Taking a Broad View of Literacy: Lessons From the Appalachian Trail Thru-hiking Community
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| Abstract
In an attempt to explore a broad view of literacy and text, this article describes the variety of literacies demonstrated among a group of “thru-hikers” walking the length of the Appalachian Trail (Georgia to Maine, USA), between March and October 2001. Data sources include ethnographic field notes and archival data, as well as interviews with thru-hikers and other members of the Appalachian Trail community. Analysis of these data showed the presence of multiliteracies and the use of “ecological literacy,” the ability to interpret the natural surroundings. Some suggestions for putting a broad view of literacy into practice in classrooms are provided, including using movement as a prewriting strategy and learning about neighborhood and classroom contexts. |
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Introduction | Theoretical Perspectives | Multiliteracies of Thru-hikers | Teaching With a Broad View | References
Iron Foot, Kelton, and I are sitting on the banks of a stream near Route 12, a small country road that crosses the Appalachian Trail (AT) and heads west toward Woodstock, Vermont. Several yards in front of us, occasional cars buzz by; behind us, the flies and bees buzz and the stream gurgles. We have spent today, and months of days before this one, as “thru-hikers,” backpacking north along the 2160-mile (3360-kilometer) Appalachian Trail that follows the course of the Appalachian Mountains between northern Georgia and Maine in the eastern United States.
After reminding them briefly about the purpose of my research and receiving their permission for an interview, I turn on my tiny tape-recorder and begin asking questions about their background, how they prepared for the trip, and how they practice literacy on the trail. Answering a question about his use of maps, Kelton replies,
I’m really good at reading maps. My job requires me reading blueprints, and I’ve found people who can read blueprints. You know, I’m not the greatest at reading, but interpreting the three-dimensional -- the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional -- I’m very good at. It’s what I do. So I can look at the topographical map and I can see the mountains, you know.
I was once with a friend and we were hiking in the White Mountains, and it was totally socked in [fogged in] and we could not see a thing. And he was saying, “How far is it to the next place, to the shelter we’re going to stay at?” And I pointed and said, “It’s over there.” He said, “How do you know it’s over there?” And I said, “Well, I looked at the trail we’d just come down.”
I couldn’t see the trail; it’s socked in with cloud. I looked at the map. It’s over there: We’re sitting there taking our break, about ten minutes later the fog cleared, and right where I pointed, you know. It’s just I’m able to -- I’m just good with that, with maps.
This article articulates findings from my research, designed to observe a wide range of literacy practices within the community of thru-hikers. I chose this community for the study because I believed that by doing so, I would have ample opportunity to observe individuals reading in many different ways: reading print text, maps, their own bodies, the landscape, trees, and each other. The question I set out to answer was “What are the literacies of the Appalachian Trail thru-hiking community?” The question seemed simple, but as is suggested by Kelton’s comment, the answer was not.
In order to conduct this research, I joined the community of thru-hikers, with the goal of hiking the AT from Georgia to Maine. According to the Appalachian Trail Conference, almost 6,000 individuals have hiked the entire length of the AT. This number includes thru-hikers who hike the trail within a year, and “section hikers” who hike a section at a time over a longer period. Although thru-hiking is in many ways an individual activity, thru-hikers make up a distinctive community with rituals, traditions, and a collective identity. For this study, the community included all of those who attempted to hike the length of the AT in 2001, whether thru-hiking or section hiking.
Theoretical Perspectives
Research in literacy has largely been carried out in educational settings and has focused on reading print text. The door to considering practices outside of the classroom that involve visual, gestural, and other forms of “texts” has been opened by researchers and theorists concerned with how sweeping changes in our society affect literacy. These proponents of the “new literacies” argue that readers must now be prepared to interpret multimedia texts that incorporate print, visual, and verbal modes (see, e.g., Bean, Bean, & Bean, 1999; Elkins & Luke, 1999; Hagood, 2000). Others have examined literacy in the context of cultures, and have noted the disconnect that can occur when the literacy practices of a community differ from those promoted in schools (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Heath, 1983). This widening of the arena of literacy is exemplified in the work of the New London Group (e.g., 1996, 2000), researchers and theorists from fields including linguistics, literacy pedagogy, and media studies who have developed both a theoretical base and a pedagogy of multiliteracies that is broader than language alone and that allows for variation in cultures and contexts.
The New London Group (NLG) has designed a multiliteracies framework that includes six modes of meaning making (see Figure 1):
Figure 1
Diagram of the Multiliteracies Framework
Reproduced by permission from Cope and Kalantzis (2000).
This study uses the multiliteracies framework to look at multiple forms of literacy in the AT thru-hiking community.
Work in ecological literacy (also called “environmental literacy”) also shapes this study. This term has been used to describe the embeddedness of literacy in a context (Barton, 1994), as well as an understanding of a group of concepts related to ecology (Golley, 1998). I agree that these are important aspects of literacy, but I argue more strongly for a third conceptualization: the development of our ability to read the world around us, an ability that pushes beyond simple knowledge of facts about the environment. Because thru-hikers are in intimate contact with nature on a regular basis, they provide a suitable base for beginning research on reading the natural world. Such research has implications for the ways we teach and learn to live in the world. I believe that it is only through familiarity with, understanding of, and ability to read our natural environment that we will see ourselves as part of this world, responsible for maintaining and not destroying it.
I perceive nature and the natural world as something that can be distinguished from the world of culture, of humankind. Lankshear (1997) describes it this way:
The natural world consists of everything animal, vegetable and mineral, and the myriad events, forces and processes, comings and goings and ‘doings’ applying to animals, vegetables and minerals, except for events, processes and products that reflect human activity other than purely biological functioning and being. The activity of bees making honeycombs, beavers building lodges, squirrels storing nuts, and chimpanzees chattering belongs as much to the world of nature as does the activity of water on rocks or lava flows on vegetation. By contrast, such human activities as setting nets for fishing, teaching a child a game, clearing land for cropping, forming a committee, or conversing about all and sundry belong to the cultural world. (p. 13)
The Appalachian Trail thru-hiking community provides an opportunity to view the world of culture in close contact with the world of nature and to examine the interaction between these two worlds. In particular, this community gives us the opportunity to examine how our understanding of literacy might change when we view the natural world as text.
Previously, research in multiliteracies has been documented in the humanities (Cummins & Rappaport, 1998; Holmes, 1999; Marvin, 1994; Muller, 1997) and in education (Kist, 2002; Kuppers, 2000; Labbo, 1996, online document; O’Brien, 1998; Smith, 2001, online document; Stevens, 2001). Studies in the humanities have tended toward investigations into literary, archival, or historical fields, such as Cummins and Rappaport’s examination of literacy, art, and architecture as controlling agents in the Spanish colonization of the northern Andes. Research in education has typically examined multiliteracies through pop culture or technology, as in Smith’s analysis of multiple forms of storybook reading and Stevens’ and Kist’s classroom-based work with media and art.
This particular study employs ethnographic approaches and thereby documents multiliteracies in practice in the daily life of the thru-hiking community, a community deeply embedded in a natural setting. Instead of working only with artifacts, as researchers from the humanities have done, I combined these with observation of day-to-day practices, and with the ruminations of thru-hikers about these practices taken from interview transcripts. In addition, the natural setting of the research allowed me to include texts from the environment, such as plants, animals, trails, and rocks, and human representations of that environment, such as maps and drawings. Previous educational research in multiliteracies has limited the texts considered to those of pop culture or multimedia (Labbo, 1996; Smith, 2001; Stevens, 2001).
In the following section, I describe some of the multiliteracies I found in these data, including linguistic, gestural, spatial, and ecological literacies. I then present some implications for educational practice when we consider literacy from a broad perspective.
Multiliteracies of Thru-hikers
Linguistic literacies. I defined literacy events as primarily linguistic if they centered around written or spoken language. Thru-hikers practiced linguistic literacies in two important ways:
(In the descriptions that follow, the participants are given somewhat odd names. This practice follows from the accepted thru-hiker practice of adopting “trail names” -- nicknames used throughout the thru-hiking season.)
I documented thru-hikers writing and reading for pleasure in many ways: writing and reading letters and postcards; writing, reading, memorizing, and discussing poetry; and reading novels. One salient example of letter writing came from Soldier, a thru-hiker in his sixties who had visited some third- and fourth-grade classrooms before he began his thru-hike and had promised the students that he would write them back if they wrote him. Although Soldier described himself as “not a big writer,” he said that a few days previously he had written 40 letters in one sitting. Tenderfoot and Sure Pace were prolific postcard writers. They kept a notebook with addresses of their friends and family members and put a checkmark next to names to indicate each postcard written. When I talked to them in Maine, they had written several hundred postcards.
Many thru-hikers carried books with them, to read in the evenings or when taking a break. Binx read the Bible, a book of Catholic prayer meditation theory, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, and Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Other titles thru-hikers read included Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Carl Sagan’s Contact, and several other adventure and romance titles.
Books were also passed from thru-hiker to thru-hiker. For example, I picked up a well-used copy of Contact at Pass Mountain Hut in Shenandoah National Park, where it had been left behind. Inside the front cover was written “Please pass this book on to another thru-hiker when finished. Rufus.” Underneath Rufus’s signature were two others: “4/07/01 Half Hitch AT -- Good Book!!” and then “6/25/01 Davenport GA-ME 01.” After reading Contact and signing my trail name to its front page, I left it in a shelter in Pennsylvania, where it was later picked up and read by Rosy. I’m unsure of what happened to the book after this.
Poetry also played an important role for some thru-hikers. For example, in New Hampshire, Professor memorized “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot during several days of hiking. He recited the poem for those of us who were around, and we spent an enjoyable hour discussing it. Another poetry encounter occurred in Monson, Maine, where I first met Kegger as he was reciting his “The Rainy Day (AT) Poem” for a group gathered at a thru-hiker party at the Spring Creek Barbeque. His recitation was greeted with applause and laughter, and afterward, he sold 12 copies of the poem for one dollar each, enough to pay for his campsite.
Thru-hikers also read to gain information about the trail. Most of the thru-hikers I interviewed had read extensively on the AT in order to prepare for their own thru-hikes. The books mentioned included Walking the Dream (Wolfe, 1998), The Backpacker Magazine Guide to Thru-hikes (Chase, 1989), As Far as the Eye Can See (Brill, 1996), A Walk in the Woods (Bryson, 1998), and A Journey North (Hall, 2001). Most thru-hikers also mentioned reading information about thru-hiking on the Internet.
Many thru-hikers carried one or two trail reference books, most frequently the Appalachian Trail Data Book, which is published every year by the Appalachian Trail Conference (see, e.g., Chazin, 2000). It uses tables to present mileage information, and also includes information on shelter locations, water sources, post offices, road crossings, supply sources, places to stay, and restaurants. In addition to the Data Book, hikers might turn to either The Thru-hiker’s Handbook (Bruce, 2001) or the Appalachian Trail Long Distance Hiker’s Companion (Edwards & Mikkalsen, 2000) for more detailed information. Both of these guides provide descriptions of shelters, water sources, and towns. Thru-hikers need to have access to such information in order to locate potential overnight campsites, obtain water, and navigate hotels, restaurants, and grocery stores in towns near the trail.
Thru-hikers also read and wrote notes and created signs to post on or near the trail. Signs often contained directions to certain places, such as hostels, restaurants, or shuttle services that catered to hikers. Some hikers who left the trail pinned farewell letters to trees, encased in ziplock bags to protect them from the elements. Streisand left such a note at New Jersey’s High Point State Park, explaining her reasons for leaving the trail and her happiness that her partner, Stormy, would be continuing on. Another hiker posted a letter explaining that since he had been hit by lightning several days earlier, he had decided to leave the trail and spend some time with his family. In his letter, he urged thru-hikers to be careful and to value their friends and family. These letters are further evidence of the importance of print-based literacies in maintaining connections among thru-hikers and other members of the community. Lacking the opportunity to speak to other members of the AT community face to face, people leaving the trail chose to write letters to say farewell.
Many of the thru-hikers that I met kept journals, too. Some had made arrangements to have their journals transcribed and posted on webpages devoted to trail journals, such as www.trailjournals.com. Others had family members transcribe their journals and post them on individual websites. However, most thru-hikers wrote in their journals solely for private use. Jockey, for example, typically wrote one page per day, including what he called “side stories -- it’s part of the trail that I experienced.” Mole wrote his journal in a conversational tone, as if he was telling someone about what happened to him on a particular day. He also planned to use his journal as a tool to cross-reference his memory of his experiences with his pictures and maps for the book he wanted to write about his adventure.
While I see these examples of linguistic literacies benefiting primarily the individual thru-hiker, they do have elements of cultural ways of being within them. Journaling, for example, is a practice sanctioned by thru-hikers, and thus receives the community’s blessing as an appropriate form of writing. In addition, several thru-hikers’ journals have been published on websites and have become part of the accumulating knowledge of the AT thru-hiking community. Similarly, the practices of posting and reading notes on the trail, circulating books to read, and even using the same reference materials, although primarily individualistic behaviors, denote community connections among thru-hikers.
Other linguistic literacy practices among AT thru-hikers are more closely linked to defining and strengthening membership within the thru-hiking community. Thru-hikers used language to tell stories, which often revolved around or illustrated some aspect of thru-hiker culture. On a night in North Carolina, for example, when the temperature was so low that our drinking water froze solid during the night, Twice Shy told the story of the “Riders of the Storm.” In 1996, five thru-hikers got caught in a blizzard. They were on the trail just out of Unicoi Gap when the snow hit. Only one of the hikers was carrying a tent, so they all got inside it. With the help of a carefully tended stove, they were able to stay warm during the night. What they didn’t realize, however, was that while they were staying warm, the snow hitting their tent was melting from the warmth of the stove and then refreezing. It took them two hours the next morning to knock the ice off the zipper and open the tent. Thus the group of hikers received their joint trail names: “Riders of the Storm.”
This story, which entertained a group of thru-hikers huddled around a fire on a cold night, also contains elements of thru-hiker culture. The Riders of the Storm were “go-liters,” backpackers who often choose to sacrifice what some consider essential gear: in this case, tents. The story also addresses how these particular hikers handled adverse weather conditions and received their trail names. All of these aspects of the story relate to the culture of thru-hikers and help to pass on and strengthen that culture.
Another story, this one told by Journey and Tailgate, elaborates on an ongoing critique of the hut system in New Hampshire’s White Mountains and the issue of what some thru-hikers consider questionable financial practices. The huts of the White Mountains are staffed during the summer, and provide a bed, blanket, and a meal for US$65 a night. The huts are designed to cater to paying backpackers from New England and New York, and only a limited number of thru-hikers are allowed to “work for stay” -- serving meals to the paying guests or doing other work for dinner and a place to sleep. As Journey and Tailgate told it, they hiked into a hut in the White Mountains and wanted to work for stay. Tailgate said that when the two of them arrived, they only needed one more person to work, which meant that one of them either would have no place to stay or would have to pay for the night. Eventually, a man who was a paying guest said that his friend hadn’t made it and Tailgate could have his bunk, if she paid him for it.
Implicit in this story is a critique of the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC), the trail club responsible for maintaining the AT in this area. Tailgate and Journey, along with many other thru-hikers, called the AMC the “Appalachian Money Club,” and did not hesitate to criticize the club and those who stayed at its huts. In particular, I heard several thru-hikers complain about the amount of money spent catering to the needs of weekenders, perceived by thru-hikers as wealthy people dabbling in the outdoors, able to pay top dollar for the privilege of staying in the huts. On the other hand, the thru-hikers noted the relatively low amount of money spent on trail maintenance in the area. These stories, examples of linguistic literacies, serve both to entertain and to illustrate community norms. As they are told and retold, they confirm thru-hikers’ sense of group identity, membership, and values.
Thru-hikers also regularly wrote in shelter registers, the blank notebooks left in shelters by hikers or by the trail club that maintains a particular section of the AT (Figure 2). Some clubs, such as the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, have archives of registers going back for many years. Thru-hikers, dayhikers, weekenders, and section hikers write in the registers, as do trail maintainers and ridgerunners employed by the trail club to provide information to hikers about safe camping and hiking practices. A typical entry contains the date, some information about the day’s hike, and the hiker’s actual or trail name. Register entries provide information about water sources, trail conditions, and amenities available in towns. They can also be used as a means of communication with hikers who are following behind, as Mole mentions:
Some people use [shelter registers] to express themselves in poems or in songs, or just say, “God, I had a terrible day today, I twisted my ankle five times, I lost three tent stakes, etc.” Some people use it to say, “Hey, so and so behind me -- catch up.”
I see the literacy practices demonstrated in shelter registers as providing “sites” where cultural and personal expressions can be made, where issues important to the community can be discussed, and where the thru-hiking community’s values are expressed and strengthened.
Figure 2
Sample Pages From a Shelter Register
Reproduced with permission of Potomac Appalachian Trail Club; log book of shelter
It is in the area of these linguistic literacies that this study continues the tradition established by other researchers who have investigated and documented multiple forms of literacies within a community setting. Like the work of Barton and Hamilton (1998), which illustrates how literacy practices serve as communal resources, this study shows a community using linguistic literacies in ways that provided for communication among group members, thus strengthening community ties. In addition, individual members of this particular community of thru-hikers used linguistic literacies to gain information and for their own pleasure, echoing the findings of Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines’ (1988) study of African American families in an inner-city community.
Gestural literacies. Elements of gestural literacy, as described by the New London Group (2000), center around body language and sensuality and include gesture, feelings and affect, kinesics (the study of nonlinguistic body movements), and proxemics (the study of the cultural, behavioral, and sociological aspects of spatial distances between individuals). I categorized data as pertaining to gestural literacy when they referred to these aspects of the body. Although the data contain examples of gestural literacies both on reading our bodies and on reading the bodies and gestures of others, I focus here on thru-hikers’ descriptions of ways in which they read their own bodies. Thru-hikers often spoke of the need to “listen to your body” and described their experiences in understanding their own bodily needs regarding calorie deprivation, dehydration, pain, and injury.
Perhaps the most important way thru-hikers learn to read their own bodies is in recognizing when more calories are needed. Thru-hikers participate in strenuous exercise 8 to 12 hours every day for five or six months, so they need a large number of calories, often more than can be found in the food they are able to carry for themselves. Learning to gauge necessary calorie intake usually comes from experience. In an interview, Buffalo described hiking up Killington Peak in Vermont, when he experienced a wave of faintness. His pace began to slow, but for a time he felt that he could continue, since he only had one more mile to his day’s destination. His body stopped him, however: “It got to the point where I was, like, whoa, I need to do something. And I didn’t feel necessarily hungry, and I had eaten -- sort of -- recently.” He sat down, ate a chocolate bar, and immediately felt better.
Drinking enough water is also critical for thru-hikers, and they develop extensive knowledge and sensitivity about symptoms of dehydration. Such symptoms mentioned by thru-hikers include sluggishness, crankiness, headache, and fatigue. Binx described the feelings he experienced climbing up Justus Mountain in northern Georgia:
Pounding headache. That’s the first time I’d gotten a headache in a long time. I was really tired, my legs were rubbery, and my skin was cold and clammy -- just the definite symptoms of dehydration. My mouth definitely felt like it had 15 cotton balls in there.
Thru-hikers also pay attention to the color of their urine (darker urine means less hydration) and to long spaces of time between urination. Mole used the consistency of his spit to gauge his level of hydration. Ignoring the signals or symptoms of dehydration can result in, at the least, a bad day of hiking. Ultimately, of course, dehydration can lead to serious illness or death.
Another part of thru-hiking is learning to understand the body’s messages about pain, and to take care of the body. Some level of pain is an everyday experience for thru-hikers, as Jumper explained:
You have so many aches and pains. And you pretty much, kind of ignore them, and that’s part of the work out here. You’re walking 17 miles a day with 40 pounds on your back. Your feet are going to hurt and they’re going to be all swollen and stuff like that.
For thru-hikers, coping with pain entails massaging aching feet and knees, warming up muscles, and walking slowly and carefully. This was especially important in the morning, because of the strange sensation that I called “morning boots”: intense pain in the feet for the first 20 minutes or so of walking in the morning. Thru-hikers also commonly deal with pain by taking “Vitamin I” -- ibuprofen -- in large quantities. Blisters, strained muscles, aching joints, and chafing are just a few of the everyday pains thru-hikers must read, attend to, and walk through.
All of these examples of gestural literacy are surely experienced by individuals outside the AT community, if they are placed in similar physically taxing situations. Because thru-hikers depended so heavily on their bodies, they learned to read them well. I expect that athletes, dancers, and others who place similar demands on their bodies possess these skills. But in these days of increasing obesity in the U.S. population (Hill, 2002, online document), learning to understand our bodies’ needs and to read our bodies could help us to become a healthier nation.
Spatial literacies. The NLG (2000) describes spatial literacy as interpreting meaning related to environmental or architectural spaces. In this study, I designated data on map reading as spatial literacy, as it requires interpretation of symbols and lines on paper and relating those to the surrounding environment.
Many thru-hikers carry maps of the AT that include topography and elevation profiles. In a topographic map, each contour line represents a different elevation. The closer together the lines, the steeper the elevation change. In addition, topographical maps may show water sources, towns, and state and county lines. Elevation profiles are graphs designed to give a quick visual overview of the rise and fall of the trail itself, without reference to the surrounding terrain. They are set up as a grid, with elevation markers on one side, and mileage marked out on the bottom. Place names such as shelters, roads, and mountain tops are indicated on the profile.
Hikers use elevation profiles and topographical maps for different purposes. Elevation profiles give an easy-to-read estimate of the terrain and mileage. Thus, they can be used to get quick information, such as the distance to the next water source or break spot. They can also be used to time hiking, so that big climbs can be tackled early in the morning, when the weather is cool and the hiker is fresh, or to pinpoint the hiker’s exact location, when he or she gets to a mileage point that is listed on the profile.
Topographical maps provide different types of information in a more complex form. Some thru-hikers use topographical maps to identify place names, such as mountains, rivers, and towns, and also to find campsites; some use topographical maps to make decisions about taking “blue-blazed trails” that may cut off a portion of the AT. Another important use for topographical maps is as guides for finding water sources, stream crossings, or places to bushwhack off the trail to find water, and to provide information about the quality of these water sources. This becomes crucial in dry seasons such as the summer of 2001, when many springs dried up.
Because they provide useful information, maps are part of many thru-hikers’ daily routine. I observed thru-hikers reading and studying maps in the evening while cooking supper and in the morning before heading out for the day. Others chose not to purchase maps (the cost for a full set of AT maps is around US$150) and either looked at others’ maps or made do without them.
One technique that thru-hikers use when reading maps is visualization. Kelton, a thru-hiker mentioned at the outset of this article, felt that his job reading blueprints contributed to his considerable ability in reading topographic maps. When he looks at a map, he can visualize the mountains portrayed on it. In a similar vein, Jumper talked about visualizing the map, the surrounding terrain, and herself walking through it:
Now I find myself really being able to visualize as I’m hiking what the elevation profile’s doing, and then what the topo looks like, and which way we’re going to curve after we go up this mountain, and what we’re going to pass -- like if we’re going to pass this brook, and then what happens after we cross the brook. So it’s...really you’re trying to take a picture of what’s on the map and imagine yourself walking through that picture.
Much like Kelton, Jumper pictures the map and then places herself in her picture. Her visual and spatial interpretation of the map thus becomes translated into a gestural and ecological experience. Through this spatial interpretation of the map and comparison to the terrain through which she walks, Jumper keeps track of her location as she moves.
For thru-hikers, visualization is an important tool used to read maps and orient the body to the terrain. Use of this tool incorporates different forms of literacy: spatial literacy, as thru-hikers read their maps and connect them with the contours of the environment; and gestural literacy, as they experience their bodies moving through this environment. Visualization, then, is an important aspect of literacy that has not been seen as reading. If we are to cope and succeed with the multimedia formats of the Internet and other texts -- and if we are to help learners do the same -- we must expand the tools that we use. I believe that visualization is one tool that can assist us in dealing with multiple forms of text.
Ecological literacy. I characterize ecological literacy as the ability to read the world around us, to read nature in its interaction with us. I chose this term because of the connections I see between the data I collected and the writing about ecological literacy done by Orr (1992). Orr believes that we must develop an understanding of our relationship to the earth. A first step in this is the development of “the more demanding capacity to observe nature with insight” (p. 86).
The data that I have classified as showing ecological literacy in this study show thru-hikers interacting with the natural environment in various ways. The texts interpreted by thru-hikers in these data were natural, not created by humans. It is this connection with and ability to read the natural world that I call ecological literacy. In our increasingly technological and human-manipulated world, I believe that this connection with the natural world is crucial, for the health of both our environment and ourselves.
Thru-hikers experience ecological literacy in many ways: awareness and interpretation of plant life; learning through experience with animal life; learning to tell time by the behavior of insects and birds; and interpreting patterns regarding weather, hiking, and trail conditions. As the seasons progress and hikers move through different ecosystems, they come into contact with different natural life. From the starkness of northern Georgia in March, to the summer hay fields and farm country of Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Gap, to the rocky heights above the treeline in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, to the fall foliage in Maine, hikers experience change every day.
One type of forest, in particular, provoked much comment in both interviews and journals. Mole described the dark pine forests as “Mirkwood forests,” a reference to the dark and evil forest visited by the characters in The Hobbit. Python described this type of forest as “very dark and moist. If someone asked me to describe a medieval forest, this would be it.” Jumper described the same area as “cool dark shady areas, spooky twiggy and downed trees everywhere. Beautiful. Definitely more of a fear of bears on this side.” Within a three-day period of journal entries, Stretchin’ moved from observations regarding the fresh, lush greens of new spring growth to description of the same type of dark pine forest that the others had described:
The forest today was very different from the past few days. Instead of the bright, effervescent greens, the forest floor was made up of dead leaves and pine needles. This made for a very soft duff, easy on the feet. It gave me a sense of sadness. The forest was old, lots of decay. Even trees that were pushing out another year’s worth of buds seemed to be struggling. There were tall trees that looked as if they hadn’t produced any green in years. Huge, old logs laid scattered about, returning slowly to the dirt they had once pushed through as saplings. It also came to my attention that there seemed to be fewer birds. I found I didn’t have to step over as many caterpillars, beetles or bugs. There was no pop-pop of the hundreds of little grasshoppers I had encountered yesterday. Can one actually feel sad for a forest? Just the strange musings of a solo thru-hiker.
These hikers created varied interpretations of the elements they experienced around them, including smells, air quality, temperature, and sights. Mole brought up a literary allusion, Python a historical allusion, Jumper a concern for increased danger from bears, and Stretchin’ a sense of sadness related to what she perceived as the lack of growth. These interpretations were all created from their individual backgrounds, as well as from their experience and new awareness as thru-hikers.
Perhaps the most interesting interaction with nature came in the second half of the trail, when some thru-hikers began telling time by the behavior of birds and bugs. Stretchin’ wrote in her journal one day in June, “At 5:30, the song birds burst into song. It was like an alarm clock. They all started at once. Their songs were pretty, and it was time to start the day.” Critter also told me that he tended to wake with the birds, and I experienced this myself once spring was firmly established. Smoker, another thru-hiker, never used or carried a watch, but she told me that she could tell it was 4:30 in the afternoon, in the height of the summer, because the bugs began to come out and bite in force after having taken a two- or three-hour hiatus during the heat of the day.
As the thru-hiking season progressed, we became fairly adept at interpreting patterns regarding hiking and trail conditions. Perhaps because so many hours in the day were spent staring down at our feet and at the trail, we became physically strong enough to handle the sometimes very tricky trail conditions, and also learned that stepping in certain ways on certain surfaces would lead to problems. When I asked Jumper about what skills had improved as a result of her thru-hike, she described improved visualization of rocks in the trail:
You look at a rock, and now you don’t see a rock -- you see how your foot’s going to step on that rock. You know, whether or not it’s going to wobble or what you’re going to.... You know, that has definitely changed, the walking.
I experienced a failure in this regard, in Maine, when I arrived at a shelter with mud up to my knees. I explained to Redbird that I had stepped on what looked to me like fairly solid mud, but had sunk. Redbird said, “I can tell where that kind of mud is.” The next day, I began paying closer attention to the mud I was hiking through, and never experienced that type of failure again. Similarly, Bug, as he passed me on a particularly rocky and slick section of trail in the Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine, talked about how difficult it was to “read” the rocks on the trail. He said that some rocks were wet and slippery, while others were wet and not slippery or dry and slippery. This meant that we couldn’t always equate wetness with slipperiness. The difficulty in reading these rocks caused many a slip and fall in this section of the trail. Thus, all of us learned through experience to interpret patterns of mud and rocks so as to protect ourselves while hiking. All of these interpretations rely on the context of a thru-hike. I believe that thru-hikers, in particular, develop a unique sense of awareness of nature that comes from their continued presence in the natural world.
The inclusion of ecological literacy in the multiliteracies framework paves the way for realization of Orr’s (1992) ecological literacy: a merger of landscape and mindscape. This study shows the importance of placing ourselves in an environment that is more natural, less man-made, in order to learn fully from it. The use of multiliteracies in interpretation is critical in this kind of learning. Thru-hikers learned to see themselves within a natural ecosystem and to orient themselves to that environment. I believe that this kind of relationship between humans and the environment cannot be developed without exposure to the natural world.
Teaching With a Broad View of Literacy
The thru-hikers who participated in this study used multiliteracies in unique ways during their experiences on the Appalachian Trail. In fact, it seemed that much of their time was spent in a variety of modes of interpretation, including writing and reading both print and nonprint texts. Whether reading novels, writing in shelter registers, memorizing poetry, or reading trail blazes, plant life, or bodies, thru-hikers were constantly involved in reading and making meaning from their surroundings. While including print and oral text, this study on the literacies of the thru-hiking community demonstrates that literacies are present in many areas that have not traditionally been considered “reading.” The thru-hikers described here interpreted their surroundings and experiences through linguistic, spatial, gestural, visual, auditory, and ecological means.
By acknowledging the presence of these varied forms of reading and writing, this study contributes to broadening our understanding of literacy, as is happening through work in progress in the areas of multiliteracies (e.g., Cope & Kalantzis, 2000) and new literacies (Gee, 1996; Hagood, 2000; Street, 1993). Within the field of reading education itself, “reading” has been extended beyond the printed page to include reading diagrams and using computers. The editors of the third volume of the Handbook of Reading Research (Kamil, Mosenthal, Pearson, & Barr, 2000) describe the definition of reading in the past decade as moving from “reading a single instance of print to reading as the exploration of all forms of representation in multi-media and hypermedia formats” (p. xii). Certainly it must be noted, however, that the idea of multiple forms of literacy has been the subject of criticism, with some arguing that pluralization of literacies may reify each form of literacy into a fixed and essential thing (Moje, 2000; Wagner, as cited in Street, 1999).
The New London Group’s (1996, 2000) framework of multiliteracies provided a theoretical grounding for this study, and it provides a structure for thinking about literacy, both in and out of classrooms. However, the understanding of texts in the multiliteracies framework includes only those created by humans, perhaps due to the social and political impetus behind the framework’s creation. In my analysis of the literacies of the thru-hiking community, I found that much interpretation of the natural world -- what I call ecological literacy -- took place; this form of text is not part of the multiliteracies framework as it currently exists. When I incorporate ecological literacy into the multiliteracies framework, this reconceptualization portrays ecological literacy as both one of the elements of multimodal literacy and as a larger context in which reading takes place (Figure 3). Thus, two meanings of ecological literacy are retained:
Figure 3
Diagram Showing a Reconceptualization of the Multiliteracies Framework
Within the existing multiliteracies framework, texts are visual, as in art and multimedia texts; spatial, as in the architecture or use of space in buildings and landscaping; linguistic, as in written and spoken texts; or audio, as in sound effects and music. Data from this study illustrate the need for an additional element that broadens multiliteracies to include texts that are part of our ecological context. Making this context part of the framework provides a place for reading the world around us in both natural and social ways.
Similarly, although the multiliteracies framework comes from the tradition of viewing literacies as part of a contextual sphere, the framework itself does not reflect explicitly that literacy is always situated in a social context. By including ecological literacy as an additional ring on the outside of the framework, I emphasize the embeddedness of all forms of literacy in a social setting, a notion affirmed by many literacy researchers (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Fishman, 1988; Heath, 1983). Following Barton (1994), I have called this aspect of literacy ecological: “An ecological approach aims to understand how literacy is embedded in other human activity, its embeddedness in social life and in thought, and its position in history, language, and learning” (p. 32). Thus, by proposing this addition to the multiliteracies framework, I intend to make more salient what I believe to be an accepted notion: the sense that literacies of all kinds reside in a social, cultural context.
Teachers who undertake to implement a broad view of literacy in their classrooms may choose to ask their students to read their environments in a variety of ways that emphasize this broader notion of literacy. For example, students may be asked to view their neighborhoods as texts and to write, speak, and create visual representations of the process through which they interpret the people, buildings, landscapes, and natural aspects of their own living spaces. The same process could be applied to a school setting, so that students examine for themselves and their peers what is required to function successfully in a particular classroom or hallway. Once students develop an understanding that they are interpreting the world around them as they live in it, teachers and students can work together to structure these once-abstract processes by noting the formal structures that they use in their interpretation. For example, teachers and students could explore interpretations of a person based on the exterior of his or her home, as learners make judgments about the home’s appearance, location, and surroundings. As students learn about their own interpretive processes, they learn not only to read, write, and speak well about academic content, but also to interpret the world around them in a way that will be beneficial to them in out-of-school settings.
A second aspect of this broader definition of literacy is inclusion of the body. Although the linguistic mode of literacy plays a primary role in the majority of the data collected in this study, it is evident that the thru-hikers used a complex web of modes beyond the linguistic. The body’s role in meaning making for the thru-hikers can perhaps be seen as what Lewis (2000) call “kinaesthesis”: “the sense that informs you of what your body is doing in space through the perception or sensation of movement in the joints, tendons, and muscles” (p. 69). Lewis enlarges this to include an awareness of the orientation of the body as it moves through a landscape and the state of being in touch with surroundings, illustrating this by describing rock climbers as possessors of corporeal knowledge: “an embodied knowledge of the climb through which the climber re-orientates herself with the world. This re-orientation is via embodied experience, a corporeal knowing rather than a cognitive knowing” (p. 71). It is in this combination of corporeal knowing with language, visual, auditory, spatial, and other modes of knowing that the potential of the multiliteracies framework comes to fruition in describing how thru-hikers interpret themselves and their surroundings.
Perhaps a first step in encouraging learners of all ages toward this combined way of knowing is to involve the body in learning, an object that could be accomplished by incorporating work with the body as part of lessons in reading and writing print text. Teachers who want to involve bodily movement as part of learning can ask students to use movement as a prewriting strategy. Klein and Hecker (1994) use an approach called “walking the structure” to help students create and organize their writing. Here, students begin moving through a room in ways that are representative of the direction of their ideas: moving forward to represent supporting details, standing still to represent “stuckness,” or moving sideways to represent a different direction of thought. Another student or a teacher accompanies this movement, using self-generated symbols to represent graphically both the movement and the accompanying thoughts. According to Hecker (1997), students who have “walked” several essays develop “an internal, kinesthetic conception of the logical relations among ideas. This understanding can be used to generate and organize further essays, to comprehend the underlying structure of others’ texts, and to aid in the revision process” (p. 48). The process of incorporating movement with writing ensures that learners who have strengths in spatial and gestural literacies can transfer those skills into linguistic literacy.
Approaches such as these are only two applications for a broadened view of literacy. It is my belief that had Kelton, the thru-hiker in the opening vignette of this article, had the opportunity to experience classroom rewards for his skills in reading maps, he wouldn’t have seen himself as a poor reader. Instead, he might have recognized that his reading skills were spatial; indeed it is possible that his skill in reading diagrams and maps would have been transferred to reading print text. It is my hope that such transfers will be the result of teachers and learners taking a broad view of literacy.
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About the Author
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Leslie Rush is an assistant professor of English education at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, WY, USA. She teaches courses in secondary English methods and in qualitative research. In addition, she supervises student teachers in middle schools and high schools in both Wyoming and Colorado. Leslie’s research interests include multiliteracies, critical literacy, and multigenre writing, particularly as these are experienced by adolescents. Leslie can be reached by e-mail at lrush@uwyo.edu. |
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Citation: Rush, L.S. (2003, April). Taking a broad view of literacy: Lessons from the Appalachian Trail thru-hiking community. Reading Online, 6(7). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=rush/
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted April 2003
© 2003 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232