Introduction
Skip other details (including permanent urls, DOI, citation information): This work is protected by copyright and may be linked to without seeking permission. Permission must be received for subsequent distribution in print or electronically. Please contact [email protected] for more information.
For more information, read Michigan Publishing's access and usage policy.
Although architects, city planners, sociologists, and urban historians research adult behaviors in public and private spaces, much less is known about how children respond to their surroundings, how they explore, create worlds of their own, or find havens from nightmare and violence. What causes them to gravitate to certain locales in quest of comfort, security, excitement, community, self-awareness, or beauty? When we force children to live in ugly and dangerous areas, or mass media assault them with labels and "lifestyles" of the rich and famous, we squeeze them and their futures at the most basic level. The relentless destruction of vegetation by developers and the "malling" of recreational spaces indicate how little adults actually care or understand about children's contact with living things or the social isolation of the very poor. City planners rarely consider the civic rights of low-caste children or those for whom home is not safe. Assumptions made by those trained in architecture, engineering, or real estate development often run counter to the actual needs of kids growing up on a scary street, without a backyard, congregation, or community barbecue. Most Americans now dwell in urban centers, yet assumptions about childhood still reflect romantic ideals of the past, not the white noise of today's advertising. As vicarious pursuits, virtual pets, and synthetic playgrounds take over, should we worry that a world where children have minimal engagement with plants and animals might be threatening to nature itself?
As our own sense of endangered survival on this shrinking planet becomes acute, children are our last frontier. A fitting topic for the year 2000, they represent 20 percent of our population but 100 percent of our future. Carl Jung wrote in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, "the child is on the one hand delivered helpless into the power of terrible enemies and in continual danger of extinction while on the other he possesses powers far exceeding those of ordinary humanity." To the degree that we can envision children as triumphant go-betweens or heroic survivors, they shelter the imagination and sustain the hope of adults. Childhood is thus both a chronological stage and mental construct, an existential fact and locus of desire, a mythical country continually mapped by grownups in search of their subjectivity in another time and place.
This volume, which grew out of a November 1998 University of Michigan Residential College exhibition and symposium on children and their environments, extends that two-day interdisciplinary forum beyond events convened at Nichols Arboretum, East Quad, the School of Education, and the International Institute. It allows all the original artists, three speakers—Louise Chawla, Robin Moore, Eugene Provenzo—and Lois Kuznets, who with Leslie Becker co-mounted the children's literature exhibit, to share their work with a wider audience. Moreover, this double issue engages some sixty additional literary artists and scholars from a variety of fields who amplify and deepen the investigation of secret spaces in early life. The names of students who created microhabitats outside and helped mount many displays are missing here. But they videotaped and facilitated events that enabled a thousand children to explore Nichols Arboretum, to build a Wendy House, and to photograph, draw, and write about myriad secrets found in the woods and in books. These young people are thus represented by the tremendous energy and response that local storytellers, architects, educators, urban planners, children's theatre groups, librarians, museum staff, recreation specialists, horticulturalists and gardeners, book and toy collectors brought to this project last year. They enabled it to grow outside a single course, "Earth-Centered Children in the Virtual Age," and beyond the university in exhibitions, presentations, play spaces in Detroit, a video produced and directed by Katherine Weider and Beverly Wood, and now this double issue of MQR. These young people's understanding of the need for secret spaces of childhood is a critical resource, which urges us to think about issues of land use, environmental justice, and the need to preserve what Robin Moore calls "natural learning."
While none of the authors in this volume are children, their words ratify the declaration of Edna St. Vincent Millay: "Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies." This epigraph to Nancy Willard's "The Secret Speaks" stakes out a universal geography where eternity enters time, the destiny awaiting every survivor of infancy. While the secret of childhood may live "in nobody's story," the range of ethnic and geographic responses in this issue underscores the fact that childhood is a kingdom that everybody shares, regardless of age, gender, race, class, or sexual identity. Whether they look to the past, inside themselves, or closely at children themselves, all the contributors gesture toward a private terrain expressive of emotional paths trodden throughout life. Although the hearts and minds gathered here approach the same topic from entirely different directions—some standing on the outside clarifying and surveying complex issues, some from the inside, probing and inventing intricate metaphors—all the voices speak of an unseen site from which every attempt to make sense of the world derives. Together they demonstrate that children aren't the only ones who need secret spaces. Adults must re-enter this gnomic and elusive state if they want to nurture real children or escape the confining surfaces and material preoccupations which distract them from the cache lode within.
Since I conceived this project in 1991—originally as a yet unrealized exhibition of multicultural children's books for the Huntington Library and an outdoor musical treasure hunt with the help of Peter Sellars—much has happened to make secret spaces of childhood an urgent and timely subject. Cuts in public school funding and welfare, called by journalist Mickey Kaus the "umbilical cord through which the mainstream society sustains the isolated ghetto society," have altered lives. Scientists, surprised by the rate of growth in the brain tissue of infants and toddlers, have found evidence of new cells developing later in life at sites where memories are first formed. But in this Decade of the Brain, busy adults seem blind to emotional wiring, to bottled-up rage and scarring events that sink the self. While fifteen children in the U.S. are killed daily by firearms, incidents of juvenile violence jarringly refract the lesson learned early, as Brad Davis puts it in these pages, that "to kill well is to win big." As childhood is perceived as increasingly threatened, invaded, polluted, or "stolen" by adults, vagrant minors around the world search for hideaways, and street children from Cairo and Bogotá to Seoul are seen but not heard. The anthropologist Sharon Stephens, who died as Secret Spaces of Childhood began to take shape at the University of Michigan, noted how easily "at risk" and "out of place" children—at work, in war zones, and refugee camps, in prisons and the media—become problematic "risky children" who need to be "eliminated . . . controlled, reshaped, and harnessed" in a rapidly changing global order.
Although Anglo-American notions of childhood are still linked to secret gardens and fresh air funds, the Kaiser Family Foundation's Kids & Media @ the New Millennium reports on NPR that children today constitute the fastest growing consumer market in the United States and "influence half a TRILLION dollars in consumer spending a year." As games once played outside increasingly move indoors, on screen, into commercial and corporate realms, schools are built without playgrounds and recess cut from the curriculum. Other families, "stranger danger," and our own backyards are perceived as more menacing, yet children gain access to zones of cyberporn once off limits to adults. Children in the U.S. have thus lost and gained spaces never dreamed of in our philosophies, such as the world ruled by an apprentice wizard, an orphan hero of bookstores and Amazon.com, whose best-selling charm is compared here and abroad by June Cummins and Nicholas Tucker in the Summer MQR. Children's museums, afterschool programs, and urban theme parks are constructed while child-centered narratives, animations, and film classics attract audiences around the world. At the millennium historians on the Learning Channel vote a diary written from the Secret Annex one of the "100 Most Important Achievements of the Twentieth Century." Because it "personalized the Holocaust," the handwritten narrative of a thirteen-year-old girl is mentioned on a list that includes the discovery of antibiotics, the exploration of space, women's rights, and the environmental movement. Zlata Filipovic, "Bosnia's Anne Frank," on the cover of Newsweek (Feb. 28, 1994) alerts us, as does Karein Goertz in the Summer MQR, of the enduring influence of this hidden writer whose construction of a moral vision gives shape to the problematic face of hope.
In the academy, research and new books scrutinize this changing map of childhood. Undergraduates focus on the "vast excluded" by connecting dots among courses in anthropology, history, sociology, public policy, and law, while scholars in diverse fields explore the complex web of representations that help constitute the social construction of childhood. Symposia study issues of genetic engineering, juvenile justice, the medicalization of childhood, theories of multiple intelligence, and the relation between "kinderculture" and the darkening youth subcultures of today. Integrated within existing structures are programs at Brooklyn College and Harvard University, which are now framing a non-traditional field that "looks at children as an entire class." Divisions and special sessions—on child authors, children's studies, environmental life writing, neuroscience and cognitive psychology—proliferate at Modern Language Association conventions. Multidisciplinary units at Michigan State and the University of Florida, rare book archives at Princeton and UCLA, child and family-serving institutes like Merrill Palmer at Wayne State University and faculty seminars like that designed by Sharon Stephens on "Contested Childhoods" at the University of Michigan's International Institute look for fresh ways for communities to integrate research, outreach, and policy engagement. Scholars of children's literature, after decades of being isolated and marginalized within departments, library programs, and schools of education, now see their journals and books approached by waves of sudden interest. Mitzi Myers and Uli Knoepflmacher, both contributors to this issue, coined the term "cross-writing" in 1997 to reconceptualize children's literary studies, calling attention to the "colloquy between past and present selves" in "texts too often read as univocal."
They heralded in their inclusive approach the eclectic, even eccentric ways other writers here risk exposing secret spaces of their childhoods. The politics of sympathy are playfully subversive in the pages of this volume yet respectful of the flinty edges and hard country of growing up. Examining those neglected zones where stories take root and childhood shuts down, Adrienne Kertzer navigates a critical crossover from the borders of "kiddibookland" to a sophisticated review of Life is Beautiful and the works of Anita Lobel. Interrogating the relevance of secret space to a Johannesburg squatter camp, Louise Chawla uses artwork from Canaansland to show that children's freedom to create places of their own presumes the luxury of "a safe center to move out from." Out of Africa where the small stand with swollen bellies and die en masse comes Wole Soyinka's poem "The Children of This Land." The manifestos of radical feminist playwright Carolyn Gage, Broadway lyricist Nan Knighton, and poet Thylias Moss prove how one can scavenge a self from environments of terror. A recent spate of childhood memoirs by literary scholars like Edward Said and Jane Tompkins are joined here by Wayne Booth, Sandra M. Gilbert, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Jerry Herron, Joyce Carol Oates, Tobin Siebers, and Marina Warner, who dramatize the genius that beginners' eyes and language learners have for spilling the beans.
The French word enfant, and its Latin cognate infans, define the essential nature of childhood as unspeaking. Adults assume inevitable author-ity in rendering the literary speech or consciousness of children. But what is the language of a child? And why, if children so rarely have become authors, have fiction writers over the last two hundred years chosen to include their speech and secret spaces—from Huck Finn's raft to Denver's boxwood retreat in Beloved? Exploring how language serves humans between the ages of 1 and 8, Susan Engel opens a window between these related questions. By making sense of the narratives children tell, she illuminates the largely unregarded area where the young cultivate a hedge between inner and outer, both in language and space. The stories children tell demonstrate that "the line between secret inner stories and shared public stories is a moveable one." Holding back information or dressing up fiction as fact, editing or covering up the unruly, young vocalists rehearse, first inaudibly with themselves, then aloud with others, the lifelong process of negotiating boundaries between what is real inside themselves and the world outside.
The improbable stories of the very young also suggest what motivates children to seek secret spaces. By assembling words—much like balancing twigs or arranging "loose parts" for a special place—they perform an engrossing fictive process which brings inner and outer spheres into synchrony. The semi-transparent curtains of their narratives function like the moveable boundaries, the permeable walls and guarded entries featured in the Residential College Art Gallery's exhibition of remembered hide-outs. As Margaret Price recalls, controlling access is critical for it allows children to show off or share private spaces on their own terms. Insisting on the logic of an area that is "all for me," children script what they look for and become. Mark Neilson's hollow tree became the "beast's absent core, which could be peered into." Like narratives that put a structure onto life, getting into this "enclosed, magical place" is primal play. Through hand-shaping and story-making, children practice the small heroics of being human, passing back and forth across fresh territory as they hone two survival skills of their species. ''——
Though children, like poets, might be called professors of the five senses, their research is silent and invisible. The complex and ambiguous nature of early existence must be reconstructed by others, through memory and from distant points of exile. Coleridge lamented in Biographia Literaria that growing up is like being dipped in Lethe, the river of Oblivion. Adults can never reclaim the intimate spaces of their first instincts and sense impressions. Before an "I" emerges, eyes open once upon a given time and place. Tasting, watching, bonding with symbols and songs of myself, infants invest their energies and orient themselves according to what Lore Segal calls "the secret of our ur-geographies." To recover such "lost kingdoms" when "six months is half a lifetime," Diane Ackerman underwent hypnosis, revisiting the blond glossy varnish of a crib known "like a birthmark." By such verbal and visual images, personal rhythms and objective correlatives, artists seek to regain a primal connection to "the lost domain." That "nearly seamless passing back and forth . . . between daydreaming and minute perceptions of the real world" draws John Taylor on his tour "Through the Land of Alain-Fournier" in the Summer MQR. Though largely ignored, the "Door" to this state, in Julie Jordan Hanson's poem, remains ajar each day. In the interplay of senses and unexpected moments, something as simple as "a tiny line of mouse droppings" can magically open the pathway to an underground history.
The work of such literary sleights of hands to retrieve the past enhances scientific research, which provides little evidence of how the young actually process their own ecology. The growth of consciousness—called Intercourse by Wordsworth, moments of being by Virginia Woolf, Union and Communion by Molly McQuade—is a solo act that defies definition. Writers know that the interchange between self and world is a temporal but timeless dynamic that accretes, like rings in a tree or snow covering the ground, in non-linear fashion. To capture the mysterious amalgam of dreams and reality, poets like Thylias Moss and Kurt S. Olsson rely on raven flights and leaps of fancy. "The witches of your childhood" come before waking, then hide in the "lip of a cup, under the greasy margin of fingernail" and in "the long, unbracketed silence between one word and the next." Yet embedded in a verbal collage like Nicholas Delbanco's—grownup names merging with songs, gossip, print, translation, and cautionary tales in a novel-cum-memoir—one can hear an incipient voice silently teaching itself at three to make sense of the world.
Once children express themselves by the system of verbal signs belonging to the adult world, the isolate integrity of infancy has been shattered. Learning to read and write may be a solitary pleasure as in Cathy Song's "Book of Hours" when "sky poured in."But to "selve" a beginning—to use Hopkins's verb—is an immense act of specialization. Human offspring need years of extended nurturing outside the womb, and their psychic survival hungers for narratives. As Ackerman's poem and Tom Pohrt's art suggest, such evolutionary thrusts forward require nesting—an unseen refuge, "night soil" and "flyways" which "evade the time-honored world for a while." Birds weave twigs into snug hollows, baby steps scavenge the beach, and authors scan the universe to furnish their pages. Finding a talisman or muse enables human consciousness to crystallize sensations, to fuse inner energies into images, which shelter identity and generate "arpeggios" like the obsidian that sits on Thylias Moss's desk. The social construction of a voice, the discovery of a way to be "Me," thus requires a complex bridging such as words and objects perform, locating a middle ground of experimentation and expression where, as Geoffrey O'Brien says, "answers are lying all around." In this protean spot one may trace the formation of a personal aesthetic. Molly McQuade, in the eerie lines of "Mouse History," recalls a "wild mildness of skin" at ten, quickened by pulling on a cardigan. This densely interconnected ground of middle childhood is also where Jeanne Schinto locates the genesis of object-centered lore and the museum industry. Avid naturalists, foragers, and collectors at this stage look down low, see up close, love to touch and find treasure everywhere. Geography can be absorbed uneventfully, like slivers in flesh. "The pier had a way of working its way inside of you," April Newlin remembers about being eight. Waiting for crabs to bite, building narratives in three dimensions, boys and girls are busy grafting old on new, searching for what's hidden in plain sight, and like Ann Savageau intent on "Making Something Out of Nothing."
Sometimes to reconjure the fleeting process of becoming requires inner dialogue: Laurence Goldstein's "Let's say" enacts fantasies from "A Room in California, 1954" while Kurt S. Olsson invokes a silent partner in "a dream of God without God" in "You Tell Me." Sometimes others are warned to keep their distance, as diaries fend off intruders—"Privat [sic] Keep Out!"—in Joan W. Blos's essay in the Summer MQR. But seeking facts or confining some personal shard of truth, the child runs quick like sap inside. For Roald Hoffmann a boy is ever peeking through shutters, "always moving, / one slat to another," trying "to make the world come out." From that spare room of consciousness, musing backwards, one can approximate childish intuitions, dive into sources of "the best seeing" like Suzanne Rhodenbaugh or piece together sexuality like a work in progress as Uli Knoepflmacher does. From his "portable interiors of childhood," one can pry apart what housed occult points of contact, spread original possibility and crystallized an evolving awareness.
The powerful meanings children take on in a culture have distinct histories. Just as the rebel crusade against Myanmar's military being led by twelve-year-old twin "holy warriors" is rooted in the superstitions, fused religions and mystic traditions of Southeast Asia, the valuation of childhood as a precious preserve of creative storytelling, utopian dream, and erotic longing developed over centuries in Anglo-American discourse. The separate domain children inhabit was called Innocence by William Blake, the first picturebook poet and artist. He mapped a pastoral world of reckless imagination where children with nurses nearby play joyously into the dusk. But he also illuminated a dark compressed space of psychic violation where children of the underclass comply with an establishment which alienates and exploits them. Idyllic retreats in children's literature emerged as legislation restricted child labor in factories and enforced education in schools. For industrialized England the bodies of street urchins and offspring of the poor conveniently fit into mine shafts and chimneys. Victorian pantomime, with its passion for cross-dressing, forbidden mutation, and little actors, encouraged a prudish culture to clap the femme fatale Tinker Bell back to life. In juvenile texts one could laugh at oversized girls fallen into rabbit holes and perform metafictional games with boys transgressing Arcadia.
Fantasy inspires hideaways, whether it's an imaginary otherworld like Oz or the so-called "ordinary" neighborhood of Pooh Corner. The place may be literary or psychic, local or exotic, but every children's book provides a lens to a world apart. Yet artists, even those who aim to entertain children, have not always produced hospitable environments for the developing play of bodies and minds closest to them. Peter Llewellyn Davies, "the real Peter Pan," as he loathed being called, suffered shell shock at the Battle of the Somme; throughout middle age, until he committed suicide, Davies was haunted by James Barrie's "terrible masterpiece." Christopher Milne's two autobiographies indicate how deeply he resented the mass production of his Christopher Robin persona.
The gender bias in negotiating space is exemplified by the Rossetti siblings: Dante Gabriel founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, painting voluptuous beauties with bee-stung lips. Christina, who both modeled for artists and lived like an Anglo-Catholic nun, worked with fallen women at St. Mary Magdalene Home. Her lyric poetry proclaims that her secrets saved her. The seductive nursery lyric, "Goblin Market," warns sisterhood of toxic passion-fruit hawked by goblin men. The links between neverland and wasteland, romantic ideals of childhood and modernist despair, rise in retrospect, but the green worlds of juvenile pastorals may be "dying after two centuries of efflorescence" as Mitzi Myers suggests. The secret fairylore Victorians invented for and about "little people" by such flagrant cross-writers as Oscar Wilde endure as tales of transformation in mainstream churches, gender politics, and New Age therapies. J. R. R. Tolkien, whose ogres descended from the goblins of George MacDonald, objected to Narnia, hidden at the back of a wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, who also claimed MacDonald had "baptized" his imagination. Knoepflmacher's Ventures into Childland, reviewed here by Mark Spilka, explores how carnal dreamworlds for those presumed innocent expressed the flirtations, fear, anger, and craving of male and female Victorians with uncensored originality.
In our more brazen culture of lost boy gangs and Lolitas in Calvin Klein jeans, the black and white photographs of Sally Mann's own children recur to an era when photography and conceptions of childhood changed radically. In the U.S. the Calvinist notion of infant damnation was discarded and gentler discipline was advocated in child-rearing manuals, now addressed to mothers, after 1830. The sentimental, voyeuristic lens of Lewis Carroll also focused the absurdity and monstrosity of grownups. Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted a "witty physician" who lamented that "it was a misfortune to have been born when children were nothing and to live until men were nothing." Just as Millais's "Bubbles" tapped the potential of round little bodies to sell products like Coppertone, his "Cherry Ripe" suggests the bizarre weight that prepubescence still carries in our culture as enigmatic eye candy, fetishes of trauma, or victims of what Marina Warner calls "the Oxfam syndrome," which makes the oppression of children "look like endemic perennial hopelessness." The power of photographic images to take us back and forth in time, not always to comfortable spaces, problematizes the supposed objectivity of viewers. Inviting us to ponder the disconcerting work of Sally Mann, James Christen Steward opens a window on the interplay between children and adults in the act of composing images "as art directors do," expressing the view of many critics that her children arouse attention as potential objects of desire (even as the mother artist hotly denies the erotic in her children). That these images elicit jolting responses, not confined to the Christian right, sparks ongoing debates regarding childhood and sexuality.
How will childhood be contested in the future? As environmental autobiography, children's books provide clues to unforgettable landscapes and ways the young relate to the natural world. Citing the lack of theoretical framework to address this issue, Louise Chawla has asked, "Our society has not been structured to admit that nature may provide more than material necessities. . . . What does it mean to say that a place is felt to be alive? What happens when a natural habitat is loved?" Laura Ingalls Wilder said that she framed her autobiography as juvenile literature because she found her own early life as a pioneer "much richer and more interesting than that of children" in the 1930s, "even with all the modern inventions and improvements." Like Tarbeach and the Secret Garden, the Little House icon, identified by Lois Kuznets in this issue as "a focal point for developmental gender issues within Anglo-European patriarchal society," reflects the empathy children have for their surroundings. It validates George Eliot's claim that "We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it."
Children's books, an impossible luxury for many parents, provide essential havens for kids growing up in the middle class. The presence of books in the home is now considered by educators to be the critical index of future academic success and upward mobility for boys and girls of any race and ethnic background. These literary constructs help forge the self, apart from adults, and as filmmaker Mark Harris shows in the Summer MQR can camouflage inchoate alienation and foster survivalist resistance for children hiding from mass murder. Narrative tradition makes clear that establishing such a private world is a prerequisite for carving out a place in community or lighting out for the territory. We like to imagine that once kids go outdoors, the best things in life are still free: dirt, trees, air, animals, rocks. Yet in a period of global urbanization, less than 2 percent of Americans now grow up in the country. Ilan Stavans, formulating an urban pastoral of boyhood amid factory ruins in Copilco, sketched "unreachable planets" from the backseat of an abandoned bus. Secret spaces born of boredom, explosive anger, sibling rivalry, or sexual dream can also spawn rich countercultures like those depicted by Karen Heuler and Catherine Ryan Hyde .
Ritualistic spaces in narratives, like handmade refuges, tell us much about the power relations between children and adults. Faller's six-year-old Anna uses the Sunshine Family to closet and disclose the source of her venereal disease. The private parts and psyches of long-silenced children—the very spaces they inhabit—are invaded by people they trust. The violation of their open minds and bodies has a profound but unwritten effect on the next generation. The majority of teen mothers have experienced rape or other sexual abuse. Through TV, comic books, graffiti, and word-of-mouth slogans, young people hunger for a social universe that allows for happy endings. In a global village where the fierce devour the small, what role awaits those now shunted aside without adequate prenatal or nutritional care, housing and family support? The 1996 budget of the Children's Defense Fund, the leading national lobby for children, was $15 million. The American Association of Retired People in the same year spent $449 million. Marian Wright Edelman cites "a new American apartheid between rich and poor, white and black, old and young" which Detroit would seem to epitomize: 46 percent of children live in poverty, the highest youth poverty rate for any city in the nation. 71.6 percent of those born there in 1997 had unwed parents.
Organizations like International Childwatch and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (an international treaty signed by all countries in the United Nations except Somalia and the United States) testify to the worldwide attention which child-centered issues and stories have captured in recent years. Yet our society has failed to address the suffering of impoverished children in a holistic manner or to embrace a nuanced understanding of what "impoverished" means in the complex ecology of growing up today. Finding a safe space for reconstructions of childhood—imaginatively, institutionally, and internationally—in legal as well as academic and poetic discourse has been the motivation of this project. In the spirit of the playground where—as Vivian Paley's book proclaims—You Can't Say You Can'tPlay, this volume of MQR has evolved as an experimental endeavor drawing on a wide range of talented people and diverse disciplines—from social work, anthropology, sociology, and history to education, economics, architecture and urban planning, from pediatrics, human development, and literature to fine arts and religion. These writers provide theoretical and autobiographical reflections, case studies and cultural analyses, which hold a mirror up to us, the people who form a child's human and material environment.
Creating this project has been a collective effort which has drawn on the talents of many people. I would like to acknowledge my students and colleagues at the Residential College, especially Carolyn Balducci, David Burkam, Larry Cressman, Fred Peters, Cindy Sowers, Tom Weisskopf, and Sheila Wilder, who lent their insight, artistry, and encouragement. The following individuals provided critical assistance at various stages: Barbara Bach, Leslie Becker, Kathleen Canning, Brian Carter, Nels Christensen, Liz Elling, Susan Glass, Fred Goodman, Deborah Greene, Robert Grese, Mark Heberle, David Hill, Anne Percy Knott, Lois Kuznets, Rebecca McGowan, Marianetta Porter, Gary Rieveschl, Inger Schultz, David Scobey, Mark Stranahan and Sandy Wiener. Doris Knight, MQR administrative assistant, offered hard work and good cheer. I'm enormously grateful to the community partners who enabled this project to grow outside the university: Child Care Network, Conservation Committee of the Garden Club of Michigan, DD Wood Productions, DTE Energy Detroit BLOOMFEST, Edsel & Eleanor Ford House, Emerson School, The Greening of Detroit, Young Actors Guild of Ann Arbor. Gifts in kind came from Delancey Design, Foto I, Nicola's Books, and Little Professor. My family and husband, Gil Leaf, have given unstinting support. Earlier research on this topic was enabled by faculty grants from Claremont McKenna College, the Gould Center for the Humanities, and the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching. The 1998 Residential College exhibition and symposium, designed in collaboration with Nichols Arboretum, The International Institute, The School of Education, and The College of Architecture and Urban Planning, was funded by The Arts of Citizenship, The Barbara Isenberg Fund, The Center for European Studies, the Dean of LS&A, the Elling Family, The Institute for the Humanities, Office of the Vice President for Research, and the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. Publication and layout of the color portfolio was made possible by the generosity of Brett Ashley and Kathy Krick, as well as Nancy Cantor, Provost, and Glenna Schweitzer, Director, Office of Budget and Planning. Finally I would like to thank Larry Goldstein for his editorial expertise and belief in this project.
