Historical & Genealogical Society Projects and Service-Learning

Many historical and genealogical societies have some level of interaction with local schools. However, most have an opportunity to become more creative by exploring additional ways to interact with teachers and their students.

I recently stumbled upon a website for the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse. This website contains many thought provoking suggestions about how to start or strengthen a historical or genealogical society's project relationship with local schools. Several historical preservation projects are described, and many resource links are provided.

The basic concept is to match historical society needs with learning opportunities for students. A few of the projects described are collecting and documenting oral histories, researching important community history topics, documenting and preserving artifacts, and scanning / captioning / publishing historical images in a local paper. The possibilities are limited only by a society's imagination.

These projects provide students with a practical and real world learning experience, the students are providing a service to the community, the historical society has found additional resources to advance its preservation and sharing objectives, and the society has hopefully enthused the next generation of society volunteers and leaders.

A good place to start a browse of the website is on a page titled Service- Learning & Historic Preservation: Benefits. Additional tabs below the title provide examples, resources, and first steps.

If your historical or genealogical society has an example of a successful project partnering experience with a school, please share it in a comment.