This session includes examples of teachers using local history at the college level. Some students have never been before in the area they now walked. There often was a public presentation of the students’ findings which attracted media attention.
Using Local History to Engage Students
AHA Session 221
Sunday, January 5, 2025: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Chair: Jason Morgan, Collin College
Papers:
Utilizing Local History through Place-Based Critical Inquiry in the P–12 Classroom
Lauren Colley, University of Cincinnati
Digital Historical Walking Tours: Bringing Local History to Life
Cacee Hoyer, University of Southern Indiana
Exploring Local Black History in Rural Appalachia: A Journey through Community Engagement
Constanze Weise, East Tennessee State University
Where Do We Come From: Using Oral and Local History to Understand Our Communities
Jason Morgan, Collin College
Session Abstract
The maxim “All Politics is Local,” has been accepted as a way to understand and explain political engagement. This panel makes the argument that “All History is Local!” Incorporating local and/or public history in the classroom engages students and creates connections to people and place. We have found that integrating local history projects into the classroom excites students to conduct historical research and engage with the past. Local history projects not only allow students see how the past directly affects their communities and themselves, it also lets them create papers, artifacts, archives and other projects that directly speak to the public.
This panel brings together people with experience in the K-12 education, community colleges and universities. Each panelist will present for fifteen minutes on how they have incorporated local history projects into their classrooms and the impact this had on students. This will leave thirty minutes for a robust discussion among the panelists and the audience on how to incorporate local projects into the classroom. The panel also demonstrates that local history can be done in all academic regions and settings. The first panelist will be Lauren M. Colley, University Cincinnati, who will introduce the theory behind the impact of local history in the classroom. Cacee Mabis, of the University of Southern Indiana, will introduce the ways in which local urban history can be explored by creating historic walking tours. Constanze Weise, University of East Tennessee, will demonstrate how working with local community partners can enhance student’s understanding of historical methods and illuminate the often-overlooked history of African American History in Appalachia. Finally, Jason Morgan, Collin College, will explain how he uses two local history assignments to engage student interest and build research skills using oral interviews and investigating the identity of those listed on the 1850 and 1860 Census Slave Schedules in Collin County. Each panelist brings local history into the classroom in different ways, which demonstrates the power that local history can have in the classroom.
We are excited to bring this important pedogeological tool to our colleagues and want to make sure that all participants leave with the recognition that they too can do local history in the classroom.
Colley
– Local history can be used it to connect to students – placed-based inquiry.
– Local history benefits place-based critical inquiry.
– Today teachers often don’t live in the communities where they teach.
– Teaching local history helps students become advocates in their community.
Mabis
1. Teaching local history is a required college level class in the community of Evansville, population of 150,000.
2. The walking tour component includes:
– local history topics
– guest speakers design walking tours
– group workshops
– archive work
– field days walk tours and taking photographs
– in-class workshops and writing days
– peer review where students walk each other’s tours
– final presentations and public tours
3. work with local library
4. driving tour- problems of logistics of where to park and sufficient space
5. segregation and demolition – urban renewal areas have become parking lots where once there were neighborhoods
6. historic churches/neighborhoods/schools in the Baptisttown community
7.students often had not been in other neighborhoods
8. use of Clio in the classroom
9. poorer neighborhoods included
10. students can impact the public and are not taken lightly because they were present and the results were published
Weise
– required class at her college
– community of 74,000 people, 84% white, and no historical society
– limited scholarships available
– historical markers at former segregated high school
– marginalized rural black southern communities
– students asked how was it to live in a segregated community? – public presentation and TV coverage of the students’ work
– students work with community partners – differences in interests are revealed
Morgan
– 1960 rural county to county of 1,000,000+ people today due to tech jobs
– participating students are not history majors
– the population explosion means no one is from there
– population increase from south and east Asia immigrants
– the communities are still segregated by immigrants
– class includes an oral history project
– the final question is “why are you where you are?”
– participants are asked if they have experienced/witnessed racism?
– Collin has always been interested in education since it was settled in the 1850s
– question for the students: why the disparity in neighborhood incomes
Q&A issue of developing community partnerships
Weiss
– Need gatekeeper: Students were white whereas community patrons were black<
– Time required to develop trust between the students and the community
Morgan – volunteered for preservation group
– Plano Museum closed for five years
– curators are not there to serve the students
Hoyer Mabis- not from the area in the local history program area but used teaching colleagues to connect her
Q&A New Orleans chess club goes back to 1830s
Utilizing Local History through Place-Based Critical Inquiry in the P–12 Classroom
Sunday, January 5, 2025: 10:30 AM
Lauren Colley, University of Cincinnati
One way to utilize local history within the P-12 classroom is through the use an “Inquiry Arc”. An “Inquiry Arc’s” focus on developing questions, applying disciplinary tools, evaluating sources, communicating conclusions and taking informed action. Using local history as a central part of this inquiry model provides a way for students to feel connected to their communities and themselves.[1] Part of this personal experience is what social studies education research describes as “place-consciousness.” By being more aware of their communities, its history, its geography, and its landmarks, students develop a sense of attachment to their communities.[2] Using place-based inquiry thus allows teachers to use landmarks and places as sources and prompts students through deliberation of questions that even our youngest learners can engage with. Moreover, research suggests that teachers who engage in place-based historical inquiry shift their perspectives on hard history.[3] By combining place-based inquiry with critical inquiry, students can question how systems of power influence their own place-consciousness. By examining places, local history, and sources of marginalized perspectives, asking questions that critique oppression, and by examining how history has shaped our present, critical inquiry becomes a powerful lens to examine local history.[4] This presentation describes ways to engage our teachers and P-12 students in local place-based critical inquiry.
[1] Rebecca Mueller, “Local history as a Pathway for Powerful Social Studies” in Social Education, 36 (3), 2024, 25–30.
[2] Annie M. Whitlock, “Walking the City: Developing Place-Consciousness through Inquiry” in Social Studies and the Young Learner, 33(2) 2020, 20-24.
[3] Christine Baron, Sherri Sklarwitz, Hyeyoung Bang, & Hanadi Shatara, “What Teachers Retain from Historic Site-Based Professional Development” in Journal of Teacher Education, 71(4), 2020, 392–408.
[4] Ryan M. Crowley & LaGarrett J. King, “Making Inquiry Critical: Examining Power and Inequity in the Classroom” in Social Education, 82(1) 2018, 14-17.
Digital Historical Walking Tours: Bringing Local History to Life
Sunday, January 5, 2025: 10:50 AM
Cacee Hoyer, University of Southern Indiana
Creating digital historical walking tours is an engaging and interactive method for students to learn about local history by pursuing urban historical themes, moments, and spaces in an innovative and useful way. Local history projects are a powerful way for students to develop historical skills, connect with their community, reveal societal changes, and cultivate their own identity. This presentation shares my method of implementing a digital historical walking tour project using two free programs: Pocketsights and Clio. The presentation will include the student learning goals and scaffolded assignments to support student learning throughout the project. Student learning goals for this methodology include a critical analysis of local events/locations, an in-depth examination of the impact of the events/locations on the development of urban space, and to make connections to change over time. Students are required to provide detailed descriptions for local ten sites of historical significance on their walking tour. Each site must include a historical explanation of the importance of the site and include images or videos from the location. The final step for this project is a reflection paper which requires students to evaluate what they have learned from the project and explain how it relates to what they have learned in the course. The digital walking tour enables students to build empathy through seeking connections to local history, while engaging students in “doing” social studies. Many historical institutions include digital walking tours; thus, this project is not only novel and engaging but practical for modern realities.
Where Do We Come From: Using Oral and Local History to Understand Our Communities
Sunday, January 5, 2025: 11:30 AM
Jason Morgan, Collin College
This presentation will focus on two local history projects that I have incorporated into my US History Survey courses. Over the last few semesters my students have participated in the “Collin Naming Project,” in conjunction with the Plano African American Museum. The Collin Naming Project’s goal is to identify as many people as we can that were enslaved in Collin County. By utilizing census data, wills, tax records and local documents we are attempting to give names to those who have been nameless. This project is challenging and often frustrating, but it has shown my students how difficult it can be to fully understand the past and sometimes just establish basic facts. Working on the “Collin Naming Project,” has not only benefited the families whose ancestors are identified, but has also shown my students the ways in which individuals can be absent in the historical narrative. I have also implemented an oral history interview in the second half of the US History Survey. Students are required to interview someone that is at least forty years older than them and who currently lives in the area. For the first time in almost two decades of teaching my students were genuinely excited to participate in a major history project. They were able to not only build stronger and better connections with their families and friends, but also gain a better appreciation of the diversity of our local communities. The vast majority of my students’ families are not from Collin County even though they live in it and they grew up there. Conducting interviews not only personalizes history, it also creates local connections to broader historical events.
New Directions in Public Histories of New York City
AHA Session 277
Sunday, January 5, 2025: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Chair: Katharine Uva, Baruch College, City University of New York
Panel:
Emily Brooks, New York Public Library
Shirley Brown Alleyne, Tenement Museum
Anna Klein Danziger Halperin, New-York Historical Society
Maeve K. Montalvo, Museum of the City of New York
Session Abstract
Today, public history sites and institutions have come under intense scrutiny in the United States as campaigns against “divisive concepts” mobilize activists to target histories presented in museums, libraries, public spaces, and classrooms. At the same time, these educational spaces have increasingly sought to make their exhibitions and curricula more inclusive of diverse experiences and marginalized voices. In addition, as the United States faces what many political scientists have labeled a decline in democracy, broad calls have emerged for more public engagement with history. In this roundtable, representatives from the New-York Historical Society, the Tenement Museum, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of the City of New York will discuss new works and initiatives produced by their institutions. Roundtable participants will consider how the exhibitions and curricula produced by their institutions present inclusive and diverse stories, how their institutions conceive of the public, and how they seek to help this public make meaning out of historical objects and at times how their institutions contend with opposition. With a particular focus on New York City, this roundtable will consider how new perspectives on the past have relevance for education and democracy in the city’s present.
