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Somewhere in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is
a legacy set in stone. “Experience Your America,” a permanent display,
attracts over one million visitors every year. The exhibit, the end
result of a class project, is a collection of quotes focusing on the
cultural and spiritual significance of mountains in America’s national
parks. Melinda Wagner’s legacy grows with each passerby and with each
class that graduates from RU.
 Wagner
is the founding mother of RU’s Anthropology Department and founding
chairperson of the Appalachian Studies Program. Note the word mother. “I
am of the nurturing school of teaching,” she says. “This mode seems to
fit me.” Wagner realizes students are often fragile and she feels a
calling to make them steady on their feet and confident of their place
in the world.
Wagner cultivates students’ minds by putting them on her
level, as research colleagues. When her classes start a project she
tells them, “Hey, we’re going to be doing this together.”
Together they explore everything from A to Z. Literally.
She and her students compiled a book called The ABCs of
Appalachia. Another project, “Cultural Attachments to Land,” took her
class on an all-terrain ride through the highways and byways of several
local counties. Wagner and her students have been key spokespersons in
hearings throughout the Commonwealth on a proposed high-voltage power
line. They’ve studied Appalachian tourist literature and coined the term
“Commercialization of Cultural Differences.” They’ve dug their way into
the area’s coal mining heritage. They’ve even explored a surge of
popularity in Christian merchandise.
Wagner was recently sorting through some personal
storage boxes and spotted one labeled “Job Search 1976.” Her first
instinct was to toss it, but, being the anthropologist she is, she just
could not. While sorting through her treasures, she learned that “as far
back as 1976, I was writing to myself about what I wanted in a job:
research with students.” She says fellow faculty and student colleagues have given her
exactly what she wanted. That is why she returns each fall with a
renewed sense of pride in a school that produces an ever-amazing crop of
graduates.
“I tell my students that anthropology is about humans.
And — guess what — you are one.” |
RU
Today, June18, 2008 
