Heritage Community Foundation PresentsAlberta Online Encyclopedia
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Teaching the Tangible:
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In researching and developing the play, Purcell and her students visited people in their homes and taped their recollections. Students saw photographs in family albums and read newspaper clippings. They studied artifacts from the Galt Museum in Lethbridge in order to recreate props and costumes for the production. |
At the Provincial Archives, Purcell studied the minutes of the inquiry into the disaster. In the process, she and her students steeped themselves in the national, international and labour politics of the day, as well as the chemistry and geology of coal mining and the history of immigration and popular trends in the region. The script turned into a production with 22 actors and drew on the rest of the school and entire community for help and support.
On opening night, the response was overwhelming. The production connected with all the different generations of people in the audience. Purcell realized, "that we had done something more than just create a high school play… we had come together with a common vision and our audience had joined us." The production,
Firedamp, ran for eight full house performances. But something else happened after each performance. The student cast came to a deeper understanding of the lives, events and times they were portraying. Students asked parents about grandparents and great grandparents. Many of the students discovered they had family connections with experiences similar to those brought to life on stage.
Teachers like Arlene Purcell are using a relatively modest idea in their work, with big consequences: make the study of the local community a key part of student learning and curriculum. Further, they involve parents and community members in the common project of studying, documenting and interpreting the experience of the local community. By drawing on the range of family, community, natural and cultural histories present in virtually every city, town and rural district, teachers find that student understanding and engagement increases as connections are made with the near-at-hand world. The approach brings together different subject areas, amply demonstrated by the work of Arlene Purcell and her students.
With the success of projects like Arlene Purcell's, a new heritage organization is helping teachers initiate their own local heritage study projects. Beginning in 1999, the
Heritage Community Foundation helped seed a number of local studies projects across the province, providing teaching resources, project support and grants to teachers and schools.
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In Edmonton, Strathcona Composite High School teacher Craig Wallace and his students studied the historic Rossdale Power Plant. The site has been a subject of local debate over its historic value as an industrial installation on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River in the heart of the city. Remains of the second Fort Edmonton, built in 1802, and a First Nations burial ground have been located on the site, exposed in an archaeological dig being conducted on one of the days the students were present at Rossdale.
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Nona Lynn Barker's Grade 11 English class at Will Sinclair High School in Rocky Mountain House researched and presented a video production on the lives and experiences of ten influential citizens through the 200 year history of the fur trading post and subsequent town.
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At Lucy Baker School near Warburg, teacher Simon Jeynes and his students investigated nearby abandoned farmsteads, eventually piecing together the story of the people who had lived there. Through artifacts found in the houses, conversations with people in the community and reading community history books, the students created a web site to make their work more widely available to the community.
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In Olds, Doug Shaw's and Carolyn Mah's Grade 10 Social Studies students met and interviewed older citizens about their experiences through economic depression and wartime. After interviewing an older woman in the community, a female student noted that, "She [the older woman] was born and raised a farm girl, just like me. I could really relate-- she was isolated from the city, her family was large and very close, they liked to do things together-just like me and my family." In this instance, the meeting of women of different generations resulted in an appreciation for the circumstances and challenges of each other.
Shaw's students conducted further research on particular community events that came up in their interviews with elders. They drew on family and public archives and created temporary exhibits at the community museum. Shaw noted "this project stopped being just school work where the issue of evaluation is important. The students were engaged in learning in a far wider sense than other topics, without the sole concern for "what does teacher want?" The ownership was really with the students." Mah, now teaching at Lamont, reported that, "before the project, my students said 'I don't want to interview seniors' but after the initial contact, both students and seniors were ecstatic about this approach to study. The people who were interviewed visited the classes afterwards and said "Thank you" -- they were flattered and said as much when we first approached them for their help. It helped change their perspective on teenagers and vice versa."
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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This approach requires teachers (and school administrators) to consider the costs and benefits of this kind of learning in their particular communities and subject areas. It also requires a set of understandings and dispositions towards teacher practice and student learning: |
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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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For more on youth in Alberta, visit Peel’s Prairie Provinces.