The Promise of Digital History in the Teaching of Local History

Abstract

oo often, students do not share their teacher's passion for history. It is easy to understand why some students dread history classes; all one has to do is sit through a poorly delivered high school history lecture or read a typical history textbook. History frequently is taught as a set of facts that must be memorized to either pass a test or become culturally literate (Whelan 1997). Such an approach to history instruction reduces content to a consumable, socially irrelevant product and strips meaning from the classroom. When history is delivered as a product, students often are unable to make connections, develop sustainable interests, or establish relevance (Seixas 1994; Grant 2001). Student interest is best generated when the answer to the ageold question, Why do I need to know this? is relevant to their lives. To alleviate the drudgery of typical history instruction, teachers can design activities that enable students to use authentic historical resources to pull engaging, meaningful, and useful content from the past. One of the best approaches to learning about the usefulness of the past is through the study of local history. Such study could focus on constructing public historical resources and re-constructing personalized stories of the past (Coles and Welch 2002). In an effort to construct more meaningful history experiences for students, we developed a local history class for high school students. The class focused on the history of Cherokee County, Georgia, and is part of a larger Cherokee County Digital History Project (2003), which helps students construct their own knowledge about local history by connecting them to their community. In addition to the class, we developed two online, local historical resources that highlight people and topical themes in Cherokee County. High school students worked in conjunction with social studies preservice education students at Georgia State University to develop these resources. In this article, we argue in favor of introducing local history in high school classes. We discuss the rationale for local history, using the local history course we recently developed as an example. In addition, we consider how technology enables the implementation of local history into this specific course, as well as school curricula in general.