A Trip to the Past
The three yellow school busses turn sharply off the paved road onto a rutted dirt road canopied by ancient trees. Their branches swoop down, strike the busses and snake into the open windows. Some of the 120 students in my senior English class riding these buses scream. I smile; it happens every year.
The buses climb a winding road past decaying shacks and the crumbling ruins of the first African American community in Kansas City, Kansas, before dipping into a valley where a small stream crosses. The bus driver pauses at the wooden bridge in our front, and turns to me questioningly. Several students urge her not to go on.
"It’s all right." I say. "The bridge will hold the busses, and you can make the turn at the other end easily."
"It’s trying to make the turn coming back that is the problem," I think silently. The lines of yellow paint left when the bus banged off the guardrails last year stand out on its rusted surface. I look to see if the driver attaches any significance to the evidence of last year’s scrape, but she is concerned only with negotiating the narrow bridge and the tight turn just beyond.
I never get the same bus drivers two trips in a row.
The buses climb a steep hill to the Old Quindaro Cemetery, established in 1850. There the students climb out and look down on the Missouri River winding through the valley that separates Kansas from Missouri today and freedom from slavery in 1850. Awaiting our arrival below us are the ruins of the town of Old Quindaro, an Underground Railroad site. It lies tangled in the river bottom brush, five miles and 150 years from our departure site, Washington High School in Kansas City, Kansas. The students wander through the cemetery containing the remains of the founders of the town taking pictures, making rubbings of the tombstones or taking notes on the inscriptions. I walk among them taking pictures of them and of the site to be used in the web pages we will construct as the first step in preserving the story of the community.
This is the first stop on a research trip that I have been taking for the last seven years with my senior English class. It is used as a beginning for a year of community research in those classes. After Quindaro, we visit Strawberry Hill, Polish Hill, German Hill, and Irish Hill where Eastern Europeans arrived in the area at approximately the same time Black Exodusters began to immigrate here from the South after the Civil War. We stand on the bluff and overlook their common arrival point at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers on which the Kansa Indians paddled 1,000 years before Lewis and Clark’s cut their own wake.
We drive by the ethnic churches and schools established by these groups on our way to the Rosedale Arch built by the residents of that neighborhood to commemorate their neighbors who died in four wars. The buses swing through Argentine where Mexican immigrants lived in boxcars after immigrating here to work in the railroads and the silver smelter of that neighborhood. We visit the home of the first white settler, Moses Grinter, and the home site of his neighbor, George, the first Black settler before a tired but an excited group of teenagers are returned to their Twentieth Century lives.
The Community as Text
In my senior English classes, our community is our text and the community field trip is used to write the first pages of it. The rest of the text is written during the year by the collaborative community research the students conduct. Community research requires students to ask and answer questions about the nature of the community and the relationships of the people within it. Using the community as our text, we create a research context for these questions that allows for their discussion as a natural outgrowth of the study, not as an artificial program attached to the course.
The fact that upon their arrival our immigrant ancestors were immediately segregated into ethnic neighborhoods that still exist today is the first hard truth to be studied by my students. The larger truth that is learned from this study is more optimistic. They soon discover that we have more commonalties than differences in our shared but often unequal history. Our ancestors, Europeans, Black Southerners, Mexicans, Hmongs, Laotians and others came to this area to looking for freedom and a chance to pursue life liberty and happiness. During their research, the students meet the immigrants and discover they are us. The story of our community is the quintessential American story and the telling of it by students allows students and teachers to confront the essential questions of living in the modern world and the opportunity to open a world of understanding between all groups in all communities.
The Kansas Collaborative Research Network
For years my students published their community research projects in the traditional manner: papers, exhibitions, presentations, videotapes, etc. This year their research will become part of an ambitious student research collaboration project, The Kansas Collaborative Research Network.
KanCRN is an open community made up of K-12 students, teachers, researchers, and mentors interested in conducting Internet-based, collaborative research. The goal of KanCRN is to engage 10,000 schools in collaborative research projects in the next five years. Not only will students share their research, but they will be aided by mentors, experts in the field, in completing their research and be given on-line feedback from them on their posted research. By posting their findings on the KanCRN web site, students can use and add to research done by students worldwide. In this sense, collaborative community research parallels the real model of research where experts share and build off research done with and by others.
The importance of the Internet model of KanCRN, however, goes beyond the ability to build a research base. Students who engage in authentic collaborative research about their communities cannot be disconnected from the text they are studying and creating. They have switched from the role of passive researcher of academic questions to the role of active storyteller of their community, and they are celebrated as such within the classroom, community and families. The KanCRN connection now expands that celebration and collaboration to an audience of unlimited numbers, providing questions and answers of importance to the global community as well as their own.
Teaching Students How to Research the Community
Students need to be taught how to research their community. They need to be taught not only the technical side of format and presentation, but also how to develop a research question, how to find sources, how to read the sources for relevant information, how to decide what material to use and not to use, how to decide what is valid and what must be questioned, etc.
The first step in teaching students research is to have them create a web page on one of the sites on the field trip. After the trip, we journal about the various sites, discuss them, and I break students up into groups where they choose one of the sites to make a web page. This on line exercise walks the students through the basics elements of creating a community research web page. The web page will contain a photo of the historic site, a basic description of it, a bibliography, two links other web pages on the world wide that share some of the characteristics of that historic site, and a page with their picture and short biographies on it. These links are placed on a community web page the students are creating in conjunction with the Wyandotte County Historical Society Museum. Two interns that I have placed at the museum act as research assistants for this first project and the other research projects that follow.
After the field trip web pages are finished, students are ready to apply basic research skills to a larger project that will broaden their research. Students asked to choose one of the four tutorials on line that I have created for this purpose. These tutorials take the students through the entire research process during the first semester to prepare them to their own spin-off research during the second semester. Each tutorial supplies a research question and the resources needed to complete the tutorial. Students can work on line or offline by downloading and printing the tutorial. Links to lessons on writing and research skills assist students to learn the research process as they work through the tutorials.
The first tutorial is titled" Quindaro, Kansas and the Underground Railroad." It deals with the town site of Old Quindaro and asks the following research question: "The National Park Service is considering making the town site of Old Quindaro a stop on the Underground Railroad Trail it is developing. Is Old Quindaro historically significant enough to become a part of this trail?" Resources provided for this tutorial include primary source letters describing slaves escaping through the town of Quindaro, oral histories preserved by residents of the area, a report by the National Park Service on the site, an archaeologist report on the site’s significance, and several sources describing the Underground Railroad system.
The next two tutorial deal with the segregation of white and Black high school students in Kansas City, Kansas in 1904. The first is titled " The Shooting of Roy Martin" and deals with the murder of a white student by a African American youth that led to barring African American students from the integrated Kansas City, Kansas High School. The research question for this project is "Was Louis Gregory guilty of first degree murder in the death of Roy Martin?’ Students use newspaper articles from 1904 and oral histories printed for the first time in the 1970’s to sift through the evidence for and against the above question and come to a verdict.
The second tutorial on this event shares many of the same resources of the above, but the question focuses the student research on the founding of the all African American Sumner High School after Blacks were barred from Kansas City, Kansas High School following the death of Roy Martin. Titled "The Founding of Sumner High School," it asks the research question "How did the racial events and atmosphere of 1904 lead to the opening of Sumner High School?" In answering this question, students must research racial atmosphere in Kansas City, Kansas before the time of the murder and up to the founding of Sumner in order to place the events of the founding of Sumner in historical context.
The final tutorial is titled "African American Immigration to Wyandotte County, Delaware Township, 1875-1885" The research question asks "Does the immigration of Blacks to Delaware Township, Kansas after 1879 show an increase over the immigration of Blacks from former slave holding states to Delaware Township, Kansas before that date." The year 1879 is held to be the height of the immigration of Blacks from the South to the North. The research question to be answered tests whether that holds true for Delaware Township, the geographic area where Washington High School now sits. The resources for this research differ greatly from the others. Microfilms of he 1875 and 1885 Kansas State Census provide the data needed to compare the number of African Americans before the 1879 benchmark and after it. This tutorial requires students to construct a demographic chart that will answer this question from the total data available. Students without access to these microfilms may use the data from the United States Census in 1870 and 1880 already on line or borrow microfilms from the local museums or libraries.
The use of the complete microfilm records and not just aggregate totals of census data is important since the microfilms allow students construct tables that include the names, ages, and occupations of these African Americans as well as the state they immigrated from. On one hand, such detailed information is helpful in answering the question as to whether children born in Kansas after their parents immigrated should be counted as a product of the immigration or not - an important research parameter. But the larger reason for the inclusion of names and occupations is that this personalizes as a founder of our community each individual in contrast to the nameless numbers presented by the totals. Some students find relatives in these research projects - a powerful personal link to this community.
The personalization of the community is the sub-text of all of these tutorials. All deal with seminal events in the founding of our community. Once students have completed any of them, they are in tune with the type of personal community research they will conduct on their own during the second semester.
The Parts of the Research Tutorials:
The tutorials provide instruction and models in the skills needed to conduct community research. These tutorials are designed for students to work independently on line, using the tutorial instructions on the research process and links to Internet resources to complete the research process. Students can work off line in groups, as well, which is the way I use these opening tutorials in my classroom. Each tutorial contains eight parts that provide instruction in each stage of research.
Publication
The primary publication site of this research is the KanCRN web site where mentors can evaluate the student research projects and where they can serve as a basis for student collaboration to expand their research. Students are also encouraged to publish in a variety of other locations. An end of the year KanCRN sponsored student conference provides an opportunity for student conducted presentations on their research. Students who do field research into the attitudes of students and teacher in their schools can be part of the data collection required for accreditation of that school. Other students take their stories to elementary schools and relate it to future community researchers.
Publication within the classroom is also a powerful tool for student sharing as well as a bridge to the next year’s classes. The students present their research within the classroom using various media; digital pictures, electronic text and web pages will preserve all of the work and create a research base from which the next year’s group of students will work.
Other KanCRN Tutorials
My community research projects focus on the areas traditionally associated with the humanities, but KanCRN also provides multiple opportunities for cross-curricular research that complements the humanistic side of community research. Research on the particulate density is already being pursued by K-12 students nationwide through KanCRN initiatives. Students gather data using particulate detectors and check the levels against reported asthma attacks in that area for those dates. Students place this data into an on-line, interactive, web-based GIS system and are able to retrieve data in a map-based format.
This type of research provides valuable data to medical researchers that would be difficult if not impossible to gather otherwise. It also provides a framework for student collaboration worldwide in this area, and more importantly provides for student spin-off projects that will continually expand this research into the relationship of health and environment within a community.
This project was designed by a middle school English teacher, Janis Dow, and a middle school Math teacher, Ruth Andrisevic, two members of a cross-curricular middle school team. It is a model for team studies that seek cross-curricular themes to broaden the scope of our narrow definition of our subject area. It, along with a dozen other tutorials, can be found on the KanCRN site
An Invitation to Participate
It is not necessary to have continuous computer access to participate in the community research projects, or the other KanCRN research projects. The technology enhances the ability to collect and to collaborate, but it is possible to do the research off line and post results when finished. The four community tutorials on line now can be used by your students as research tutorials in preparation for asking similar questions about their own community.
It is not necessary to become the premier local historian to assist your students in community research, but it is necessary to become familiar with the story of the community. The history of each community is waiting to be discovered by students. Teachers who have a limited knowledge of their own community can find willing assistance from the local museum or the library for an opening tour. The students will do the rest.
Returning to the Field
An end of the year field trip provides for closure for our year of community research and their high school years. This time there is no screaming by the students as the buses plunge into the back roads of our community. They are comforted by the knowledge that the bridges did not buckle in the fall, and they are excited by the fact that they are now the leaders of the tour
Students have planned the route based on research they did, and they give presentations at the various sites in the community. I still sit in the front seat to reassure the new driver, and distract him or her from the bridge scrapes. In all other ways I have switched places with my students as they teach me and their fellow students about our community.
