Jennifer Lewis and Camalo Gaskin pause for a second with their sixth-graders.
			Taking History outside the Classroom Text and photograph by Michael Kish
	Class Projects from Last Year		DECEMBER 22, 1999--On a recent afternoon, two Oberlin College students herded six rambunctious sixth-graders around downtown Oberlin. Although the kids were glad to be out of school for a while, laughing as they ran down the sidewalk, the outing had a serious purpose. The College students--Jennifer Lewis, a senior from Washington, D.C., and Camalo Gaskin, a senior from Oakland, California--were leading them on a tour of Oberlin abolitionist landmarks as part of their project for the course Oberlin History as American History. The course, taught by Carol Lasser, professor of history, demonstrates that American history can be learned by exploring Oberlin's history. Lasser's students are active agents in the education process. They do their own research, using primary sources like the College archives, records of local newspapers, and Oberlin's historical society. Dispensing the information, they become teachers themselves, going into the Oberlin public schools, partnering with teachers to run Oberlin-history projects that they create from what they have learned in their research. "I want students to connect to Oberlin, to connect to history, and to recognize that there are multiple audiences for history, not only the professors for whom they write papers," says Lasser. Positioning College students as history teachers is a major component of the class. All but one of the class's 15 students are working in Langston Middle School and Oberlin High School. Tetsuichiro Miyaki, a sophomore from Tokyo, is working alone to research Asians in the Oberlin community. Lewis and Gaskin, studying how Oberlin participated in the abolitionist movement, work with sixth-grade teacher Michaeline Walzer, whose class has been reading Virginia Hamilton's The House of Dies Drear, a novel about a boy whose family moves into a house that was once a stop on the Underground Railroad. Walzer's student could read the book then go with Lewis and Gaskin on a walking tour of three Oberlin abolitionist sites: First Church , where antislavery meetings were held; Evans House, once the home of an African-American cabinetmaker who helped rescue a fugitive slave imprisoned in nearby Wellington; and Bardwell House , where former slaves on the Underground Railroad hid in secret passageways behind closet walls. Paige Wiegman, a senior from Alison Park, Pennsylvania, brought eighth-graders to Oberlin's Martin Luther King, Jr., Park as part of her project about race relations in Oberlin during the 1960s and '70s. She says that the park can be a symbol of the racial situations at the time it was built, in 1972. Wiegman had her students write about the park's monuments, and will incorporate their writings into a virtual tour of the park on the web. Wiegman says that when she started working at Langston Middle School, the students wondered what she was doing in their history class. When they started reading documents from the College archives and visiting the sites they had read about, she says, the project came alive for them. "They progressively got more excited," says Wiegman. "Half of them said, 'I didn't even know the park was here.' " The teachers are excited about the projects too. "It's been outstanding working with the college students," says Walzer. Susan McDaniel, who teaches seventh-grade social studies, says, "The students are well prepared and hard working. My class looks forward to the days when they come." Lasser, who created the course in 1998, says collaborations like these were an important reason for developing the course. "This class is a way to invest in the public schools," she says. "The teachers have been very responsive. They have a stake in this history, and we're working together to make it meaningful." "Oberlin history is fabulous," she says. "It's really a window into larger social issues." Before she came to Oberlin in 1980, Lasser had studied 19th-century American history and was already interested in Oberlin. The town and college, simultaneously founded in 1833, are known for their importance in the abolitionist movement and other progressive causes. A grant from Ameritech that promotes the use of technology in schools helped Lasser develop the course. Most of the students will publish their final projects on the web, which Lasser hopes will show how technology can be incorporated into community-history projects.
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