reinvented the legend to illustrate concerns and changes in postwar America. The 1949 adaptation of Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is not only firmly settled into the American mind as a part of historical narrative, but as a legend it moves and changes to meet the needs of the time. Disney tailored the story – while keeping all necessary elements – to meet the needs of a postwar American society entering on a new period of their history.
From guest contributor Sarah Ruth Wilson, Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg