Consultants in the Classroom: Student/Teacher Collaborations in Community History

Abstract

In the spring of 2011, students in my advanced seminar for history majors at Michigan State University () discovered that nearby Lansing had spent more than a decade fighting over the desegregation of the city’s schools. “I do not think I have ever really thought about who makes up the population of Lansing or how foreign the idea of desegregated schools would be during the time period,” one of them wrote in her class blog, “but it is all becoming much more clear now.” She did not arrive at this conclusion after hearing a lecture or reading a text. She came to it while immersed in the minutes of the Lansing School Board (“I am addicted to school board minutes”), which chronicled a divisive and emotional struggle from the mid-1960s through the late 1970s by the city to shape the direction of its schools, a struggle highlighted by a special election that replaced the board’s busing proponents with opponents of busing and by a series of losing court battles with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People () that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The struggle over busing and desegregation is an important chapter in the nation’s history of civil rights that college students can study in the conventional way, through a course of lectures, readings, and writing assignments. The students in my seminar entered the story from a different door, however, by conducting research and preparing work product in a community setting. Public historians are familiar with this approach to research; project-centered study is a staple of public history course design. What made this experience different was that the instructor had had no formal training in public history, the students’ projects originated outside rather than inside the classroom, the course was not explicitly or formally one on public history, and the method of instruction put the teacher in the role of consultant rather than professor. The common denominator in these experiences was the audience-driven nature of the course work, like that of a consultant’s work.