Reflect on Your Practice
- Have you ever had students investigate their local community as part of a unit of study?
- What aspects of your local community lend themselves most to exploration via an integrated arts unit? History? Agriculture? Architecture? Economics? Migration or immigration? Engineering and innovation?
- What disciplines might this unit involve? Who in your school could you collaborate with on a project connecting your community to the classroom?
- How do you judge students' success at understanding and assimilating new information and material?
Adaptations / Extensions to Consider
Scale it back: Have students interview local residents about what makes their community unique and share their findings with their classmates. Select one of these community characteristics to explore from different arts and non-arts perspectives.
Compare eras: Have students research what their community looked like 100 years ago and construct a replica, either 2D drawing or 3D model, of an area within this historical landscape. Have students explore how this landscape may have influenced the local community. Have students compare that historic community with their own. What changes do they see? And what effect do they see those changes having on the community?
Connect to today: Discuss with students how their community shapes their lives today. Have them select, from stories in the local newspaper, a development in the community and forecast its effect on a class of students like their own, perhaps 25 years in the future.
NEXT: Additional Resources, including unit materials that teachers used.