Telling the Told (and Untold) Stories of a Downtown: Creating a Digital Walking Tour

• In Event: What Happened Here? High School and Preservice Teachers’ Engagement With History at Local Historic Sites

Abstract

Your context - your place - matters. Place serves as a “lens” that teachers can utilize to inform their social studies curricula, instruction, and assessment (Author, 2022). Students can also use this lens to “make sense of themselves and their surroundings” (McInerney et al., 2011, p. 5) in addition to a resource for “[their] education, entertainment, nourishment, inspiration, and lifelong learning” (Clark & Glazer, 2004, p. 1). Our research utilized a case study approach (Yin, 2017) to explore how teacher candidates (TCs) learn about, research, curate, and create place-based social studies educational resources for a digital walking tour of a downtown space. We will focus on the second and third research questions in this study: How do TCs utilize existing resources to create new resources associated with local historical sites? What told (and untold) stories associated with local historical sites do TCs tell through a digital walking tour?
Resor (2010) poses the following question about place-based education (PBE): “What is its place in the social studies classroom?” (p. 185). We posit that place not only belongs in the social studies classroom (i.e., place ambiguity), but it extends the social studies classroom into the larger local community (i.e., place sensitivity). Truly, place has the potential to become the social studies classroom (i.e., place essential). In our work, we will employ Mannion and Lynch’s (2016 as cited in Renshaw & Tooth, 2018) three levels of place responsiveness (p. 15):
(1) place ambiguity, where teachers treat the place as simply the staging ground for activities;
(2) place sensitivity, where teachers show some awareness of the features of place related to their curriculum and pedagogical goals; and
(3) place essential, where the features of place are essential for the activities that are designed to engage students in deep learning about place.
Data sources included researcher notes from two field trip experiences as well as TC course work (i.e., two written reflections; a project self-evaluation; sources, inquiry questions, written content, TC-recorded video, and TC-created assessment related to their chosen local historical sites). Data analysis is ongoing and focuses on elements related to elementary social studies place-based education.
Preliminary findings indicate that 1) TCs utilized existing resources (e.g., sources, written content) to develop new resources (e.g., inquiry questions, videos, assessments) associated with their sites and 2) TCs predominantly focused on told stories; however, in some instances, they were committed to including untold (or often silenced) stories about marginalized populations in their community. For example, Lucy showcased the dialogue surrounding the contextualization of a confederate monument (i.e., through news articles and primary source images) while Greta designed a map assessment to highlight Black-owned businesses that had been demolished to create a parking lot. Our work highlights the importance of TCs “experienc[ing] PBE in action themselves as learners, [...] hear[ing] from [community members] who testify to the approach’s power, and join[ing] communities of educators who can embody the aims and values that they aspire to” (Lowenstein et al., 2018, p. 47).

Authors

• Ariel Cornett, Georgia Southern University

• Erin Piedmont, Georgia Southern University