Explore Your Community: A Community Heritage Poster for the Classroom

In cooperation with the Rural School and Community Trust, and with support from the U.S. Department of Education, the American Folklife Center has produced a poster entitled "Explore Your Community," designed for middle school and high school students. The poster encourages students to learn more about their own communities by engaging in documentation projects. On the back are suggestions for heritage studies and community projects, such as interviewing friends and classmates about school-related traditions and developing a walking tour of a historic neighborhood. The Folklife Center and the Rural Trust hope that students will want to explore and document a wide range of living cultural expressions in their families, schools, neighborhoods, and towns and cities.

The "Explore Your Community" poster is in full color, 22 x 34 inches, and available free of charge from the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 101 Independence Avenue, SE, Washington, D.C. 20540-4610. Email folklife@loc.gov. Schools and other institutions or organizations needing multiple copies: please send in one order for all the copies if possible.

This site provides the full text found on the back of the poster. In addition there is a list of Web resources for further exploration of community heritage. Select from the following menu:

• What Heritage Studies Can Do for You (introduction)
• Community Culture: It's All Around You! (panel one)
• Exams, Trophies, Dirty Socks: Community Traditions in Your School (panel two)
• Work and Play, Ritual and Celebration: Cultural Heritage in Your Community (panel three)
• Mapping Your World (panel four)
• Choose a Topic, Any Topic-- Chances are, it has Links to Folklife (panel five)
• About the American Folklife Center and the Rural School and Community Trust (panel six)
• Web Resources for Further Study