Introduction
By Mitch Mendosa

The writing of the introductions of Voices of the Valley Volumes I-III has given me the opportunity to articulate many of the educational and social values of the project. I’ve seen scores of students learn important academic skills while contributing something of value to the community. Since we began the Voices of the Valley project five years ago, my opinions about teaching strategies have evolved substantially.

In 1897, Mark Twain wrote in Following the Equator, “Apparently––like our public–school boy––his ‘education’ consists of learning things, not the meaning of them; he is fed upon the husks, not the corn.” I have been very fortunate to work with many educators who strive diligently to avoid this type of instruction. The persistent validity of Twain’s observation serves as a driving force for those of us trying to develop methods that allow students to learn at very high levels. It’s imperative that students become active participants in their education and not passive recipients of information.

For students to participate actively in their learning, a high level of student motivation is required. The stereotypical image of high school students half asleep and bored stiff while their teacher drones on about this and that, dissolves as students become active in an educational pursuit that holds meaning for them. One might counter that this learning must then be remedial, lacking much academic rigor. I would argue that, even though that is certainly a danger, a skilled teacher guides the students down paths that demand the development of higher level skills. Students working within the context of a project or lesson in which they are interested will traverse very challenging obstacles (learning opportunities) in order to accomplish a goal. What’s more, if the students play active roles in the creation of the goal, and the steps required to reach the goal, motivation increases dramatically and high level learning follows suit.

Adults are the same. We all acquire knowledge and skills much more readily when the goal is intriguing and we create and modify the steps to reach the goal. Let’s say, for example, that learning Italian is a goal for you because you’ve just found out that a long-lost, Italian-speaking aunt is moving to town. That could be very powerful motivation to learn Italian, unless she’s obnoxious, of course. For the sake of the example, let’s say your aunt is wonderfully friendly and cooks great pasta. You would probably overcome many obstacles in order to accomplish the goal of learning Italian. Perhaps you’d take a class at the local college and invite your aunt to visit regularly in order to help with the homework. Perhaps you’d cook (great pasta, of course) together on weekends where Italian was the only language to be spoken. Compare that learning environment with a required course where you were forced to sit and do boring, repetitive Italian worksheets with the sole goal of getting credit for the class. I think it’s obvious which setting is more conducive to learning.

During the last five years, I have worked very hard to create a high quality learning environment in our Voices of the Valley class. I say “our” class because I don’t look at it as my class at all. It belongs to the students as much as to me. In fact, it is more theirs than mine. They do the majority of the work. My role is to guide them down the necessary educational paths and keep them on track so that they can reach their goal of publishing their book and CD.

I’ve been asked why we don’t purchase dictating software that would allow the students to speak into a microphone while the text is automatically typed. My answer is that transcribing the seemingly endless audio is a very important learning opportunity. It’s one of those educational paths that I demand the students go down. Although they complain vigorously throughout the whole transcription process, they always emerge at the culmination feeling an incredible sense of pride that their English and word-processing skills have improved so drastically.

The Volume IV student historian staff is no exception. In addition to having admitted that the dreaded transcription process taught them lifelong writing skills, they’ve discovered many other things they’ve learned. They have improved their conversation skills, English skills (especially for our native Spanish speakers), digital photo editing skills, digital audio recording and editing skills, and have learned a lot about history. Equally important is the immeasurable sense of accomplishment and pride that they’ve earned during the process of preserving the stories of eight of the Valley’s residents.

During the last couple of years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a national group on assessment practices. Deena Zarlin, the Mendocino North Coast Rural Challenge Network coordinator, and I have been meeting regularly with a talented group of people from the Rural School and Community Trust, Educational Testing Services, Harvard School of Education, as well as educators from around the country. Our task has been to develop tools that measure the learning that takes place within the context of a place-based project like Voices of the Valley. To try out these tools, the Voices of the Valley Student Learning Committee was created. We took an in-depth look at two areas of student learning. Although there are many areas that we could have examined, we decided to focus on how the interviewing process improves students’ abilities to speak more fluently with elders and how English as a Second Language (ESL) students improve their English acquisition through the transcription process.

In order to analyze how interviewing improves a student’s communication fluency, we studied interviews that Gabe Shapiro participated in during the construction of Volumes II and III. We charted his utterances during his first interview and his last interview and compared them. During his first interview, Gabe spoke only 196 words. 150 of these words were read from a list of questions. That means that only 46 words, or about one-quarter of what he said, were created by Gabe on the spot.

This was contrasted with what Gabe said during his last interview. During this interview, Gabe spoke 352 words, nearly doubling his speaking quantity compared to his initial interview. What’s more, only 45 of these words were read from a piece of paper. Three hundred and six words, or about six-sevenths of what Gabe said were created by him during the interview. The content of what he said was at a much higher cognitive level as well. He was asking for clarifications, commenting on observations, and generally communicating much more fluently during his last interview.

Gabe adds, “I found out that I was a lot better as an interviewer. I asked a lot more questions. And I noticed that interviewing has been a good thing for me, and I might want to do it in the future. I might want to do broadcasting or something like that.”

The other skill the Voices of the Valley Student Learning Committee studied was how the transcription process helped ESL students acquire English. When the students transcribe the conversations for the books, they type five-minute segments from various interviews. This assures that students become familiar with at least parts of each of the interviews. Students wear headphones and listen to these interview segments as they type.

When Maria Malfavon joined the Voices of the Valley project, she knew very little English. When we began studying Maria’s English acquisition improvement, she had been here two years, and had already participated in the creation of Voices of the Valley, Volume II. Students like Maria, who are in the process of learning English as their second language, often have difficulty understanding the subtleties of English, and, therefore, make errors in their transcriptions. For the sake of discussion, we’ll call them ESL errors. These do not include typing errors.

We examined a transcription that Maria typed in the fall of 2000 and another that she typed in the spring of 2001. It’s important to note that Maria didn’t participate in either one of the interviews from which these segments were derived. During the transcribing of a five-minute interview segment in the fall, Maria made 39 ESL errors out of total of 1,160 words typed. That’s one ESL error for every 30 words transcribed. An example of an error Maria made in the fall was, instead of hearing and typing “...it was nothing for her to walk to a country school...” she typed, “...there was nothing for her to walk to a country school...” Maria’s lack of exposure to the intricacies of spoken English were to blame for her substitution of the word “there” for the word “it”, completely losing the meaning of the sentence. Another example of this is Maria’s typing of the sentence “...did we have a share of him in 1922?” instead of “...did we have a sheriff in 1922?”
In the spring, Maria made only six ESL errors in a five-minute interview segment that contained 828 words. That’s one ESL error for every 138 words transcribed. This means that Maria understood much more of what was being said and was able to reduce her ESL errors substantially. She was making nearly five times more errors in the fall compared to what she was transcribing in the spring.

Anyone who has struggled to learn another language, especially English, can relate to the difficulties Maria and her native Spanish-speaking classmates go through daily. The fact that she is now much more fluent in English than when she began the Voices of the Valley project is evidence of the power of this type of learning and, of course, Maria’s tenacity. I am proud to say that Maria is on the staff that created this volume as well, and has continued to make vast improvements in her English skills.

Maria adds, “The interviews were much easier this year for me because I got to talk more and I could understand what the people were saying better. This made it easier to listen and transcribe much better. I still have some trouble with some of the English accents.”
Voices of the Valley, unlike any other professional endeavor that I’ve undertaken, has had an extraordinary impact on me. I am eternally grateful for all the support I’ve been given by so many people. The Anderson Valley teachers and administration, as well as my fellow North Coast Rural Challenge Network educators from Laytonville, Mendocino, and Point Arena, have provided a wealth of encouragement. I’m especially indebted to my family for putting up with my obsession, to Maria Goodwin for her scrupulous editing, and to the many talented students with whom I’ve learned so much about this special valley. This project has also made me a better teacher. I’ve learned that students, when given the freedom to develop every aspect of a project, are more than willing to use this endowment to perform important community service. I’ve found that students have a burning desire to make the world around them a better place. I’ve also learned that when students have a real say in what they do at school, a teacher can challenge them to learn at levels previously inconceivable.

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