Teaching the Tangible:
Student Learning through Local Heritage Studies

David Ridley
Director of Research and Youth Programs, 
Heritage Community Foundation
February 2001

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Local study projects introduce other standards into student work, in addition to teacher evaluation: those of "the world out there". Attentive listening, accurate recording and punctuality is expected by those the students contact. For students, the reward is not simply the carrot of a diploma, the ethereal "good job" or the better mark. They enter into the larger community on mature terms and contribute their efforts. Their work gains a wider audience, including those whom they interviewed or approached for help. This presents learning situations that appeal to many students: a sense of power, independence and freedom and assuming the role of the privileged learner with license to learn from others outside the formalities that can be encountered at school. As well, students become scholars and active agents in the community as their work joins other scholarship on community experience to be collectively held and remembered . One of the rationales for these projects-that the knowledge students seek is not yet documented and they are helping create it-- provides students with a message about their readiness to enter into and serve the larger community. 

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1. The community is a subject of serious study. 
   
   There are many ways to celebrate "community" but few of these emphasize learning and scholarship. As students engage in local studies they ask questions and become participants in the world outside the classroom. They become experts about aspects of their community and often about the entire community itself. This meets what psychologist Robert Kegan has called "the greatest educational need of young people from age twelve to twenty" : learning that focuses on what it means to join and be part of a community, beyond individual and private purposes.
   
   

2. Opportunities for students to do "real work" are sought.
   
   With support and direction, the work of students adds to the knowledge and understanding of their community. Teachers and students become proficient storytellers in the community, as well as helping document the community through photograph, interview and writing. Possibilities for collaborative projects with community agencies are many.
   
   

3. Students are encouraged to study the many layers of community experience. 
   
   Through studies that focus on cultural and natural heritage, or what could be called folklife, students realize that pretty much everyone and everything has a story that is a part of the community's experience. History is not only about the lives of those who are rich, influential or famous. In time, this growing detail about who we are and what was important connects to the larger flows of political and economic history. Helping students to find relevant and tangible stories from the past and present provides models and points of reflection for their own lives.
   
   

4. Student learning and study serves the community. 
   
   Local study has both a learning and community-building dimension. The return of student work emphasizes the value of the work beyond evaluation and is a gift and service to others in the community. 
   
   

5. Inter-generational research is incorporated into every project. 
   
   This approach to learning is not just for students. As noted in teacher comments from the Heritage Community Foundation projects, the learning is of value for students, parents and older citizens. No single generation fulfils the aspirations, "the project" that it sets out upon. Students can understand the aspirations and trials of preceding generations, seeing their own challenges (and the distinctions) in this encounter. Inter-generational learning works builds trust between communities and their schools, bringing parents, grandparents and the larger community into a learning circle centred at schools. 
   
   

6. Through the study of change, continuity and conflict in the past, students gain perspectives on contemporary issues. 
   
   Knowing that the earth circles the sun is different than knowing the story of how we came to know that. In reality, all subjects involve history, as past experience and understanding is brought to bear on contemporary concerns and challenges. Through understanding how we come to know, students understand that knowledge is not fixed and see that they have a role in adding to knowledge. 
   
   

7. The educational power of narrative is appreciated and used. 
   
   Teachers are storytellers of one kind or another, either in their ability to tell a story, string together a narrative or through their actions before students. As teachers know, simple stories with clear answers about what decisions and actions to take in life are rare. As students encounter these stories, they face the dilemmas complexities of life. As well, our society tends to seek analysis and explanation-the cause and effect relationship-more than narrative. And often, explanation ends thought. Narratives tend to be open-ended. If students see themselves participating in a larger story, they are open to writing and taking part in the next chapter.
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As Arlene Purcell and the other teachers discovered, local studies projects are a demanding and rewarding approach to teaching. "Near-at-hand" stories are a set of creative sources for students to think about self, community and society. Engaging those stories with students can help place public education and schools at the centre of community concern and support. Using the immediate community as a place of learning is not an excuse to devolve the role of teachers and schools. In fact, it requires and results in more community political and fiscal support for teachers and schools as they engage students in their scholarship. 

Reflecting on the experience with his students, Doug Shaw says "The result of this work does not belong to the school--it belongs to the community and that's an important justification for why we do this with our students. After our first year of work, an elderly woman came up to me on the street, took my arm, looked me in the eye and said, "That work you did with your students was good… you'd better do it again next year!" We've established an expectation for continuing this type of study with our community." Such work suggests what is obvious but often forgotten: good teaching is a craft of place, a skill rooted in a community, embedded in a local environment made up of stories, places and people.

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David Ridley taught social studies and worked as a researcher with the Folklife Program at the Provincial Museum of Alberta. He is currently the manager of Research and Youth Programs with the Heritage Community Foundation, a provincial body with the mandate of linking people with heritage.

This article originally appeared in the Alberta Teachers' Association Magazine, volume 81, number 3, (summer) 2001.