Making It Home

2008
Wisconsin Cultural Tours
for K-12 Teachers

Ashland-Chequamegon Bay Tour
Milwaukee Tour

What Will I Learn?
How to Apply
Tour Costs
Tour Faculty
Professional Development
Download a Tour Summary (.pdf)
Contact Us

Making It Home in 2008! The Ashland-Chequamegon Bay Tour is full.

Join scholars, cultural and natural resource specialists, guest presenters and other K-12 teachers from throughout the state on one of two 2008 tours—in the Ashland-Chequamegon Bay area June 23-27, 2008 or in Milwaukee August 4-8, 2008. The two multi-disciplinary tours explore land and water issues in Wisconsin, a state that has had a long tradition of leadership in conservation and resource stewardship.

Making It Home asks: How do people make this their home? What is their relationship to the land and water where they live?

Both tours are a special project of Wisconsin Teachers of Local Culture and are sponsored by the Wisconsin Humanities Council, the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures and the Wisconsin Arts Board.

Take this opportunity to explore northern Wisconsin’s beautiful Chequamegon Bay region or the vibrant culture of Milwaukee, the state’s largest metropolitan area while earning Graduate Credits or meeting the content requirements of your Professional Development Plan.

Making It Home regional cultural tours are based on the idea that resources and content for teaching exist all around us—in the local environment and landscapes, in family stories, in local artistic expressions, in community history and contemporary social issues.

What You Can Learn and Use

Making It Home seeks to promote understanding of Wisconsin’s disparate cultures through a deeper awareness of how people connect with the land around them. Topics addressed during the tour will include cultural geography, environmental studies, folklore and folklife, history, agriculture, arts, meteorology, biology, rural sociology and urban planning.

What You Can Learn

Meet Local Residents: The tours will look at how a variety of residents think about and respond to issues involving their homes in this Great Lakes state. Those residents will include, among others, tribal members and descendants of European settlers, municipal employees and neighborhood activists, artists and homemakers, immigrants and conservation workers, scientists and health professionals. In different settings and in different ways these people will present tour participants with aspects of their own connections to the land, their insights and beliefs, and resulting cultural expressions.

Talk with Scholars and Faculty: Noted environmental scholar and author Curt Meine will offer the opening presentation for both tours. He will explore the history of conservation and environmentalism in Wisconsin to help lend understanding to today’s activities and perspectives. He will also examine Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic, and explore its meaning in the 21st century as the state’s growing and diverse population faces new challenges.

Four faculty members will accompany the Ashland-Chequamegon Bay tour and three faculty members will accompany the Milwaukee tour.

What You Can Use

Each Making It Home tour will offer teachers a chance to experience directly how Wisconsin citizens relate to the land and water around them through on-site guided tours, interaction with local residents and community-based presentations. The tour itineraries are especially designed for the needs of teachers and will include “inside the community” experiences not usually available to tourists or independent travelers.

K-12 teachers will be able to use the information generated through this experience to meet state curriculum standards for such topics as:

• community (Grades PreK-3),
• Wisconsin history (4-5),
• immigration (6-8),
• environmental stewardship (4-12),
• visual culture (4-12), and
• content-based writing (4-12).

In addition to providing content and first-hand experiences, the tour will also address two specific needs identified by teachers:

• experiential training in ways to study local culture, and
• simple methods by which to incorporate local culture studies into existing curricula.

Ashland-Chequamegon Bay - June 23-27, 2008

This multi-disciplinary tour explores land and water issues in the Ashland-Chequamegon Bay region of Wisconsin, a state that has had a long tradition of leadership in conservation and resource stewardship.

Tour Details: The Ashland-Chequamegon Bay tour will begin on Monday morning June 23, 2008 near the shores of Lake Superior’s Chequamegon Bay. The tour will conclude in the same location on the following Friday, June 27, 2008.

Teachers will spend the week traveling through Bayfield and Ashland counties with overnights at the Pigeon Lake Field Station (shown at right) in the Chequamegon Forest and at the Chequamegon Hotel in downtown Ashland. The Pigeon Lake Field Station is a renovated, former CCC camp operated by the UW-River Falls. The Chequamegon Hotel was built in 1986, its architecture inspired by an earlier 19th-century resort hotel that once stood nearby on the bay shore.

Local Background: The Ashland-Chequamegon Bay region of the state has long been recognized for its deep, rugged and quiet beauty. It has been home to the Ojibwe for centuries, whose journey from near the Atlantic Ocean brought them to this Lake Superior area, abundant in wild rice and other natural resources. Later arrivals included European immigrants who fished, worked as loggers, developed cutover farms, and in bringing their distinctive customs and traditions, also made the area their home. Today, people continue to be drawn to the rocky shores, rural landscapes and clear air, some as year-round residents and others as seasonal tourists.

Cultural Issues: The growing and varied populations of the Ashland-Chequamegon Bay area have also brought changes. European-Americans, especially, changed the landscapes in significant and sometimes inalterable ways. Logging old growth timber and extracting the area’s mineral resources are two activities whose impact can still be seen. Today, the region faces increased land development, bringing concern for such issues as watershed health, land values and sense of community.

The area has also been home to those with a strong sense of land stewardship from the Ojibwe caring for the Kakagon sloughs, to area farmers maintaining soil fertility to Ashland’s Northland College developing its strong environmental focus. In recent years, a growing eco-community movement has drawn national and international attention. Come and see how a variety of different people live in the present, look to the future, and make this area their home.

	Enjoy a traditional Slovak luncheon and take a guided tour around the Town of Pilsen to learn about the land issues currently being addressed by local residents in this rural area.
	Explore the Chequamegon National Forest with U.S. Forest Service staff and Diane Defoe, a member of the Red Cliff Band of the Lake Superior Ojibwe and traditional birch bark basket maker. See the Forest Service’s birch regeneration project and hear from Diane about the cultural importance of birch to the Ojibwe.
	Hear the personal narratives of longtime local resident and teacher Russ Bailey around the campfire at Pigeon Lake. Russ uses storytelling and his own experiences as a fisherman and dock worker to engage students in his science classes.
	Tour Bodin’s fish processing plant in Bayfield and hear the perspectives of fourth-generation fisherman Jeff Bodin. Then, take a short walk through town to enjoy a luncheon at the Bayfield City Pavilion on the shores of Lake Superior.
	Take a 3-hour trip out into Lake Superior’s Chequamegon Bay waters aboard a scientific research vessel for an intriguing, scientific perspective on the land, water and aquatic life. Some of the teachers will travel along the Red Cliff coast aboard the UW-Superior’s L.L. Smith conducting water sampling, others will trawl for fish with U.S. Geological Survey biologists aboard the Kiyi.
	Visit Washburn Elementary School, designated as a Green and Healthy School, where students grow vegetables in a school garden for their own hot-lunch food program. Take a tour of Washburn with Mayor Irene Blakely to see a variety of projects that citizens and the city have undertaken in this first eco-municipality in Wisconsin.
	Tour the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission offices located on the Bad River Reservation. This inter-tribal agency, comprised of eleven member tribes residing in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan, addresses land, water and treaty issues facing the Ojibwe. The Bad River Reservation is also the home of the Kakagon Sloughs, the largest coastal wetlands on the Great Lakes

Milwaukee - August 4-8, 2008

This multi-disciplinary tour explores land and water issues in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a state that has had a long tradition of leadership in conservation and resource stewardship.

Tour Details: This tour will begin on Monday morning August 4, 2008 on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. The tour will conclude in the same location on the following Friday August 8, 2008.

Teachers will spend the week traveling throughout the City of Milwaukee. All overnights will be spent at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Housing suites.

Local Background : The City of Milwaukee grew up at the confluence of three rivers at one of the finest natural harbors on Lake Michigan. The rich resources of the rivers and their wetlands had attracted people to the area for thousands of years. European traders met residents of well-established Native villages upon their arrival in the 18th century.

The surge of European-American immigration and industrialization that was to follow changed the face of the landscape and the rivers themselves. Industrialization created a solid foundation of manufacturing jobs for the city that was to be known as “The Machine Shop of the World.” But, as factories later closed, that same industrialization left acres of unused land, some with potentially unhealthy soils. Milwaukee’s immigrants, especially the Germans, also brought strong cultural traditions emphasizing the positive value of shared public space. Bringing this influence into municipal government, Milwaukee officials in the late 19th and early 20th centuries established a park system long recognized as a national model.

Cultural Issues: Current Milwaukee residents inherit the challenges and strengths of their city’s past. Some issues are abiding concerns and others have been compounded with new complexities. While today’s residents face the ever-present challenge of using Lake Michigan as a source of drinking water, they also see a growing, and sometimes disconcerting, national interest in the lake’s supply of water.

Many Milwaukee citizens are energetically addressing their city’s land and water issues. Activities include urban agriculture initiatives, revitalization of the rivers and monitoring of the Lake Michigan spawning reefs, critical for the health of the yellow perch, Milwaukee’s fish fry favorite. Recent immigrants bring new cultural traditions, adding to the city’s rich mix of diverse heritages and renewing the question, “What makes this home?” Neighborhood residents, scientists, municipal officials and scores of others bring their own varied perspectives to develop ways to move into the future with a strong sense of their shared place.

The Milwaukee tour is still under development. Additional information will be added as details are confirmed.

	Enjoy a boat tour exploring the Milwaukee and Menomonee Rivers and their historic and contemporary roles in the cultural and commercial life of the area.
	Tour the last operating farm in the City of Milwaukee, Growing Power, where Will Allen has drawn a diverse group of people to explore innovative and intensive urban agriculture techniques, gaining international acclaim.
	Explore land along the banks of the Kinnickinnic River in one of the neighborhoods served by the Sixteenth Street Community Health Center. Staff in the center’s Sustainable Development Program are working with teachers, students and other residents to develop plans for meeting community needs and environmental health concerns in reinvigorating the river corridor.
	Visit Walnut Way Conservation Corporation, a civic engagement and neighborhood revitalization effort on Milwaukee’s north side. Hear about their youth program and projects that include the creation of high-production community gardens; installation of rain gardens and rain barrels; and the establishment of a neighborhood-scale fruit orchard.
	Investigate what it means when an artist chooses to incorporate images of home in his artwork. Meet Milwaukee painter Juan Flores and view his murals at Botanas, a popular Mexican restaurant on the near south side.

Tour Faculty

On the Tours:

• Staff folklorist, Dr. Ruth Olson, Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, UW-Madison
• Staff historian, Debbie Kmetz, Coordinator of Wisconsin Teachers of Local Culture
• Curriculum specialist, Dr. Anne Pryor, Wisconsin Arts Board Folk Arts Education Coordinator
• Resident meteorologist and research scientist (Ashland tour only), Dr. Steve Ackerman, Director of the UW-Madison’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies

Guest Faculty: The Ashland-Chequamegon Bay tour will also feature presentations by the following guest faculty aboard the scientific research vessels L.L. Smith and the Kiyi:

• Sue O’Halloran, Water Resources Specialist, University of Wisconsin Extension, L.L. Smith
• Dr. Owen Gorman, Research Fisheries Biologist, U.S. Geological Survey Great Lakes Science Center, R/V Kiyi
• Gary Cholwek, Research Fisheries Technician, U.S. Geological Survey Great Lakes Science Center, R/V Kiyi

Tour Costs

One Making It Home tour, $185. Includes tour transportation, meals, lodging and admissions.

These affordable 2008 Making It Home tours are made possible with funding from the Wisconsin Humanities Council. Additional support is provided by the Wisconsin Arts Board, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the UW-Madison.

UW-La Crosse Course Credit

Each of these tours may be taken by teachers for 1-3 University of Wisconsin-La Crosse graduate credits. Those interested in acquiring UW-La Crosse graduate credit should contact Dr. Anne Pryor for more information.

The cost of UW-La Crosse tuition is not included in the $185 bus tour fee.

Professional Development Plan

Participation in each of these tours may be used to meet some of the content requirements of a teacher’s Professional Development Plan. The tours will address the following Wisconsin standards:

1. Teachers know the subjects they are teaching.

3. Teachers understand that children learn differently.

6. Teachers communicate well.

7. Teachers are able to plan different kinds of lessons.

10. Teachers are connected to other teachers and the community.

How to Apply

Download an Application (.pdf)

Teachers and Staff

There are 21 seats on each tour available to K-12 Wisconsin teachers and staff. The seats will be assigned on a first-come, first-served basis.

The deadline for both tours has been extended.

Interested teachers and staff should print out and complete the registration form (PDF) and mail it with a check or money order to the Wisconsin Arts Board. A check or money order for $185 must accompany the registration form in order to secure a seat. Purchase orders will not be accepted.

Your registration is secure when you receive confirmation via email or standard mail.

College Students

There are also 3 seats on both tours available to undergraduate or graduate students attending a college or university located in Wisconsin. Students have a different application procedure. Interested students should contact Dr. Ruth Olson for the application procedure at reolson3@wisc.edu.

Student applications are due April 1, 2007.

Contact Us

For more information about Making It Home-Wisconsin Cultural Tours for K-12 Teachers, email Debbie Kmetz, dkmetz@wisc.edu, or phone (608) 262-8180

Wisconsin Arts Board

Dr. Anne Pryor, anne.pryor@wisconsin.gov

Wisconsin Humanities Council 

Dena Wortzel, dwortzel@wisc.edu

Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures

Dr. Ruth Olson, reolson3@wisc.edu

Wisconsin Teachers of Local Culture home page