Where Do Mountain Goats Sleep? Bringing Place-Based Collaborative Journaling out of the Woods and into (and beyond) the Classroom

Inviting students to engage in collaborative journaling is a democratic and participatory way to help them to reconsider their classrooms as places of agency and reflection, recording what’s important from their perspectives, as well as a method for bridging places, spaces, and interests beyond the classroom walls. Drawing from collaborative writing, pedagogy on journaling in the classroom, nature writing, and Bob Fecho’s notion of a safe space to engage with, this chapter features journal entries written by high school students while they were volunteering on a summer trail crew for the Student Conservation Association. The author, a current teacher-educator and a former middle and high school teacher who served as the trail crew leader, reflects on this place-based collaborative journaling experience to offer strategies, suggestions, and benefits for teachers to foster collaborative journaling in which the classroom serves as a hub for distribution, redistribution, and sharing of journals while students write in all the places and spaces (inside and beyond the classroom) they occupy throughout the school year.