What Might a Historic Preservation Service-Learning Project Look Like?

Service-learning projects in historic preservation can be linked to curriculum across all grade-levels and subjects ranging from social studies, math, science, and art, to name a few. Service-learning in historic preservation should focus on student volunteers filling identified needs in ways that benefit the organization, the community, and the young people themselves. Students could fulfill multiple curricula needs in areas such as:

• Research
• Documentation
• Restoration
• Maintenance
• Outreach
• Creating educational and marketing materials

Here are just a few examples of projects students could be involved in:

• Local historical societies or house museums could use students as volunteers, while educating students on the stories of local people, places, objects, and events. Students can develop research skills by working on tasks such as searching records, surveying archaeological sites, or interviewing people to capture oral histories.
• Students can work on archives of objects, documents, images, and other materials.
• Restoration efforts can involve students directly, from pounding nails and painting at historic sites to trail maintenance in national, state, or local parks.

Historic gardens or farms, roads and buildings, streams and military installations, as well as parks and natural features can instruct students about agriculture, transportation, industry, environment, biology, physics, chemistry, literature, writing, computer science, and other disciplines. Learning how animal and plant populations changed locally over centuries can create mental pictures or result in actual images of the way the landscape and the community evolved as human, cultural, and natural changes swept an area. Sites can memorably reveal vast amounts of historical content:

• how Native Americans were joined or forced out by European frontiersmen;
• how the industrial revolution, urbanization, and emigration changed a community over the years;
• how men and women marched off to war or served national priorities; and
• how all these local stories and more were themes of the national epic.