As both an educator and a literary scholar, I am drawn to the idea of the palimpsest. As in life, the texts that we read are layered with meaning and one of my greatest joys is digging through a text to pull out the various layers while teaching student to engage in their own excavations.
As a neighbor, mother, wife, and daughter, I am drawn to the work of family history to understand the multiple connecting and divergent threads that have created my personal reality. And as a gardener, I enjoy researching and growing heirloom varieties of plants mainly because I love thinking about all the layers of history that these plants have seen on their journey to my garden. I feel an affinity with them as they too have dug through various iterations of being to come to rest on my dinner plate.
Living in an urban setting, I have come to understand cities as a type of palimpsest as well with multiple layers that interact in both harmonious and discordant ways. This blog is an attempt to interact with the Cities as Text (TM) pedagogy to explore my own community, the communities I visit with my students, and any other community I am fortunate to visit in my meanderings as educator and scholar. To dig out the various layers of urban palimpsest and lay them side-by-side as I try to visualize the innumerable interactions that make a city or town. This project is also created with the express purpose of engage with other educators who use or wish to use high impact practices like Cities as Text (TM), experiential learning, and study away to help their students develop both compassionate consideration for the experiences of others as well as critical thinking, research, and writing skills.
Urban Palimpsest 