About the Grant: Mission Statement
"The disciplined thinking of
the historian is crucial if individuals are to draw their own
inferences about what happened in an event, decide which historical
analogies are apt and which are not, and express opinions and cast
votes on issues of import in terms of reasonable criteria rather
than sheer whim."
-Howard Gardner (1999)
Project LOCAL (Learning Our Community�s American
Lore) will train teachers to incorporate the local history of their
communities into the teaching of traditional American history. In partnership
with Tufts University, the communities of Everett, Medford, Revere, Somerville,
and Winthrop will engage in a series of day-long intensive professional
development workshops following a "train-the-trainer" model. As members of the
Shore Educational Collaborative, these communities have an existing
relationship that supports teachers in sustained collaborative opportunities.
The initial workshops will focus on providing participants with access to:
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experts in American history,
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area sites with community, regional and national historical significance,
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related primary resource materials, and
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appropriate teaching strategies that foster higher-order thinking skills.
Subsequently, the participating site leaders will employ the resources and
skills to provide a series of professional development workshops within their
respective communities. To that end local historical societies and historic
sites will support the individual community effort.
To provide a lasting resource that will support the growth of American history
studies in each participating community, a library of teaching strategies,
discussions and models will be created and stored for dissemination at a
website hosted by Tufts University. Combining video and text, the library of
video-based teaching cases will document Project LOCAL and provide a
means of evaluating and further implementing the developed resources.
In the three years of the grant life, Project LOCAL will directly
involve approximately 75% of the teachers of American History in each district. Project
LOCAL
will also have an impact on approximately 964 students per district (over
4,800).
