The City as Classroom: Teaching in and with Historic Places

INTRODUCTION This chapter discusses the creation and implementation of an experiential course, "The City as Classroom: Teaching with Historic Places," taught to American students in a semester abroad program in Florence, Italy. The course used the format of a classroom without walls. It is a prototype for using study abroad as a vehicle for student immersion in a culture and achieving a cross-cultural competence from that immersion. In this course students explored the political, economic, religious, social, intellectual, and aesthetic (hereafter using the acronym PERSIA) aspects of a geographic location as a framework for building a deep understanding of its people and its culture. The PERSIA approach emphasizes the interaction and the multiple influences of each aspect thereby providing a dynamic interpretation of the world of humans over time (Ivey & Hickson, 1974; Stern, 2002). The instructors chose this framework for examining Florence and comparing it with other cities. This framework provides students with a model that is transferable to other locations they might visit or reside in. Major concerns highlighted by the framework include: What is unique about this city and what does it have in common with other cities? How and where can one find this information? What can be learned from viewing a city through the framework of the social studies? This course was designed to meet the needs of both history and teacher education students and to be broadly interpretive across academic disciplines. Background and Relevant Literature The instructional design for The City as Classroom is drawn from several sources including the literature on authentic learning and assessment, experiential learning, the PERSIA framework, and digital story telling. In addition, the literature on study abroad and the need for students to develop cultural competency were consulted. The first criterion was to create a course that would take advantage of the unique opportunities presented by the fact that while the students in the study-abroad program travel extensively across the semester, they generally spend very little time exploring the city they are based in for the duration of the semester (according to our colleague Russell Greene an English professor at James Madison University who oversees the London semester). This was the impetus for the design of a course based on authentic learning that would focus on the city of residence. Authentic Learning The criteria that measure authentic learning include: depth of knowledge, higher order thinking, connectedness to the world beyond the classroom, substantive conversation and social support for student achievement (Newmann & Wehlage, 1993). Scheurman and Newmann (1998) frame the idea of authentic intellectual work which requires: construction of knowledge, disciplined inquiry and value beyond school. "Construction of knowledge" mandates that the student create the meaning and the learning rather than the teacher imparting the knowledge. "Disciplined inquiry" requires that the tools of the academic discipline, in this case, social sciences are utilized by students as they communicate. "Value beyond school" demands that student assignments focus on information and performance that have utility beyond simply jumping through the hoops of passing tests for course grades. Authentic pedagogy posits that students learn best in "substantive conversation" with one another and the instructor, in a situation where the class climate provides social support for learning. The design of the City as Classroom met these criteria. Place-Based Education The instructors consulted the Teaching With Historic Places website. This site, in conjunction with the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places, assists educators who wish "to enliven history, social studies, geography, civics, and other subjects." Among the resources linked from this site were Rita Roman's (1994) article, Historic Places: Their Use as Teaching Tools and Beth Boland's (2000) Visualizing History: Inquiring Minds Want to Know. …