Finding Our Wayne: A Case Study of Including Local History in Secondary Education using a Digital History Project

The study of local history is an often-forgotten art in secondary schools. Teachers are so focused on cramming as much content and building as many skills as they can into a school year, that adding the nuance of local history would be a distractor for both them and their students. My alternative Independent Study argues that My argument is that local history allows students to connect with history on a more personal level, and therefore should be utilized more often in secondary education. Defining and explaining local and digital history and how those two aspects work together will lay a framework for how local history can be used. Interrogating examples of local history in the classroom and social studies pedagogy will take digital local history to the next step and allow for classroom integration. Using the framework that has been created from these two ideas, a digital history project created, using Wayne County, Ohio as a case study for integrating local history into the classroom. The digital history project includes a database of sources relating to Wayne County, Ohio, all of which have a short analysis and link to content. In addition, there are multiple activities for teachers to use for integration of some of the provided sources into the classroom. This can be found at: woosterdigital.org/wayneohiohistory