Project #1

Projects Can Be Motivating and Memorable

Community Change

Summary: Elizabeth Smith of Waterford, Michigan, designed a project that involves seeing the changes in a place rather than seeing a community as a static entity. The class repeatedly considered whether changes were "positive" or "negative"

Specifically, her class investigated changes through

	observation of their neighborhood
	guessing what particular parts of the community looked like 100 years before
	a guest speaker from the local historical society who brought pictures and reports about some of those places that the class had speculated about
	field trips to selected places in the community with camcorders, notepads, etc., to observe and report on current vs. historical views and attributes of particular places
	interviews with senior citizens about community changes
	reading from a number of fictional accounts of changing communities, as well as a history of their town
	journal writing to facilitate students' thinking about topics, especially whether changes were "positive" or "negative" and what groups might make such judgments
	evolving a matrix that they filled in as they developed pieces so that they could consider similar aspects for the various places. The readings contributed several pieces to this matrix.
	inviting a panel of community members from various walks of life to discuss authoritatively responsible community change
	a role-play scenario on community change vs. people's rights
	The unit culminated with students' recommendation reports regarding responsible community change, focused on their town, delivered before an assembled audience of parents and town officials; the directions and a scoring scale are included in the report of this project referenced below (13-18).

Adapt it for yourself: Ignore the grade level for Smith's class (other than to consider other titles for readings, e.g. more primary documents for a college course) and figure out which features of her design you might adapt for a unit in one of your courses. Adaptations would most obviously be suited to a course in English, history, sociology, or political science, but the methods could also be adapted to any course that could include a historical perspective or a focus on change over time, e.g. health science classes. Students would, for instance, interview doctors or nurses with some decades of experience instead of senior citizens, to capture changes in equipment, procedures, skills, etc., and the necessity of staying current in one's field. But business (retailing and fashion design, for instance, but also accounting), architecture and building, electronics, and any humanities course involving cultural change could benefit from adapting this unit.

Source: This project is described in a .pdf online file (requiring Adobe Acrobat Reader) at http://www.remc11.k12.mi.us/FW/teach_learn.pdf Scroll down to pages 12-20. Page 3 at this site lists the four standards for "authentic instruction" that serve as background for the glosses that appear on each of the 5 project reports in this document. Page 5 lists questions for discussion, in case you decide to confer with colleagues about any of the five "vignettes" included in the document.

You may be able to access an html version of the report at this link, which was provided by Google (www.google.com), a search engine:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ZLwAnAP56Os:www.remc11.k12.mi.us/FW
/teach_learn.pdf+teaching+vignettes&hl=en

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