Cephalopodcast - The Ocean Podcast

Unknown species of red-capped mushroom, Mountain City, GA.

I thought I would be headed home today, but instead we ended up with an unexpected extra day in the mountains. It gave us an opportunity to finally visit the Foxfire Museum.

Starting in the late 1960s, students in this rural Southern Appalachian area produced a magazine containing interviews with the elders of their community. The stories ranged from country herbals, to ghost stories and legends, to what life was like growing up in a pioneer era. The magazine was a pioneering effort itself and has grown over the years into its own franchise of sorts, including the museum.

I’d forgotten how deep the hyphae* of the Foxfire had penetrated into the substratum of my own life. As a kid, my parents regularly took us on camping trips to this area and for as long as I can remember, we had all the books sitting on the shelves of our modest Florida home. But it is interesting returning to this place and seeing its fruit with more mature eyes. As an educator, I am especially interested in the “Foxfire method of classroom instruction.”

“Foxfire” is a method of classroom instruction—not a step-by-step checklist, but an over-arching approach that incorporates the original Foxfire classroom’s building blocks of giving students the opportunity to make decisions about how they learn required material, using the community around them as a resource to aid that learning, and giving the students an audience beyond the teacher and the classroom for their work.

A more thorough introduction is available in this brochure (PDF). But I wonder if this approach would lend itself to some of the new media methods of content creation that interest me, especially student-created podcasts and blogs. Expect to see more on my explorations into that topic here in the future. Sadly, I missed the teacher courses for this year, but I hope next year will be a possibility.

*From the Web site: “The term ‘foxfire’ is a name commonly applied to several species of bioluminescent fungi that grow on rotting wood in damp forests.”