Gracia Santiago performs in Stevens Park, Finney County, Kansas, 1999, detail from poster. Photo courtesy of the Finney County Convention and Tourist Bureau.

Explore Your Community: A Community Heritage Poster for the Classroom

World Wide Web Resources for Cultural Heritage Research Projects

Explore Your Community Poster

Listed here are some online resources that will assist you in doing cultural research in your community, arranged according to the kinds of information they provide. (Unless otherwise noted, links on this page connect to resources provided by organizations other than the Library of Congress. The Library is not responsible for information provided on other Web sites.)

Collecting Cultural Heritage Materials

• Folklife and Fieldwork, by Peter Bartis (American Folklife Center, Library of Congress). A booklet on how to do fieldwork in your community (online and print versions available).
• "Fieldwork Basics," in Louisiana Voices: An Educators' Guide to Exploring Our Communities and Traditions.
• Preserving Community/Cuentos del Varrio: An Oral History Instruction Manual, by Jon Hunner, Daniel Villa, Pauline Staski, Jon Wall, and the students at Panther Achievement Center (New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Panther Achievement Center, Gadsden High School, Anthony, New Mexico)

Preserving Cultural Heritage Materials

• The Library of Congress's Preservation Directorate's page, Caring for Your Collections.

Cultural Heritage Curriculum Materials

• A Teacher's Guide to Folklife Resources for K-12 Classrooms, online database created by the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
• Louisiana Voices: An Educator's Guide to Exploring Our Communities and Traditions is an online statewide folklife curriculum model available through the Louisiana Division of the Arts Folklife Program.
• With City Lore, the Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students maintains the CARTS Web site, which contains much valuable information and a wide variety of relevant online folklife resources. City Lore also publishes The Culture Catalog: Resources in Folklore, History, and Culture.

Organizations

In addition to the American Folklife Center, the following national organizations have resources to help educators develop folklife education and folklife fieldwork projects with young people:

• American Folklife Center
• American Folklore Society
• City Lore, the New York Center for Urban Folk Culture
• National Endowment for the Arts, Folk and Traditional Arts Programs
• National Task Force on Folk Arts in Education
• Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
• Rural School and Community Trust
• Indivisible: Stories of American Community, A national documentary project that explores community life in America, with photographs and recorded voices.

There are also numerous state and local arts agencies and folklife-in-education initiatives across the country, many of which are listed in the Folklife Sourcebook: A Directory of Folklife Resources in the United States. (American Folklife Center, Library of Congress)

Examples of School-Based Cultural Heritage Projects

Bland County History Archive

Developed and maintained by students at Rocky Gap High School, in Rocky Gap, Virginia, the Bland County History Archives contain 80 cemetery catalogs, 330 oral history interviews (both tapes and transcripts), and 700 scanned photographs, plus maps and other artifacts. The Archives began in 1993 as an optional project in junior-year American history classes, with the goal of preserving the unique stories of the area's Appalachian residents. Several years later, educators took advantage of the opportunity to integrate computer technology with the history curriculum, creating a local history and technology class specifically to manage and organize the Archives's Web site. The online content of the Archives continues to grow, and in 1996 the site won "Best School Resource Site in Virginia" from the Virginia Society for Technology in Education.

Llano Grande Center for Research and Development

Much of the history of South Texas is missing from conventional textbooks, lying instead in oral folk tradition. As a result, students and staff of the Llano Grande Center for Research and Development, housed at Edcouch-Elsa High School, are conducting and publishing interviews with residents of this Rio Grande Valley border community. Equipped with a cassette tape recorder and a still camera, students conduct the interviews and later transcribe and edit them for publication in the Llano Grande Journal, available in hard copy and online, in both English and Spanish. Many area students now read the journal's oral histories as literature assignments in their language arts classes.

Montana Heritage Project

Montana's state-wide project supports cultural heritage education in its schools. The Web site provides curriculum materials, examples of past projects, and information about publications and events related to the project.