Students at Berea College tour Appalachia, home to most of them, to better understand it

Berea College, a small school just outside the East Kentucky Coalfield, is unique in that all students are from low-income families, get free admission and must work on campus. They also are expected to be involved in community activities, such as helping the needy, educating people on social issues, or being a part of the thriving art community in the town of 14,000. (AP photo)

Most Berea students come from Appalachia, but the school wants them and the faculty to better understand the region, so every summer faculty and staff take a bus tour through Eastern Kentucky, Southwest Virginia, West Virginia and East Tennessee -- a five day trip preceded by a two-day seminar, reports Peter Slavin for The Atlantic. He went on last summer's tour.

"We stopped at small towns (two struggling, one thriving), a historic settlement school in the mountains, a family homeplace, two churches (one white fundamentalist, one African-American), a famous media and education center called Appalshop[in Whitesburg, Ky.], and a museum to a historic civil-rights struggle in Clinton, Tenn. We visited a historic log cabin belonging to Frontier Nursing University, heir of the renowned Frontier Nursing Service, which once sent nurses on horseback into the hollows. We spent an evening at the legendary Highlander Research and Education Center, which played a key role in advancing the Southern labor and civil-rights movements." The bus was supposed to see a mountaintop-removal coal mine, but company trucks blocked the way, Slavin reports.

"It's not a poverty tour through the glass of an air-conditioned coach," says Chad Berry, Berea's academic vice president and dean of faculty. "I'm trying to challenge people's preconceptions about arguably the most misunderstood region in United States." (Read more)