Students as Historians

Getting Started
It takes some sleuthing to discover that a local thoroughfare was named after a woman who challenged segregation or that changes in the 19^th century fishing industry brought large numbers of Portuguese to town. What’s the first step to finding out about your local community’s history, and how can teachers best interest students in such inquiries?

For Mary Smoyer in Roxbury, Mass., the trick is simply to pick a theme and start exploring the neighborhood, talking with the students and getting them to talk with their parents and grandparents.

“Make sure the kids feel invested in the project—that it’s their research agenda, not yours.” She advises teachers who want to do local history to make it a regular, positive experience. “We met every Friday from 10 a.m. to noon and had lunch together afterwards. And every time, we either went out exploring or had someone come in.”

History teacher Dean Eastman uses a more rigorous analytical approach. First, he suggests, become familiar with the use of primary documents. “Once you’re familiar with how to read them—and there are whole books on the subject—then you can start by making a trip to your local historical society to see what resources are available there. Almost every community has one or two official or unofficial historians, and you should sit down with them and formulate some questions that your students could answer.

“For example, in the Midwest, you might want to focus on patterns of migration. Were the frontier settlers newcomers to America, or had they been in the U.S. for several generations already? What happened to your community once the railroads come in? The answers come from cross-referencing different records and learning how to make sense of them. For example, if the census records indicate a pattern of siblings being born in Norway and in Iowa, then you can bet that the immigrants arrive directly, as young families.”

For this kind of close, textual analysis, Eastman recommends taking a class during the summer months, along the lines of the one he and a colleague teach during the summer in Iowa.

Digger Deeper
You’ve discovered several topics that might be interesting, and you’re keen to get to work. What next? How can you develop the topics in a way that’s meaningful for you and your students?

Since different students have different abilities and interests, one way is to divide the class into cooperative teams assigned to produce a mixed-media portfolio, combining art, video, photography and text. Let’s say, for example, that you and one team of students want to investigate the history of a local Greek Orthodox Church.

Two or three members of the team can be in charge of gathering oral histories by audio- or videotaping interviews with older members of the congregation and its priest. Others can investigate the church’s architectural style as well as the building’s ongoing relationship to its people. They can create a photo montage, diorama or other exhibit that reveals the congregation in all of its attitudes—celebratory of a wedding, reverential during high mass, solemn at a funeral. And, if they are lucky enough to find old photographs or sketches of the church at particular moments in its history, they can incorporate these into the exhibit.

Meanwhile, other students can pursue questions about the church and its history. How did the Greek community come to settle in this locale? Why did they choose to build such an extraordinary monument to their faith? What does the style of architecture say about their faith, compared to, say, the almost severe Puritanism of New England churches? Is the church still as relevant to the Greek community’s life as it was at the time of its construction? Or, like many of the more traditional churches in America, is it losing its membership as the children grow up and become “Americanized?”

Together, the student teams can produce a semester- or year-end exhibit that they can donate to the church and that will itself become a legacy for future generations interested in the past.