Writing Our Communities: Local Learning and Public Culture

Emphasizing writing and student inquiry, this rich collection offers teachers ready-to-use classroom resources with a sound basis in best practice. Student engagement with community becomes the centerpiece of the book, an engagement that takes place across disciplines through projects involving history, environment, culture, and much more. Editors Dave Winter and Sarah Robbins present teachers and students at all grade levels with lively, classroom-tested lessons that can be easily adapted to different teaching levels and a variety of settings. The book also effectively addresses curricular guidelines specific to local, regional, or state settings, as well as to national standards. Writing Our Communities: Local Learning and Public Culture grew out of Keeping and Creating American Communities, a multiyear curriculum development project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Writing Project. Educators from multiple disciplines and diverse institutional settings drew on their personal learning experiences to research and write about the communities around them and to revitalize curriculum in their classrooms. The result—this collection of the favorite lessons developed by an inquiry team of teachers and students, for application beyond their individual experience. Whether you’re searching for brief exercises to introduce community studies in the classroom or for extended units, this book is a rich resource for your classroom, helping your students write about their communities while exploring, re-creating, discovering or rediscovering, reclaiming, preserving, and building these communities