Originally appears in the Fall 2007 issue

Young people today in southeastern Tennessee never knew the barren red hills and deep eroded gullies that were here in their grandparents’ day. By the late 1800s, open-pit roasting of copper ore in the Copper Basin of the southern Appalachians had produced the largest man-made biological desert in the United States, and the ecosystem was in trouble. Fifty square miles of forested land had been stripped bare to provide fuel for the processing of copper ore; and any vegetation that was not lost to clearcutting had been decimated by the sulfur dioxide fumes released in the ore roasting. The Basin had become so barren that the bald, red land could be seen decades later from space as a huge scar on the landscape — other than the Great Wall of China, the only man-made feature on the planet that could be recognized from that distance. Today, the natural beauty of the Copper Basin is re-emerging as the result of a successful but ongoing environmental reclamation project, a combined effort of government, private companies and local citizens and organizations.

Given the community’s history of environmental degradation in the pursuit of economic goals, teachers at Copper Basin High School were determined to create a better future by educating their Grade 7-12 students about community pride and character. Successful community partnerships helped us establish a Learning Center at the school, and the arts became a focus of a progression of activities that has expanded over the past five years. In this article, I will outline a number of our arts-oriented initiatives, as well as the partnerships and community support we have developed to maintain the program in our small high school of 331 students.

The arts as a strategy for learning

Our first goal was to have our students develop a sense of place and a pride in the community. To initiate this, we punctuated school hallways with “thought-starter” posters that posed such questions as the following: How much of our culture is reflected in the places we live, work and play? What does our living environment say about who we are, what we care about, and what is unique about our place and the people who live here? Are there visual clues that tell about things of value to us? Are there places of visual clutter that obstruct our view of the natural environment? Does the built environment complement and enhance the natural environment?”

To gain a sense of the influence of community appearance on one’s sense of place, teachers led high school students on photojournalism field trips to photograph “the good, the bad and the ugly.” These included visually pleasing streetscapes, green spaces and unique cultural elements that contribute to the community’s character, as well as examples of visual pollution. Using these photos, students worked in small groups to create a PowerPoint presentation that suggested actions for preserving the good and enhancing the poor visual environments. Students presented this at a school open house to spark discussion of how the visual environment affects the community’s character and livability and residents’ civic pride and sense of place.

In art history, students studied American landscape artists, such as those of the Hudson River School. After viewing pristine landscapes of early America, they placed clear sheets of acetate over prints of these and other landscape paintings and then added examples of visual pollution to each scene. At a subsequent exhibit, guests were invited to lift the acetate to view the original landscape paintings and compare them to the scenes with the overlays, which included such things as utility poles, cell towers and billboards. This proved to be an effective exercise in raising awareness of visual preferences.

Engineers involved in the reclamation project helped geometry students create a scale model of the Central Headframe, a tall structure that is across the highway from the school and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Central Headframe once contained the massive machinery used to power cables that lifted ore from the underground mines up onto railroad cars that hauled it away for processing. The students’ model is proudly displayed in the school lobby against a mural backdrop of a treed mountain landscape. The model and mural reinforce the importance of preserving historical landmarks as part of our heritage.

While studying architecture, a home economics class learned the history of the town’s pre-fabricated, mail-order Sears houses, purchased decades ago by the mining company for the purpose of housing workers. They visited the company-housing sections of town, the newly built subdivisions on the outskirts of town, and an abandoned community with nothing left but stone foundations. Comparing the planned and unplanned communities, they discussed the components that made them attractive and those that didn’t. They were then asked to design an ideal community with curb appeal.

A history class visited the Ducktown Basin Museum to study the relationship between the history of the area and the community’s character. The students then created an artistic timeline of the Basin, in which a large drawing of the Central Headframe formed the backdrop for a progression of historical images with corresponding descriptions. Students put their timeline on display at an open house, thereby sharing their awareness of the strong impact of mining on the appearance and character of the community.

An art class enjoyed a field trip to see the Ocoee Whitewater Center, a building designed to fit harmoniously into the environment in the Cherokee National Forest on the outskirts of town. A scavenger hunt around the facility helped to create awareness of the characteristics of architectural design that “builds with nature.” Students noted such features as marble placed in bands across walkways to mimic the quartz veins in the natural formations of the river gorge, a structural curve in the building that reflects the curve of the river, and the use of natural stone pillars stacked on an outward and downward slant to create a natural visual flow from building to river.

A language arts class read books and stories emphasizing the value of place, and wrote expressive poetry sharing their sense of place. Along with other student artworks, these writings, including this excerpt from a student’s poem, were displayed in the school:

Beautiful mountains, trees, and hills,

The wind howling in the night.

This place… to you, it may not seem like much,

But to me it really is grand,

Because, as far as I’m concerned,

We’re the richest people in all the land.

Expanding to the elementary level

After initially focusing our community-character education at the high school level, teachers and students realized that we needed to start telling the community-character “story” to younger students. As a result, we developed a curriculum for Grades 3-6 and provided teacher training, resources and support to the elementary teachers who volunteered to pilot-test the curriculum. With the help of an artist-in-residence, a high school art class developed a clever claymation video to introduce visual pollution to elementary students. Students wrote the script and made clay figures and objects, such as trees, litter and billboards, that they used to act out their story. For each scene, the characters had to have their clay arms and features moved, then photographed, then moved again, then photographed, and so on…so that the video would appear to be animated.

Third-grade students were given “viewfinders,” empty slide frames mounted on popsicle sticks or clothespins, which enabled them to become “detail detectives.” First in the classroom and schoolyard, and then on walks in the downtown area, they used their viewfinders to identify examples of visual pollution, art in nature, and visually appealing scenes. Meanwhile, high school students with PowerPoint skills mentored sixth-graders, showing them how to develop presentations on community character and sense of place.

Educating the community

While the towns in the Copper Basin have been busy restoring their natural landscape and community pride, neighboring towns less than 20 miles away have been aggressively degrading their community character and appearance through rapid development. Huge earth-moving equipment has scraped the earth bare of trees, and scenic drives have become marred by large billboards. Feeling a need to educate people in these neighboring towns, students at Copper Basin High School decided to conduct visual preference surveys to help people take an honest look at their town’s roadways, business districts and residential areas.

The visual preference surveys were based on sets of comparative slides shown at public presentations. The students took photographs in the communities and used computer graphics to alter the views by adding street trees, eliminating overhead wires or billboards, or changing building facades, street furniture and plantings. Both original and altered images were then presented to the audience, who recorded their preferences on worksheets. The responses were then tallied and an overall summary created of what local citizens like and dislike about their community’s visual character. The students’ passion and concern were invaluable in getting the attention of local residents, who formed a task force to oversee development and promote respect for the visual environment. As part of their presentations, students developed “charters” for community leaders and elected officials to sign. Once signed, these charters served as declarations of their commitment and responsibility to protect and enhance the visual integrity of both the built and natural environments of their community.

Copper Basin Learning Center

Central to many activities and projects undertaken at our school is the Copper Basin Learning Center. Staffed by one person in an office at Copper Basin High School, the Center’s role is to promote projects with a cross-disciplinary focus on technology, environment, arts, culture and heritage. To that end, teachers regularly plan together and partner with each other on interdisciplinary projects and lessons. For example, through a grant from the Dunn Foundation, teachers received three days of training in the use of the foundation’s ViewFinders Too1 curriculum on community appearance. To assist them in using the materials, the Learning Center provides a cart containing cameras, a projector, lesson plans, and other curriculum materials, such as slides, student handouts, curriculum correlations, maps and assessments.

The Learning Center also supports students in the Basin Pride Club, which meets for 30 minutes each Tuesday during homeroom. The club’s mission is to rebuild a sense of community pride by educating adults and mentoring elementary school students about community character. In this popular club, students apply what they learn in their various classes to environment-focused activities. Club members recruit other volunteers to help with our projects. They also make regular use of a weekly in-school news broadcast to alert staff and students to upcoming activities.

Building partnerships

To support these and other projects, we have formed partnerships and sought funding from agencies and companies that share our community-improvement goals. Hearing of our work, the managers of the large reclamation project, Glenn Springs Holdings, Inc. (GSHI),2 stepped forward to become the primary funding partner. It was GSHI’s financial assistance that enabled us to establish the Copper Basin Learning Center. GSHI’s funding also covers program expenses and provides for school speakers and professional trainers who are experts in technology and the environmental sciences. The financial support we receive from GSHI is short term, however, and will need to be replaced with more sustainable sources of support. At the end of the 2006-07 school year, a Happy Earth Day celebration was held to share the many visual and performing arts projects that had raised students’ awareness of the community’s character. A DVD was made of the celebration in order to highlight students’ work and publicize these initiatives to a broader audience, including potential funders and educational partners. 3 Selling copies of our DVD is another way we hope to raise money to keep our Learning Center and its activities going.

In many communities there are several large companies with grant programs that might support initiatives such as ours, but this is not the case in the economically depressed Copper Basin region of southeast Tennessee. Thus a nonprofit organization, the Copper Basin Rural Community Association, was established by teachers at our school. All of the board members are teachers and community members who serve on a volunteer basis. The Association serves as a bridge between the school and other community organizations and enables us to obtain grants for specific projects, such as bringing artists-in-residence to the school. Beyond funding partners, we have also sought partnerships with organizations that have other resources to share with our students. For example, our latest partner is the Red Hill Ladies’ Club, whose members teach quilting and other crafts to our students.

Looking to the future

The 1996 Olympics in Atlanta established the Ocoee River as the site of the Olympic Canoe and Kayak Slalom competitions. This event made Basin residents aware that while their economic past is mining, tourism could be a mainstay of their future. Attracting tourists has become yet another important reason for us to continue to focus on our community’s character and appearance.

Today, the people in Copper Basin are encouraged by the natural beauty returning to the landscape, with its wooded hillsides and rippling clear waters. And our students are much more aware of the importance of community character as well as their civic responsibility to maintain and improve their community’s appearance. Many are beginning to understand why people feel a sense of place and pride in this community — and choose to live here even if they have to commute to jobs over the mountains. Now we smile as students complain about flaws in shabbily built structures, unsightly signage, and littered city drainage ditches, because we know that their passion to make things right will ensure a successful future for the whole region.

 

Notes

  1. Sandra Ryack-Bell and Richard Youngken, Viewfinders Too: Exploring Community Appearance, Grades 6-8, The Dunn Foundation, Newport, RI, 2002, <www.dunnfoundation.org>.
  2. Glenn Springs Holdings, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum.
  3. The Earth Day Celebration DVD can be ordered by contacting: Angie Cook, Copper Basin High School, 300 Cougar Drive, Copperhill, TN 37317, (423) 496-3291, ext. 1017, angiecook@tds.net.

 

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Angie Cook is the Coordinator of the Copper Basin Learning Center and a professional teaching artist with Artist-In-Education programs in Tennessee and Georgia. She is very interested in connecting cultural history and environmental concerns through the arts.