Teachers Who Made Local History a Shared Project

A Case Western Reserve history professor, Van Tassel started National History Day in Cleveland in 1974. The first event brought local secondary-school students together to present their own historical research. The project gave young researchers an audience beyond a classroom and made room for questions they had chosen themselves.

Through the Urban Memory Project, Krucoff helped Brooklyn students practice interviewing before asking neighbors to share what they remembered. One way to run the work was to arrange a day of concurrent interviews at school. The students gathered viewpoints they could compare with what they learned from other records.

In a U.S. history course at Joliet Junior College, Lyons asked students to interview their oldest living relative, record the interview, and write about it. The Joliet Area Historical Museum holds student work from 2002 through 2008. A course assignment became evidence that later researchers could use to study the area.

Hinojosa led an oral history project in Erath County, Texas, about topics such as work, food, family, and local traditions. Residents’ interviews were made publicly available, and teacher Amanda Stanfield developed classroom lessons using them. The project made local testimony a source that other teachers could work with.

At Balcarres Community School in Saskatchewan, Schwab’s students interviewed Cree Elders and other local knowledge holders. They turned what they heard into articles, poems, and artwork for a magazine. The publication gave families and community members a way to see how young people had understood and carried forward their stories.

Toronto’s Crestwood Oral History Project grew from inviting speakers into Masters’ classroom. Students went on to interview people in their community, including Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans. They added recordings, photographs, and mementos to an online archive so later classes could study them.

Seward asked students in Smiths Falls, Ontario, to select a name on the town’s cenotaph and trace that person’s wartime history. Families, the local veterans’ organization, and archives supplied letters, photographs, and service records. The resulting accounts gave local people more to go on than a name carved in stone.

Cleave’s students in Winnipeg spoke with Indigenous leaders and visited the Canadian Museum for Human Rights as they researched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action. Three classes rewrote the calls in language younger readers could understand and published both versions in a book. Other children could read the original alongside their classmates’ explanations.

Bunnell helped develop a research-based play about how the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans affected young people in Seattle. A play gives students a way to consider what those events meant to people their own age, in a city they know. It’s a particularly apt approach when a community wants to bring local research to a wider audience.

Coate developed the Madera Method in a sixth-grade classroom in California. Students investigated lives in local history using sources such as census records, letters, and interviews. They could publish imagined diary entries based on that research, giving them a reason to distinguish the evidence they found from the scenes they wrote.