Historic Places: Common Ground for Teachers and Historians

Beth M. Boland

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
16 (Winter 2002). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 2002, Organization of American Historians

Editor's Note: At press time, the U.S. Department of the Interior had disabled all of its Internet functions, including the National Park Service web sites mentioned in this article. This action was in response to a legal case concerning the department's management of trust funds for Native Americans. Until this matter is resolved, readers may have difficulty accessing online material from the National Park Service.

Teachers searching for ways to capture student interest and spark learning . . . Historians eager to instill an enthusiastic, yet critical understanding of the stories and lessons from the past . . . Historic places form common ground where educators and content specialists can reach out with great advantage to each other and to the students they both care about. At the same time, the most effective exploration of this territory combines knowledge, skills, and training from both disciplines. It is this natural affinity between historians and educators that the National Park Service's Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) program seeks to encourage and assist. Educators have contributed to every phase of the TwHP program, and it is an example of the benefit derived from working collaboratively.

As authentic remnants of the past, historic places provide both an emotional link, which generates interest and excitement, and an intellectual gateway into investigating and understanding people and events in history. And the best part is that we can find these places all around us in the communities where we live. The National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places lists and maintains documentation on more than 72,000 such places, containing more than a million significant historic properties within their boundaries. Although the National Register includes national park sites and national historic landmarks, there has always been a special emphasis on places important to the towns, counties, regions, and states in which they are located. Approximately 60 percent of the listings represent sites of local significance, and 30 percent are places meaningful at the state level. For every national icon like Mount Vernon, there are literally thousands of places that reflect state and local individuality.

About ten years ago, the National Register began promoting places as effective tools for enlivening traditional classroom instruction. Consultation with a wide range of educators resulted in the launch of TwHP in 1991, and the program owes much of its success to the initial and ongoing contribution of educators and other partners. In the beginning, teachers, curriculum specialists, professors of education, and leaders of education organizations, along with historians, historic site interpreters, preservationists, and others met to offer invaluable advice about structuring a program teachers could really use. From teachers we learned about time and budget constraints; limited opportunities for field trips despite their acknowledged value; the lack of training in using nontraditional sources, such as historic places; and the need for credible and convenient teaching materials.

The group recommended the development of such materials as the most immediate, helpful service we could provide. Fay Metcalf, a former classroom teacher and Ph.D. historian, developed the prototype TwHP lesson plan format and wrote the first several lessons. Subsequently, educators have continued to write, review, and edit TwHP lesson plans. Classroom teachers and other educators have written lessons individually or in interdisciplinary teams on sites such as a rancho in southern California, an artist's home and studio in New Hampshire, a Cuban neighborhood in Florida, and the Indiana headquarters of a company founded by a spectacularly successful African American entrepreneur, among others. Field testing by classroom teachers has resulted in revisions that help individual lessons appeal to students and better fit curricula, and that incorporate more teacher-friendly features into the overall lesson plan design.

A series of more than one hundred classroom-ready lesson plans forms the foundation of the TwHP program. Based on places listed in the National Register, each lesson demonstrates how focusing on historic sites can engage student interest and improve learning, even when students cannot visit. Lesson topics cover a broad spectrum of the American past, including African American history, the Civil War, commerce and industry, immigration, the presidency, and many other themes. The contributions of Asian Americans, American Indians, Hispanic Americans, and women are all represented in lessons such as Locke and Walnut Grove: Havens for Early Asian Immigrants in California, The Battle of Honey Springs: The Civil War Comes to the Indian Territory, Forts of Old San Juan: Guardians of the Caribbean, and Adeline Hornbek and the Homestead Act: A Colorado Success Story. More than seventy of these lessons are available on the World Wide Web at <http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/twhp/>, where the lessons are indexed by historic theme, state, and time period.

Lessons conform to a standard format, and each contains information about curricula connections and learning objectives, as well as guidance on working through the lesson plan. Evoking a "sense of place" is particularly important for students investigating sites in the classroom, and this is one of the major functions of the "Introduction" section of the lessons. "Setting the Stage" provides basic historical background to prepare students to learn. "Locating the Site" furthers an understanding that "place" signifies more than merely a location point on a map. "Determining the Facts" and "Visual Evidence" contain primary documents and other sources of evidence, which students analyze for information. "Putting It All Together" activities require students to synthesize the information and link the specific place and its story with "the big picture." On the advice of educators, we recently added a new opening section called "Getting Started," which uses a variety of images and a visual analysis worksheet to engage students quickly.

Working through the lessons, students enjoy a historian's sense of discovery as they examine documents, develop and test hypotheses, and conduct research. For example, in "locating" Alaska's late-nineteenth-century Yukon gold field in the Gold Fever! lesson plan, students analyze maps to consider advantages and disadvantages of land and sea routes from the contiguous United States. While "determining the facts" from writings and speeches of European American and American Indian leaders prior to The Battle of Horseshoe Bend: Collision of Cultures, students learn that there was disagreement within each culture and gain new insights into the complexities of the conflicts between the two. After examining railroads' remote reach in Thurmond: A Town Born of Coal Mines and Railroads, students "put it all together" by comparing the impact of railroads with that of other forms of transportation in America and by role-playing the precision needed for workers to keep operations running smoothly, without disaster. Because even distant sites can cast light on the familiar places around us, and because local history mirrors the broader themes that have shaped this country, at least one activity in each lesson guides teachers and students in researching the history and places of their own communities.

Another hallmark of TwHP lesson plans is their flexibility. The lessons help students learn the nation's history from real historic places even when they cannot go there, but they also can prepare students for and reinforce class trips to these places. Teachers can use whole lessons or pick out portions to complement existing teaching units. A high school teacher of American history and geography related that she uses the lessons primarily in four ways: for whole class readings and discussions, as cooperative learning jigsaws, for document analysis practice, and as "destinations" for virtual historic site visits. Lesson plans also have the advantage of being interdisciplinary. An English teacher in Oakland, California, wrote that she has used the lesson on Chicago's Black Metropolis: Learning History Through a Historic Place as a final project for an eleventh-grade unit on Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. A library media specialist in the Columbus, Ohio, public school system likes the maps and the geography content of the lesson plans. A middle school teacher in Phoenix, Arizona, incorporates technology by directing students to use Internet genealogical programs as part of an Andersonville activity that asks them to research ancestors or other people from the past. Teachers from upper elementary through high school and even college make use of TwHP lessons, as do home-schoolers and instructors for gifted and talented students. The lessons also serve as a model for those wanting to write their own educational materials based on historic places. In short, the lessons provide a convenient, reliable, flexible, and replicable means of meeting curriculum requirements while engaging students in active and creative learning.

Not only do the TwHP lesson plans serve as teaching units on their own merits, but they advance another valuable methodology. Through the lesson plans, teachers and students practice examining places as three-dimensional sources of evidence. TwHP further promotes this process in workshops called "field studies" to emphasize the active investigation involved. In field studies, mixed groups of educators, historians, and preservationists decode information from the physical evidence of a specific historic place. After spending time on site, participants regroup to share and critique their observations. Many are surprised to learn how often they already make unconscious assumptions from visual clues, and they start to think about how to test those assumptions by pairing places with other forms of evidence. Then the group discusses and debates conclusions, places information within a larger historical context, relates findings to curricula and standards, and plans how to apply the procedure back home.

In recent years, the Internet has become, by far, our most important means of making TwHP information more widely available than was possible through the traditional mail or at professional conferences; and it has provided an important avenue for receiving feedback as well. In addition to online lesson plans, the TwHP web site contains a step-by-step guide suggesting ways to follow the lessons, and an author's packet outlining the process of writing a lesson using our model. Worksheets are available to help educators select historic places appropriate to their instructional objectives, and to teach students how to analyze a photograph or "read" a historic place. The site links to information on using the National Register's computerized database, registration files, and other resources to identify, locate, and obtain documentation about historic places. With the development of a variety of distance-learning techniques, the Internet holds even greater potential for the future, including, of course, collaborations between public historians and educators.

Everything we do is undertaken with the hope that those caught up in the enthusiasm for historic places will spread the word. And we know this is happening. A recent Park Service publication entitled Creative Teaching with Historic Places showcases the work of only a sampling of teachers, historians, national park staff, professors of education, preservationists, and others, who--individually or collaboratively--have implemented or been inspired by TwHP. This publication is accessible online at <http://165.83.212.198/issue.cfm?volume=23&number=08>.

One goal of TwHP is for the use of historic places in education to become as routine as it is for some other types of primary sources. We encourage teachers in search of content to seek out local historians and to recommend that site interpreters, preservationists, and others eager for students to learn from their favorite historic place consult local educators. The results should only strengthen the relationship among public historians, educators, and their respective institutions. I know this has been true during my own journey across the common ground I described in my opening paragraph, a landscape that for me has been designed by teams of historians and educators. The substance of my formal education and professional training has consisted of history, museums, and preservation, and I have taught only adults in the course of my job as a preservation historian. Yet I am extremely grateful to my colleagues in education, who have been unfailingly generous and patient with their instruction and guidance. One of the highest compliments of my career came from a middle school teacher who asked me after one of my presentations where I had done my classroom teaching before joining the National Park Service.

Beth M. Boland is a historian with the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places, and the program manager for Teaching with Historic Places.