Book IUIiIB Reviews Wigginton, Eliot. Sometimes a Shining Moment: The Foxfire Experience. Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1985. $19.95. With nearly 100 photographs and illustrations. Eliot Wigginton, a teacher with twenty years tenure in the schools of Rabun County, Georgia, is one of the precious resources of the Appalachian region. He and his students first gained wide attention in 1972 with the publication of The Foxfire Book. And for the past fourteen years, the makers of Foxfire have been lights glowing in the night, teaching us about the history, beauty, and richness of Appalachia . Now, with the publication of the long-awaited Sometimes a Shining Moment , Wigginton shares his remarkable story and his educational theory and practice with the entire country. Eliot Wigginton did a lot of his growing up in Athens, Georgia, where his father was a professor of landscape architecture at the university. He had an undistinguished public school career in Athens, having to repeal the ninth grade. He was then sent by his father to the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. There, under the tutelage of Jack Tyrer, Wigginton's academic career and his life itself were turned around. Eliot went on to a successful college career at Cornell University. With degree in hand, he arrived in August of 1966 ready to teach English and Geography to all the ninth and tenth graders at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School. Wigginton found himself in an educational context that would have made lesser men weep: he had 146 students, was a dorm parent on duty virtually all the time, was responsible for enforcing the school's laundry list of rules, and had to teach English to students who despised the subject. His description of this situation in Sometimes a Shining Moment brims with absurdity and hilarity. From this chaotic situation, things at the school went rapidly downhill, if that can be imagined! The crisis precipitated by the lack of student discipline and their almost unbearable apathy led to one of the most wonderful innovations in American education in the past twenty years—the Foxfire experiment. As Wigginton tells it, the Foxfire story is full of drama, risk, adventure, and humor. The beginnings were like this: because of no monetary support from the school, Wigginton and his students begged, borrowed, and stole enough money in the Winter of 1967 to publish 600 copies of a 72-page magazine that included some 65 poetry and essays from professional writers, some drawings, and collections of local lore and oral histories done by his ninth and tenth grade students. This first issue, though a minor financial disaster, made a tremendous impact. Howard Senzel, a college friend of Wigginton, wrote in 1967 the following prophetic remark about the magazine: Foxfire. I was overwhelmed. I think you have turned some people on in a magnificent way.... Nothing about the magazine was "quaint" and folksy the way an annual old ladies' local preservation meeting is. It was straight and honest...how great it would be for this country and yourself and the world, if it grew and prospered, and all that time stayed a Rabun Gap thing. To make a long story short, it grew and prospered—beyond anyone's dreams. The Foxfire Book appeared in 1972 and Foxfire 9 is being readied for publication today. The Foxfire program grew from no budget and no facilities in 1 966 to an operation with the following dimensions in 1986: 24 log buildings (grist mill, blacksmithery, woodshop, museums, etc.), a budget of $400,000, a TV studio, Foxfire Records, a publishing company, the Foxfire String Band, and on and on. But perhaps the real miracle is what happened educationally. All phases of the above projects were done by students, from beginning to end. Because they were doing real work, addressing real audiences, sharing real responsibility, the students quickly mastered the basics of the Language Arts skills, and then went far beyond these basics. Sometimes a Shining Moment is arranged into three sections. The first section is the terrific story of the birth, growth, and flourishing of the Foxfire idea. Part 2 of this book deals with Eliot Wigginton's educational theory, a theory profoundly influenced by...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
May 18, 2023
Rui Wu + 7
