Faced with that litany of accusations, Wigginton on Nov. A judge, after giving the educator one last night to have dinner with his father, ordered him to report to the jail the next day to begin serving his month sentence. The whole messy affair rocked this small, conservative community, where churches seem to spring up at every bend of the winding mountain roads.
The news also sent shockwaves through the education world, where Wigginton had earned a reputation as a respected writer and teacher-reformer in the model of a Pat Conroy or a Jonathan Kozol. And it devastated the Foxfire organization, which had grown up under his nurturance.
Under the terms of his sentence, he is barred from working with children for 20 years. As Eliot Wigginton prepares to walk out of jail a free man—at least in a physical sense he was released Nov. And can Foxfire thrive without him?
Clad in faded jeans, his shirt sleeves rolled up, Wigginton looks every bit the reformer whose photos appear in Foxfire publications. He has the same round glasses, long buckteeth, and tall, lanky frame that have become almost trademarks for him. At 6 feet 1 inch and pounds, he is impossibly thin. The face may be more lined than the early photographs suggest, but, in truth, Wigginton, at 52, is still somewhat boyish-looking as he sits with his long legs casually sprawled.
The voice, in contrast to the informal image he projects, is deep and resonant, and his words often are eloquent. What I knew, I knew, and what I now know, I know in spades. For all his time in jail, however, Wigginton is less clear about the crime that put him here. He is prohibited, under the terms of his sentence, from denying that he molested the Athens 5th grader. Today, outside the courthouse, he seems more remorseful, offering these words for the colleagues and friends who are still struggling to figure out how the Eliot Wigginton they knew—the educator so unselfishly devoted to the profession—could have done something so wrong, so potentially damaging to a child psychologically.
Already a slow and thoughtful speaker, Wigginton takes an extra moment to puff on a cigarette and to regard the passing cars. I deserve that. There are no signs directing tourists from the main highway to the center. But visitors still manage to find their way up the mountain, past the Blue Hill Baptist Church and the Mountain City Church of God, past the few mongrel dogs that inevitably nap in the street, to the dusty, narrow road that leads to the center.
There are 15 log-and-clay structures scattered among tulip poplars. Some of them are more than years old. Students, working with Foxfire educators, painstakingly disassembled the once-crumbling buildings, moved them from their original sites, and reassembled them here.
Partially hidden by trees, the empty six-sided structure sits atop the complex and overlooks the neighboring mountains. Wigginton has been drawn to this section of northeastern Georgia since childhood.
His widowed father, a former professor of landscape architecture at the University of Georgia, frequently took his son to Rabun County on visits. Almost 60 percent of the county is covered by national forests. And the vacationers who come to enjoy its mist-shrouded hills, lakes, and waterfalls cause the local population of more than 11, to double and triple during the summertime.
But Rabun County today is neither the redneck territory of Deliverance nor the isolated, rural community Wigginton encountered when he first began teaching here in Now, teenage boys do their hunting in the morning before school, and their fathers are more likely to work in textile mills than on farms. Fresh out of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.
His classes were a mixture of boarding students, many from troubled homes, and local public school students for whom there was no room at the high school. The local students were more interested in showing off their cars, hunting, and socializing than they were in Shakespeare, and there was friction between them and the boarding students, who were almost never let off the campus. Once, some boys set fire to his lectern. Thus, Foxfire was born.
Named after a glowing fungus that grows in the damp woods of these mountains, Foxfire magazine at first offered a mixture of poetry and journalistic pieces centered on local folklore and practices. Students went out into the community and interviewed old people. Then they came back and wrote about everything from hog dressing to how to plant crops by the signs of the zodiac. The best of the articles were then compiled in a series of 10 books published by Doubleday.
The first book of the series, The Foxfire Book , is now in its 47th printing and has sold more than 4 million copies. Some of the profits reaped went into the creation of the Foxfire complex.
Other funds were plowed into ill-fated community development projects and into scholarships and summer work programs for students. And Foxfire Fund Inc. Over the years, students working with Foxfire educators have produced record albums, run a blacksmith shop, and formed a string band, among other ventures.
There were also experiments with outdoor and environmental education classes. In , Wigginton published Sometimes a Shining Moment , the semiautobiographical book that attempted to synthesize what he had learned about teaching through those experiences. Teaching, after all, was what Foxfire—the magazine, the books, the string band, and the many other activities—was all about.
Out of it had sprung a pedagogy. That pedagogy held that students learn best when they are engaged in meaningful activities that they choose themselves. What do people do with it in the real world? The really perverse beauty of the philosophy is that it appears to the initiate to be crazy. The principles were not entirely new. MacArthur Foundation. The writer, Debra Viadero, recounts the increasing severity of the accusations against this once-lauded teacher:.
All of the accolades stopped two years ago, however, after a year-old boy from Athens, Ga. Soon after that news broke, other young men began to come forward. They said they, too, had been molested by Wigginton when they were teenagers, and their stories were remarkably similar. By the time the case brought by the Athens boy was scheduled to go to trial, a total of 18 young men were prepared to testify that Wigginton had molested them — or had attempted to — on 23 separate occasions.
Viadero also interviewed Wigginton himself for her article. About any attempt to draw connections between his teaching and his crimes, he had this to say:. And no teacher is immune from the scrutiny that comes with crossing it. Beyond that though, another theme has to be acknowledged: the verve with which so many people — educators and students alike — recognized the value of experiential learning.
It was built on getting students into the community, where they were encouraged to understand and appreciate their own natural and cultural surroundings, and write about it. That approach invests everyone in the education of children, from parents to. No amount of dollars, nor any computer-based program will ever accomplish what human beings working together can accomplish. Today, The Foxfire Fund, Inc. The website offers a range of Teaching materials and News , which right now include pictures from the Foxfire Mountaineer Festival last October and a scholarship opportunity for local students.
Students learned, through their work with Foxfire, to appreciate and better understand the older generations and the past. Students developed a greater appreciation for their native culture and with that developed the confidence that they could carry themselves proudly as mountain people anywhere.
In the mids, I headed a University of Georgia network of public schools called the Georgia League of Professional Schools, which focused on democracy, education, and public purpose Glickman, We partnered with Foxfire to provide professional development to K classroom teachers eager to engage their students in learning activities that extended into their communities.
That collaboration with Foxfire continued until In every education endeavor, unilateral claims of success and failure are highly suspect. Education is a social science, not a hard science of strictly controlled studies, and a major element is the period of time in which the program is evaluated — its first five, 15, 30, or 50 years.
Foxfire belongs to the community as an irreplaceable contribution to the world showing the staying power of students, classrooms, and schools partnering with their community to make education a contribution to both. As Oliver pointed out, Foxfire clearly benefited many students in Rabun County and continues to do so today.
As an outreach effort to influence classrooms and schools throughout the nation, according to teacher survey responses, Foxfire had a major effect on individual classrooms in schools that were members of the Foxfire Regional Networks in the s and s. But today, the name Foxfire is no longer used to describe education practices that support student activity, audience, and service to the community. I reviewed the research on current activity-centered programs that have kinship to the core practices of Foxfire.
Those programs have titles such as project-based learning, place-based education, deep learning, academic service learning, experiential learning, and civic learning. These programs boast many examples and studies showing student success in academic achievement, higher interest in learning, lower dropout rates, and progress beyond school in both higher education and professional careers, and greater participation as adult citizens in local and state affairs. Few of them, however, credit Foxfire with showing that these practices could work in real schools.
Can an education approach to learning be successful if nobody uses its name? I think the answer is yes. Foxfire influenced many of the current, progressive education practices. The downside is that these practices have not become as widespread as they should.
Educational approaches that promote student engagement and student contribution remain a glaring need for all students. Unfortunately, such experiential, inquiry-oriented learning is often only found in honors classes or in those with gifted students and in schools with a preponderance of students from middle to high socioeconomic backgrounds.
The students who need an active and contributory education most are the ones who receive it least Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, ; Levinson, ; Levine, I alluded to tumultuous times with Foxfire.
How these difficulties have been navigated is particularly relevant to education and schools and communities of the future. For many reasons, Foxfire has no business to be still standing and planning for its next 50 years.
But, in , he was indicted for child molestation, pleaded guilty, served prison time, and was ordered out of state, and removed from any further involvement with the program.
He was convicted on a single count, but prosecutors contended that his victims numbered many more. Due to public outrage, Foxfire was nearly disbanded. But current and former students took it upon themselves to post notices on the windows of downtown businesses asking the community to keep the program and museum alive.
It was tough going for many years. A Foxfire board member volunteered his time to negotiate legal settlements, which helped the organization avoid bankruptcy. He called my bluff. They drank some more beer with Wig and fell asleep. My mind just would not go there. Wilson has a conscious memory of only one incident when he was sexually molested by Eliot Wigginton.
According to investigators and sworn testimony, Eliot Wigginton abused dozens, perhaps as many as boys and young men. The molestations allegedly began the year that Eliot Wigginton first stepped into the classroom, and for 25 years constituted a current of suspicion and fear that wound through Rabun County like a black creek. He attended Chase Street Elementary School there, was nearsighted, and repeated the ninth grade. He later attended Hill School, a private preparatory facility in Pennsylvania, and eventually Cornell.
He was president of his fraternity and wanted to be a writer. His senior year, he had decided the only profession that would allow him to write was teaching. And in the summer of , he was hired sight unseen by the principal of Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School. Vietnam was igniting campuses across the country. The South was rioting. Nations were racing to the moon.
And these kids were growing bored, ignorant and disruptive. Others seemed duty bound to tear down his classroom at every turn of his back.
One student once even tried to set fire to Mr. But by late fall of , he had struggled, parried and literally arm wrestled his students to a stalemate. Now what are we going to do together to make it through the rest of the year? The answer came in the form of a student project, a high school magazine called Foxfire , named for a glowing fungus found locally in the damp mountain humus.
Students interviewed community elders on the vanishing details of native Appalachian life, from superstitions and planting by the weather signs, to building log cabins and making moonshine. In the best of the interviews were compiled into The Foxfire Book , which is currently in its 47th printing.
Eliot Wigginton was Georgia Teacher of the Year in He has received the John D. He has been on the Today show three times, Good Morning America once. Guess what. I woke up the other night and this guy had my hammer in his hand. Tommy Wilson sat in a Clayton hotel room sipping coffee, reaching back through the fog, mixing a little scripture and a little dark humor with gulping honesty now, because the truth—best as he can remember it—is all that remains. The summer of , Wilson had finished his first year at Shorter College but stayed heavily involved in Foxfire.
He was one of the first three students ever paid by the organization through a stipend program that continues today. That fall, around Thanksgiving break, as Wilson recalls it, he again returned home to Rabun County. By then, Wigginton had moved off of the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee campus and was living alone in a private house. As he had done many times before, Tommy visited his former teacher, drank with him and fell asleep. Coming to, he might have just as implausibly found himself driving down a dark highway and arriving on the scene of a horrible accident.
He says Wig had pulled his pants down. He had never had sexual contact of that nature with anyone, and he froze, like a rabbit caught in rushing headlights. Then he stood up and left the room.
0コメント