Describes high school social studies student projects involving a study of local cemeteries. Projects include charting life expectancies, creating slide shows of community grave sites, and collecting tombstone rubbings. (KC)

Suggests methods and materials for class discussions of local water resources and conservation. (SJL)

This guide will help secondary teachers use the 1984 elections as a tool to teach about American government and politics. Students use their town, county, or city as the classroom. Newspapers, community resources, campaign materials and activities, and the broadcast media are their textbooks. (RM)

A museum program in Montreal encourages elementary and secondary school students to examine their surroundings and neighborhoods. Units focus on stained glass windows, houses, history of Montreal, the neighborhood, and architectural heritage. (KC)

This article outlines a conceptual framework for a high school or college level unit on local history and demonstrates use of the framework through a case study of Whitehall, Georgia. Information is presented on planning the unit, selecting a community, teaching methods, collecting data, and identifying likely sources of information on community…

Talking with local merchants helps sixth-graders explore the impact of change in their community. (Editor/SJL)

Students can use their community as a historical base, but they must first learn how to question effectively. Specific strategies for implementing interviews are suggested. Through interviewing, students learn concepts about demography, roles, and social change, and they acquire skills in collecting data, testing hypotheses, and evaluating data.…

Provides suggestions for turning the search for local history materials into a coherent package for the classroom. Teachers should choose a project that teaches skills and helps shape student values. A thematic approach (for example, transportation) contributes to selectivity and is useful for producing a sourcebook. (KC)

This article consists of four sections. The first presents starter activities in career awareness for elementary students. Sections two and three, addressed to teachers, discuss sex stereotyping in careers and career education for the handicapped. The final section describes a fifth-grade community study project which produced a local guidebook.…

Home, school, neighborhood, and community studies offer unique opportunities for teachers to initiate youngsters into observing and recording phenomena. Because fuel costs make trips increasingly expensive, an alternative method is suggested for observing and recording data about the local community. (Author/IS)

Suggests that observing, photographing, and discussing local buildings and places can help students form opinions about the built environment, the art form they experience most of the time. Presents some teaching ideas from existing photography-in-the-built-environment projects in Britain and the United States. (Author/SJL)

Describes a writing course for undermotivated students which focuses on careful precise observations through the study of other time periods in the history of the town where the school is located. (DD)

How fiction is used in a college-level political science seminar to teach about democratic decision making and U.S. politics is described. The fiction used is clustered around the following topics: community-level decisions, limits to consensus, group values and politics, acquiring elected offices and trying to keep them, and public bureaucracies.…

Describes a local history project in which high school students located valuable historic photographs on the local community and reproduced them on 35mm slides. An historic photo archive consisting of the slides accompanied by documentary materials was created. Procedures for creating and suggestions for using a photo archive are included. (KC)

Explains how studying a floodplain can help students analyze the interactions between humans and the physical environment. Analyzes data from two cities in California to demonstrate that housing prices did not rebound after a flood. (GG)