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The first of TIELab's projects is the Local Historical Archives Project. LHAP's purpose is to make learning about history more meaningful to children by providing a context for working in the history of their own communities -- reading and collecting historical records, photographing and researching historical sites and publishing their work in an online database. Students at LHAP schools create a local history archive of documents and images that is then woven back into the school curriculum. Study of local historical records is a powerful way to engage students in learning about the past. For example, a skilled teacher can contextualize 19th century photos of the town's old river-powered paper mills, mills that students walk by each day, in the tumult of the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, the buildings take on life for students and the walk to school takes on new meaning. Students now know something about their town, maybe how it came to be and why their parents' ancestors settled there. They come to know how their town fit in to larger regional, national, even global historical trends and developments. Most importantly, students who learn history this way come to see that history isn't something that happens "out there," to be found only in textbooks. It's what is happening all around them all the time and has been so for as long as humans and their artifacts have existed. Schools and towns that join LHAP have some flexibility in how they implement parts of the program. For example, in addition to working with the local historical society, the planning group can enlist the participation of townspeople who have their own collection of town records in their attic. Or there may be elderly townspeople who lived through notable events who students can interview. Or there may be old houses, farm buildings or stone walls about to fall prey to the developer's bulldozer. Students can take photographs to document their exisitence, and mark their location on a "map our town's past" before they are lost forever. The permutations of the project -- its participants, its purpose for the town, its extent -- is bounded only by the imagination of its participants and LHAP's mission: to give students and teachers access to local historical records that make learning about history more engaging and meaningful. For more information please fill out the contact form.  TIELab :: Technology in the service of learning © TIELab 2002-2012 |
