From Colonial Williamsburg: Past and Present Podcasts
"Buildings bear silent witness to the history that happens inside them. Conservator Matt Webster makes sure structures live to tell their tales."
This podcast also has a corresponding vodcast with Matt Webster.
National Park Service Teaching With Museum Collections offers object-based learning emphasizing the links between the real things and historical analysis. Collections connect students to their past, rich and varied cultures, momentous events, inspiring ideas, and the places where the nation's history happened.
Lesson plans provide teachers with easy-to-use, grade-appropriate educational activities, and link to national educational standards. Photographs of museum objects and specimens, historic photographs, maps, and other documents are used to teach. Reading materials, web resources, and glossaries are included. Suggestions on how teachers can substitute similar available objects, and develop local, community-based activities are provided.
Teaching with Museum Collections includes a worksheet for analyzing artifacts asking students to examine such factors as the object's construction purpose, value, and design. The site also includes a similar worksheet for analyzing photographs.
The Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois has been dedicated to preserving historic structures throughout the state of Illinois since 1971. Landmarks Illinois focuses on advocating succesfully for the preservation of historical structures across the state, and has been instrumental in both stalling efforts to demolish historic buildings as well as pushing for new legislation that favors preservation.
The site offers a wealth of information about preservation projects undertaken by the society, both past and present, as well as resources for users looking to aid in the preservation of structures important to them.
"The workshop will use sites in Atlanta to tell the powerful and provocative stories of the imposition and demolition of the Color Line. The workshop participants will explore the Fox Theater, where the physical barriers of a segregated facility are still visible. They will walk the streets of the two principal historic districts that trace the history of the color line, the Martin Luther King National Historic Site and the Atlanta University National Register District. They will visit sites throughout the city where Civil Rights history is memorialized. The participants will have background readings and primary historic documents, access to historic site documentation on the websites of the Library of Congress (American Memory), the National Park Service, and the Landmark sites themselves in their study of the color line. They will hear lectures in their meeting places and at the sites they visit. Participants will receive resource packets with primary and secondary source materials for principal historical figures and the landmark sites with which they are associated in Atlanta."
"The workshop will use sites in Atlanta to tell the powerful and provocative stories of the imposition and demolition of the Color Line. The workshop participants will explore the Fox Theater, where the physical barriers of a segregated facility are still visible. They will walk the streets of the two principal historic districts that trace the history of the color line, the Martin Luther King National Historic Site and the Atlanta University National Register District. They will visit sites throughout the city where Civil Rights history is memorialized. The participants will have background readings and primary historic documents, access to historic site documentation on the websites of the Library of Congress (American Memory), the National Park Service, and the Landmark sites themselves in their study of the color line. They will hear lectures in their meeting places and at the sites they visit. Participants will receive resource packets with primary and secondary source materials for principal historical figures and the landmark sites with which they are associated in Atlanta."
During this workshop, "site visits integrated with documentary evidence will push participants to broaden their understanding of what did - and did not - constitute an Underground Railroad escape. Participants will discover that fugitives and the northerners who protected them were often as likely to fight as flee when confronted by slave catchers in the 1850s. Study of two nearby historic sites, Christiana, Pennsylvania, and Harpers Ferry, West Virginia will provide new insights into the aggressive operations of the Railroad and help frame the story of the coming of the Civil War. By the end of the workshop teachers will draft lesson plans that incorporate both episodes and offer a fresh approach to the study of the Underground Railroad."
During this workshop, "site visits integrated with documentary evidence will push participants to broaden their understanding of what did - and did not - constitute an Underground Railroad escape. Participants will discover that fugitives and the northerners who protected them were often as likely to fight as flee when confronted by slave catchers in the 1850s. Study of two nearby historic sites, Christiana, Pennsylvania, and Harpers Ferry, West Virginia will provide new insights into the aggressive operations of the Railroad and help frame the story of the coming of the Civil War. By the end of the workshop teachers will draft lesson plans that incorporate both episodes and offer a fresh approach to the study of the Underground Railroad."
"Teachers," the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis wrote, "are those who use themselves as bridges, over which they invite their students to cross; then having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own." With Kazantzakis’s maxim under my wing, I have nurtured his approach to teaching history for 30 years. Washington, DC, and its environs is the great laboratory of democracy. Given the chance to teach in the Washington, DC, area, I can empower my students with a special kind of learning—one infused by time, place, and space.
The Individualized Field Trip (IFT) permits students to encounter the past at historic sites and museums, all within the context of learning history based on state and national standards. They make outstanding summative assessment tools, while at the same time permitting students to have an enjoyable and fun experience while they learn.
The IFTs I have constructed over the last two decades have included student visits to battlefields, cemeteries, public monuments, history and art museums, and other historic sites. These activities are designed to have students, on their own time, visit these places, not simply for extra credit but for required enrichment of my classes. In each case students carry worksheets, a camera, and sometimes readings that they are to complete while visiting their particular site. These trips become a record of their experience, be they studying George Washington, while visiting Mount Vernon; Theodore Roosevelt while viewing an artistic exhibition interpreting his life at the National Museum of American Art; walking the National Mall and looking at the 20th-century war memorials to World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars; or traipsing through Congressional Cemetery in search of the final resting places of Mathew Brady, the famous Civil War photographer, or feminist sculptor Adelaide Johnson, whose National Memorial to the Women’s Rights Movement sits in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.
In the days before PowerPoint I used to have students create photo essays, placing images on poster board and adding captions underneath each image for identification. Today with more sophisticated technology and access to digital archives via the web, students can now craft engaging PowerPoint presentations that incorporate not only the pictures that they take at these sites, but archival images as well.
In my regular U.S. History classes I generally require IFTs for three of our four quarters. The IFT for the first quarter is connected to the Colonial Era, Revolutionary Era, and Early American Republic by visiting Mount Vernon. In the second quarter, students visit the National Gallery of Art and study the 1900 plaster cast of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Memorial. They also visit the National Memorial to African American Soldiers and Sailor’s Memorial by Ed Hamilton dedicated in 1997 which sits a short distance from Howard University, the first institution of higher learning for blacks created during Reconstruction. These visits are related to our study of the American Civil War. During the last quarter students are assigned an IFT I call “Echoes from the Mall,” which requires that they study the three memorials on the National Mall, all erected since 1982, that honor American sacrifice during those conflicts.
In all of these instances students complete worksheets (Mount Vernon, National Portrait Gallery, Civil War sculpture, and monuments along the Mall) I designed during the groundwork stage of the activity, where I pre-visit the site. The worksheets are specific and can only be answered by visiting the site. Students also must take at least two photographs of the sites during their visit. These photographs eventually illustrate journal entries that students complete, and are placed in their bound composition books. They are also used to decorate a section of my classroom called Clio’s Corner, where images of these student-historians at work are placed on display. To explore the worksheets for each of these trips, see the “download” part of this entry.
While it is true that I may live near Washington, DC, and have access to all these incredible places, I remind you that history and memory have taken place all across the nation. Working with local historical societies, small house museums, and even public libraries can go far in offering you and your students a singularly unique view of the past. Local history can work as a prism for larger issues in American history, connecting your town or community to the bigger picture.
My biggest suggestion is to encourage you to do your homework before you send the students on their mission—you need to visit these places yourself. That is crucial in crafting these activities. You need to know what you want your students to see, feel, and experience.