Shared Histories: Teaching outside the Classroom "Box"

Abstract

“Town and gown”: the phrase typically evokes distinct communities in shared or contiguous space. Since the medieval origins of the university, these communities have often existed in tension, typically surrounding the different sorts of economic, social, and cultural capital they represent. Today, virtually every college and university exists within a community with histories of its own and organizations devoted to preserving and telling those histories. Public historians have long been accustomed to recovering and telling these stories: sometimes from within the academy, where they teach in departments of history, but more often through historical museums, archives, and other institutions that connect a broader audience to the local past. However, the gap between academic and public history is narrower than we might think—because our students have their own connections to the places where we study and teach, especially if they attend college not far from where they have spent most of their lives. Our students’ experiences afford opportunities to bridge the town-gown divide. The three essays that make up this section describe collaborations between college students, instructors, and cultural and historical organizations beyond the campus. Each partnership aims to enhance the students’ historical understanding and to provide a tangible product for the community institutions or organizations. Peter Knupfer (Michigan State University) explains how his Senior Seminar in American History has come to study topics and episodes in Lansing’s history: not only as windows onto larger national stories but also as opportunities for students to dig deeply into archives and produce finding aids and other materials for local institutions. As Knupfer explains, his students’ course work thus becomes “audience-driven”: doing history, “need not be confined to classrooms and formal works of scholarship, . . . need not arise from cutting-edge research into a recently opened gap in the literature, and . . . can instead be taken into a community to serve a community’s needs.” Genevieve Carpio, Sharon Luk, and Adam Bush describe a project they devised while graduate students in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (): Building People’s Histories. Inspired by Howard Zinn’s pedagogical ideas, these authors brought students and instructors from several  courses into collaboration with the Southern California Library (), a self-defined “people’s library” devoted to collecting material about local freedom struggles. Their essay suggests multiple ways to bring the community to the classroom and vice