Article #6: Preserving Culture, Heritage, and Diversity

Summary:

The author writes about how students relate and connect to their community’s diverse cultures by researching and interviewing different people around the area. She starts off with a lumber community in Libby, Montana that closed down in 2003. In order to preserve its history and culture, Libby High School and its students built a research project for the town which they presented as their final product. As a final closure to the research project and the closing down of the lumber yard, the entire community celebrated. The author provided more examples of other schools using the same idea revolving around heritage, cultures/diversity in their respective communities. One school uses a system, called “ALERT” ( ), which guides the students in the direction that they need to go in order to be able to present it to the community as their final projects. The ideas presented in this article are all about preserving heritage. It gives educators ideas on what to present inside their classrooms when designing a curriculum around diversity.

Opinion:

As a means for preserving a community’s heritage, albeit historical or evolving, I am a firm believer in cultural and diversity awareness. I have done a very similar project in high school when I lived in Hawai’i. After doing my research on my father’s employer, HC&S (Hawai’i Cane & Sugar Co.), I have found out a lot of information about the company like no other. Just the historical aspect, alone, opened my eyes to how our community (and economy) evolved due to HC&S’s contributions through history. I highly recommend the suggestions made in the article that the author spoke about and do more research on planning and designing a curriculum for students surrounding heritage/cultural/diversity awareness. It is a positive learning experience for all.


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Ball, Ashley (8/5/2003). Logging History: Students as Archivists. Edutopia.  Retrieved from:  http://www.edutopia.org/montanaheritage