"Dr. John Willets is an educator of working adults seeking baccalaureate
and masters degrees from DePaul University's School for New Learning (an
alternative higher education program for working adults). He is also an
ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church. His parents were born in Central
Appalachia and moved to Illinois after losing their land and resources to
those who mined the minerals from the farms. They were not miners, they
were hill people, subsistence farmers, poor and proud of their heritage.
Although he was born and grew up in West Central Illinois, his ethnicity,
language patterns, and stories are derived from the Appalachian experience.
He was a first generation college student whose parents hadn't completed
high school but they valued education and wanted a better life for their
children. They came with their own parents from a place they loved and
cherished and where their hearts and memories were nourished and
strengthened by a subculture of the American experience. John owes his own
dreams and aspirations for a life committed to justice and social change to
these parents, their parents, and the stories and values of a place called
Appalachia." -- jw
"A Search for Justice"
by John Willets
"Since World War II, many rural communities have relied on jobs provided by manufacturing, but those jobs are quickly moving overseas, Hite [James, adjunct professor of agricultural and applied economics at Virginia Tech] said. 'It's probably inevitable that [foreign] competition will continue to be a threat to the economies of rural Virginia.'
"That trend is unlikely to change, Hite said, unless rural communities can find new products to make that will be in high demand around the world.
"Rural areas also have to reverse the loss of young, well-educated people who move to cities for better jobs, Hite said.
"'If opportunities are thinner and thinner in rural areas, people will leave until you get down to some sort of residual population,' which relies more and more on public assistance from urban areas, he said.
"The economic decline in rural areas should concern residents of cities and suburbs, too, because a migration of people from rural communities will put a strain on urban economies, said Del. Whittington W. Clement, D-Danville, who co-sponsored the legislation creating the commission.
"'We've got to convince the urban and suburban areas that have so much clout in the General Assembly that they have a stake in this," Clement said. "It's not just our problem. It's going to be a huge problem for wealthy areas of the state.'
"Wilkins urged the commission to look for alternative types of agriculture and manufacturing to help boost rural economies. The commission also should focus on improving education, he said.
"'You're not going to put them in a high-tech world overnight,' Wilkins said. 'We've got to do things with our infrastructure and educational system to bring this all together.'"
-- Rural Economic Decline Causing Conncerns, John Reid Blackwell, Richmond Times-Dispatch 8/25/00
Graphic: "Abstract" by Suzan Ertuman, Morgantown WV, currently a BFA student at Richmond's Virginia Commonwealth University.
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My parents moved to Illinois as children: my
father from West Virginia and my mother from eastern Kentucky. While I am a
native of Illinois, my childhood memories are filled with stories that
derive from the Appalachian experience. As an adult, I returned to Appalachia and engaged in justice work in a
variety of settings. Returning to DePaul it occurred to me that Appalachia
has a long, rich, and compelling history of work for social justice and it
could teach us much about justice.
About two years ago, Appalachia: A Search for Justice (Capstone Seminar) was conceived and founded on an underlying
question: What does Appalachia have to teach us?
This course is offered to
working adults returning to college to earn a baccalaureate degree at DePaul
University's School for New Learning (Chicago). It grows out of my own
ethnicity and acculturation. The course is designed so that learners
come to an evolving personal definition of social justice and what it means
to deal with power, oppression, and class difference. Although many of my
students are without personal experience of extremes, they do experience and
can articulate conditions related to oppression. Many of them are first
generation college students. Most are women and the average age of the
students is about 35. Many have experienced previous attempts at earning a
college degree, but for one reason or another did not complete their degree
programs. Some start from the beginning of a degree program and almost all
articulate this learning opportunity as a "last chance" at achieving a goal
they dreamed of.
Given their experiences and the compelling history of Appalachia, it seemed
to me Appalachia is a place offering a great opportunity where learners can
engage class struggle, environmental spoilage, and artistic expressions of
both. Learners could engage at nearly any aspect of the human experience
and come away clearer in their own thinking about social justice and, at the
same time, devise strategies to confront power and exploitation within the
context of their own lives.
The course does not tell learners what to think about social justice and
does not give them the definition for it. The course offers them a rich
experience of a people who struggle in their own journeys and work out
strategies and actions to engage for a more just world. To engage in
concepts about social justice and social action, learners are encouraged to
include in their course experience the opportunity to travel to Appalachia.
While the course focuses primarily on the experiences of people from Central
Appalachia, my own ethnic origin, some choose to encounter Southern
Appalachia. Often when this happens, it is because they discovered in their
own personal histories a connection to this geographic region and they
choose to explore some of their own memories of stories they heard as they
grew up.
If students choose to make the journey to Appalachia, I encourage them to go
in small groups and an itinerary must be planned prior to their departure.
They make appointments to visit with specific organizations or persons and
they leave some open time for opportunities to trace down suggestions made
by people whom they encounter. As expected, they always return with their
experiences of the hospitality of mountain people and with a different
understanding of what justice means in their own lives and in their own
experiences. Appalachia is a good teacher! The people of Appalachia are
good teachers!
Outcomes of the learning experience are presented in a learning
portfolio at the course website. There are a variety of suggestions for the content of the
portfolio, but the door is open for negotiating something different than
what's requested in the course design. Among the things students discover
in their course experiences is the powerful articulation of life
transformation learning offers. Not many who make the trip come back
unchanged. In a few cases, the transformation is strong enough to create
changes in their own life journeys. In other cases, students discover their
own life experiences contain contentions with power at a level not realized
before taking the course. One student wrote her own music and the lyrics
reflected the pathos and hope that is often found in hill music. She
described the lyrics to her songs and the songs of others as the Wall Street
Journal editorials of common folks like herself. What she discovered is
music is a powerful transmitter of social concerns and social action.
Another student discovered in the churches of Appalachia the seeds of
longing in his own soul that hadn't had the benefit of his own reflection
and meaning-making until he heard the stories of those he met in Appalachian
churches. A third student was empowered by the women of Appalachia whom she
met and talked to and came back to volunteer in local agencies advocating
and working toward women's rights and needs. A fourth student, a women
whose work is union organizing, learned to tell stories and decided to go to
story-telling workshops and learn to be a better story teller so her stories
might tell of the struggle and hope of the working class and incite others
to action for justice.
These few examples illustrate the power of Appalachia to teach! It wasn't
my teaching that brought them to their understandings and transformations,
it was their experience of a people and a place to make a difference in the
lives of a few so that the lives of many can be touched. Because of my own
ethnicity, I do not think of Appalachia as a place of impoverishment. On
the contrary, I think of it as a place of power and solidarity. I think of
it as a place of fierce independence with an undercurrent of power that can
inform and transform. I think of it as a place of beauty that cannot be
spoiled and where God can show us the resilience of God's power for
preservation and renewal in the face of the power of men who would eke out
the last drop of energy from nature and from the bodies of women and men who
cannot be beaten.
Graphic: oil on canvas, Margaret Gregg, Mill 'N Creek Studio Gallery, Limestone TN
"Most troubling of all is the sense that the Clinton mantra—'If everyone’s
lying, no one is'—has pervaded every aspect of our life as a nation. Our
tolerance for untruth of every kind and degree, from pastel hypocrisy to
garish outright fabrication, is really pretty amazing. It’s a tolerance that
the peddlers of untruth have found to be pure gold." --
Inflation Is Here: Ask Weary Drivers by the Lobster Inn
by Michael M. Thomas,
6/26/2000 edition of The New York Observer
"Last year, 160 times more people died from AIDS, malaria, respiratory
diseases and diarrhea than the number killed by natural disasters, including
the massive earthquakes in Turkey, floods in Venezuela and Indian cyclones...." --
Associated Press
 Table of Contents
Word Preserve
text © John Willets; graphics © Jeannette Harris, September 2000.
All rights reserved.
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