We stood in the desert at the edge of a deep hole that had once held the Lahontan Reservoir. The temperature was in the 90s; the sun glared off the tiny bit of water at the reservoir bottom, several hundred yards away.
“What are the hoses for?” someone asked, pointing to six-inch tubes running from the dusty rim into the grey-green puddle.
“We're pumping in air,” explained the ranger. “There's so little water we think the fish will die unless we oxygenate.”
The scene was sobering for us all: 30 teachers, kindergarten through college, and a pair of instructors from the university. We were some 40 miles southeast of Reno, tracking down one of the terminal points of the Truckee River. In good times, the Truckee flows freely from Lake Tahoe in the high Sierra to the towns, deserts, and farmlands of Nevada. We were in bad times; no water would help “green the desert” on this hot July day. Instead, desert critters were making webs and nests in the hardware that opened and closed the irrigation gates. Farmers were making do with 28 percent of their normal allotment of irrigation water, and the fish were struggling to make do on a lot less than that.
We visited the Lahontan Reservoir as part of our two-week summer institute, “The Truckee River Community Project.” During the institute we hoped that teachers would learn more about the region from an interdisciplinary perspective and prepare teaching materials for classroom use in the fall.
Curriculum Begins at Home
- Interdisciplinary curriculum can and should begin “at home,” because every region or locality has historical, scientific, economic, literary, and cultural resources that can provide a starting point for explorations across the disciplines.
- One of the most effective ways to prepare teachers for interdisciplinary teaching is to engage them in it; teachers don't so much need to be told about the values of interdisciplinary study as they need to experience them (Lafer and Bancroft 1989).
Our first premise had occasioned some snickers.
“Nevada?” one person had asked with a grin, “There is no culture in Nevada.”
We begged to differ. Contrary to E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and the proponents of “cultural literacy,” who seem to value canonical culture—the famous names and dates—over local history, we believed that true “cultural literacy” (and economic, scientific, and mathematical literacy) is what people know and pursue and practice every day (Tchudi 1987). They do so as they read their newspapers, raise their families, speak their native language, balance their checkbooks, and generally go about their lives (Lafer 1989). True, Nevada does not have many big name cultural icons; Mark Twain is perhaps our best-known writer, and he said so many unkind things about Nevada that if we had more self-respect we would disown him. But Nevada, like any state, city, town, hamlet, or crossroads, can serve as a microcosm of national and even global history and current issues, so that beginning interdisciplinary study at home is anything but provincial.
We chose the Truckee River as our focus because, quite simply, water is the life source of the region. From it flows not only sustenance for people, animals, and plants, but also a steady stream of social, cultural, and political issues. Through the river, we discovered we could explore such issues as the culture and lifestyle of the native Paiute tribes, American westward expansion, the politics and economics of urban and suburban development, and even the ecological question of whether humankind should live in the desert at all, despite our technological capability for doing so. At the time of our planning, too, public interest in the Truckee River had been heightened by six consecutive years of drought in the Sierra range. All our reservoirs, like Lahontan, were practically dry.
As we planned the summer institute, the “Great Basin Chautauqua” fell into our laps. The Nevada Humanities Committee had been planning a midsummer chautauqua, a revival of the old-time cultural exposition and tent show of the 19th century, with the theme “Water in the West.” Along with book discussions and policy debates, the program featured nightly performances by scholars role-playing major historical figures in the water debates: John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club; Sarah Winnemucca, a Paiute who lectured during pioneering days on the needs and culture of her people; John Wesley Powell, explorer of the Colorado River; William Mulholland, the engineer who drained the Owens Valley of the Sierra in order to supply Los Angeles with water; and Mary Austin, the social and political gadfly who criticized the “engineering” of the “hydraulic” West.
The Humanities Committee wanted to sponsor an educational component for teachers, and our project, already in the works, fit the committee's design perfectly. With funding from the Pacific Telesis Foundation, our participants received textbooks and an unexpected stipend.
Learning from the River
Our two-week program was intense, from morning until nightfall and beyond. We devoted two days to field trips exploring the Truckee and its complex system of tributaries, canals, and reservoirs. Plus, we learned some of the lingo of water in the West: water rights, rates of flow, acre-feet, water table recharge. The interdisciplinary nature of the topic was immediately evident as we learned about the jobs of the federal water master and the cloud seeders of the Desert Research Institute, as we studied the ecology and economy of the Paiute fishing industry, and as we figured out where the water we bathe in and pour on our lawns winds up (two very different places, it turns out).
We approached our work from a language arts perspective, “reading and writing the culture.” Participants read four books featuring poetry, nonfiction, and fiction about the region, each text with a distinctly interdisciplinary perspective (Finkhouse and Crawford 1991, Goin et al. 1992, Griffin 1991, Knack and Stewart 1984). They wrote in journals and did imaginative writing-across-the-curriculum about their experiences. Several Nevada writers conducted workshops for us, both to discuss their perception of our region and to help our teachers learn to shape their own experiences in language.
The Great Basin Chautauqua occupied four full days of our first week. Participants attended their choice of 30 out of 60 hours of programming. Although we think our project would have succeeded even without the chautauqua, it provided hands-on exploration that invigorated and energized our participants.
During the second week, we continued our reading and writing workshops but added an afternoon curriculum workshop. We gave participants a few observations and pointers about curriculum development from an interdisciplinary perspective (Tchudi 1991a, b), but we discovered that, for the most part, the teachers already had projects in mind. Furthermore, the material they were accumulating from their own experiences seemed to dictate the direction of classroom projects. The participants suggested having students develop chautauqua-style characters in their classrooms. They, not we, observed that discussions of water supply for Reno or the Stillwater Wildlife Refuge involved mathematical calculations, scientific knowledge of the rain cycle, understanding of the economy, and some “cultural literacy” in the form of historical background. At the end of the two weeks, each teacher left the institute with a thick packet of materials ready for implementation, projects we would monitor through a yearlong follow-up program.
Trying the New Curriculum
In particular, four teachers from Brown Elementary School in Reno—Mary Dunton, Gina Taylor, Stephanie Spencer, and Sheila Meibergen—did a stellar job of implementing their ideas. They had come to our institute with a specific vision of what they intended to accomplish in their school the following year. Because the school had a site-based management system led by a teacher-centered principal, they felt empowered to proceed.
The group from Brown developed no less than a full month's worth of Truckee River activities linked to a yearlong theme of “Communities” for their entire K–6 school. The younger students studied the regions close to home: their neighborhood, their school, and the surrounding foothills. The 3rd and 4th graders moved outward to look at geography, city and county issues, and the question of water itself; while the 5th and 6th graders looked at still broader issues of ecology, economy, and job futures. The students at all levels read and wrote, calculated, conducted scientific experiments, interviewed neighbors, drew maps, raised desert beasties, built models of mines, took field trips, and asked questions of guest speakers.
By October, these four teachers and their colleagues had accumulated material that led to a dazzling display and workshop for teachers attending the Southwest Regional Conference of the National Council of Teachers of English in Reno. By midyear, the Brown School staff had not only committed itself to doing the Truckee River Project again next year, but was planning to develop a new whole-school project on a different interdisciplinary theme for the following year. These four teachers were then commissioned by the Nevada State Council of Teachers of English and the Nevada Humanities Committee to revise their materials for publication in Teaching Nevada: An Interdisciplinary Approach, which is being distributed as a resource manual for teachers all over the state.
Obviously, not all the participants used the experience as extensively as the Brown group. However, our follow-up sessions revealed that teachers were applying their ideas in diverse ways: a college instructor based a writing course on Nevada issues and the water theme; a teacher in a new interdisciplinary high school linked the water theme to a larger team focus on communities and survival; a middle school media specialist and a senior high English teacher compiled a Nevada/water/desert bibliography for young readers; a literacy teacher at a Job Corps center incorporated Nevada interdisciplinary materials into her program; and a middle school teacher helped his students to map out a bicycle tour that retraces the passage of the pioneers through our region.
We ended the follow-up year with a Saturday exposition linked to Nevada History Day festivities. The teachers in our program gathered with some of their students for a grand show-and-tell in which the young people performed their own chautauqua reenactments of regional characters. In contrast to other curriculum projects we've directed, we have seen teachers directly and enthusiastically changing the curriculum as a result of our institute.
Full Circle
Imagine one more scene, seven months after our field trip to the Lahontan Reservoir. It was a bright but cold Saturday in February, temperature in the 20s. Dressed in snow gear, the participants in the follow-up program were at Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada, close to where the ill-fated and eventually cannibalistic Donner pioneers were stranded in the winter of 1848. We were excited, because in the winter of 1992–93, the first big snow in six years had fallen. Under the guidance of a member of a Tahoe winter search and rescue team, we probed the depth of the snowpack, an average of almost 10 feet! We calculated that when the snowpack melted, Lake Tahoe would rise to its natural rim for the first time in years and the Truckee River would flow with restored vigor.
“Hallelujah,” somebody shouted. “The drought is over, and I can water my lawn!”
“Oh, no,” the rest said. “This snowfall might be just a blip in the drought.” We pulled out charts and studied precipitation patterns over the past century and speculated about the snowfall next winter, and the winter after that.
We know about such matters now because we've measured the snowpack ourselves, observed the rivers at high and low flow, gotten sand and snow in our boots, read the literature, and studied the history. And our students know these things, too.
“How dry is the desert?”
The high desert of Nevada may be dry in precipitation, but our study of one of its rivers and the correlated culture has opened the floodgates to interdisciplinary study and to curriculum change.
