Past Winning Projects

The People’s History of Geneva K-12 Curriculum Project, an interdisciplinary curriculum and professional development project, seeks to develop a social justice oriented local history curriculum for the city’s schools and brings together nine community members from diverse backgrounds and nine teachers representing all four schools in the Geneva City school district. The participants will spend the day discussing how issues of power and privilege shape the K-12 history curriculum, the role history plays in the civic identity and emotional well-being of students of color, and the often-unknown stories of local community activists. The workshop concludes with a series of story circles during which teachers and community members share their respective histories.

2016: ART, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND NEIGHBORHOOD IDENTITIES: HEMISPHERIC CONVERSATIONS

Director: Caitlin Frances Bruce (bruce.caitlin@gmail.com)
The University of Pittsburgh

This project will bring artists from Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Leon Guanajuato, Mexico into conversation with Pittsburgh residents and each other. By developing workshops on the history of aerosol art, planning public murals, and holding a pot luck party, and one-day symposium, this project allows for artists and residents to connect shared challenges in post-industrial urban spaces, and to explore public art making as a means of democratically shaping the urban environment. Its goals are educational, professional, oriented towards social change, and future collaboration.

2016: PROMOTING SERVICE LEARNING IN AMERICAN STUDIES

Director: Rebecca Schreiber (rschreib@unm.edu)
The University of New Mexico

This joint project of the Department of American Studies and the National Hispanic Cultural Center (NHCC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, will establish a number of paid internships for undergraduate and graduate students in American Studies. Under supervision by the NHCC curatorial staff, interns will conduct primary research, oral interviews, and studio visits. They will help select artworks to be exhibited, write object and text labels, and develop exhibit-related programming.

2015: DOCUMENTED THE UNDOCUMENTED: STORIES FROM THE SOUTH

Co-Director: Anna Jo Kim (anna.kim@coa.gatech.edu)
Georgia Institute of Technology
Co-Director: Laura Emiko Soltis
Southerners on a New Ground

The ability to see yourself in the life of another is both the inspiration and goal behind the Freedom University Photo-Book Project. The ASA Community Partnership grant would enable us to edit a manuscript with stories and poems from undocumented youth, and produce a photo-book for middle and high school students. It's a contribution to the American Studies teaching curriculum that comes from undocumented students, themselves. The target school district is Gwinett County Public Schools, the most diverse (and most foreign-born county) in the State of Georgia. See more at https://freedom-university.org/.

2015: Minnesota’s Early Civil Rights History for Community Building

Director: Yuichiro Onishi (ohni0001@umn.edu )
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

This is a community-engaged collaborative historical research project designed to unearth the texture of African American porters’ civil rights and labor struggles in Minnesota in the first three decades of the twentieth century. This local early civil rights history will be integrated into the public history component of local human services agency’s redevelopment initiative in St. Paul. To this end, during the funding period, community partners and I will carry out archival research at Minnesota Historical Society to mine manuscript collections and local African American newspapers. We will also produce the manuscript of this local history of civil rights unionism; select stories will be integrated into a public history site.

2014: American Studies at Stateville Prison: Building Political Education

Director: Erica R. Meiners (e-meiners@neiu.edu)
Northeastern Illinois University

The objective of this project is to partner with a community organization, the Prison Neighborhood Arts Project (PNAP - http://p-nap.org/) to facilitate seminars with people at the prison with a focus on subjects within African American and Latino histories.
Our three 2014-2105 seminars are:

Fall 2014: Black Chicago
Spring 2015: Youth Organizing in Latino Communities
Summer 2015: Race and Contemporary Urban Life

Seminars will result in written responses by the participants to key American Studies texts. With the written consent of participants in the seminar, the students’ engagements and seminar products will be made available to an outside public through an annual exhibition hosted by PNAP, presenting a way of interpreting these texts from the vantage point of those incarcerated. Thus, core ideas and texts will be made available to a population that is shut out of access to post secondary education and free world informal educational opportunities, and also bring their engagement and responses into outside communities. Further objectives include hosting guest lectures at the prison by American Studies scholars and making the discussion groups a permanent part of the programming through PNAP. With funding from this ASA Community Partnership Grant, the next academic year will function as a pilot project to introduce on-going American studies curriculum into the PNAP’s programming.

2014: Unlocking the Crisis: New Analyses of Carcerality and Change

Director: Diana Zuniga (CURB) and Sarah Haley (UCLA) (shaley@ucla.edu)
University of California, Los Angeles and Californians United For a Responsible Budget

This social change/civic partnership collaboration will build upon existing research by ASA members and the work of community activists by creating in-person dialogues about mass incarceration between ASA members and community organizers/members. This project will create a permanent online collection (blog) of these dialogues as well as a series of essays generated from them in order to produce new scholarly and activist tools for thinking about the carceral state that are widely accessible. Through surveys, is project will also help facilitate matches between community members and scholars whose research might support their ongoing community work.

2013: Black/Land Interview Project

Director: Eve Tuck (tucke@newpaltz.edu)
The Research Foundation for the State of New York on behalf of SUNY New Paltz Black/Land Project (Community Organization)

The Black/Land Project is a community organization that has conducted 38 hour-long interviews with members of several Black communities in urban centers all over the United States. Key personnel of the Black/Land Project have no formal training in systematically analyzing interview data. In this year-long collaboration, a social science researcher will provide hands-on training and support in data management, coding and data analysis, identification of findings, and communication of findings in several formats. The researcher will teach staff of the organization important skills in social science research and analysis, so that the organization can meet its goals to collect, synthesize, and share stories of Black communities’ histories and perspectives on land, place, and environment.

2012: Archival Theory and Practice: A Graduate Student Service Learning Course

Project Director: Kristina Bross (kbross@purdue.edu)
Purdue University and the West Lafayette Public Library

The objective of Purdue University’s Archival Theory and Practice graduate seminar is to provide archival services to the West Lafayette community and Tippecanoe County. The class will digitize records, process incoming materials, record oral histories, and store records and documents according to proper archival standards. These projects are beneficial to helping the community store records and helping future researchers access these materials. In addition to archiving the community materials, we will culminate and present our individual projects in a community-wide â€œblock partyâ€ event. The goal of this event is to showcase the histories of the West Lafayette community and Tippecanoe County.

2012: Creating Public Scholars: A Collaborative Project on Environmental and Economic Justice Activism and Scholarship

Project Director: David Correia (dcorreia@unm.edu)
University of New Mexico

This project is a collaboration between the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico and La Jicarita News, a community-based 501(c)3 in northern New Mexico that has for 15 years published a local newspaper covering issues of environmental and economic justice in New Mexico and the larger Southwest region. The aim is to organize a conference that will bring together American Studies scholars and community activists involved in La Jicarita in order to bridge the gap between faculty and graduate students inside the academy and authors and activists working at the grassroots level outside the academy. The conference is simply a starting point from which to launch a new and unique online journal, which likewise will focus on environmental and economic justice. The journal will provide an outlet for both scholarly and journalistic writing, and it will work as a vehicle for connecting academic scholarship and community-based activism. It will continue the work that La Jicarita News has long been known for, but also place its characteristic focus on the politics, economics, and environmental and cultural issues of New Mexico into collaboration with scholarly efforts of the same orientation.

2012: Love, Labor, and Filipinas in San Luis Obispo and Northern Santa Barbara Counties, 1920-1970

Project Director: Grace I. Yeh (gyeh@calpoly.edu)
California Polytechnic State University

This project, undertaken by Cal Poly Corporation on behalf of California Polytechnic State University, aims to document the lives and experiences of Filipinas who had immigrated to California between 1920 and 1970. Interviews and oral histories will be gathered and combined with family documents and other rare sources into a searchable digital archive that will be available for researchers. Much existing material focuses on the experiences of Filipino men who came to California during the time when the Philippines was still a U.S. colony. This collection will focus on women. Their experiences will shed light on the history of racism in the U.S., American and Japanese imperialism in the Philippines, themes of immigration and community formation, and for the later part of the period covered, Filipina participation in the Civil Rights movement and experience in the environment of the Cold War. The final digital resource to be compiled will preserve these women’s perspectives and histories, and it will provide material to the American Studies community for research into these themes.

2011: American Worldviews Explored

Project Director: Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo (i.nwankwo@vanderbilt.edu)
Vanderbilt University

This project is a four-week long American Studies educational outreach summer program for economically disadvantaged African American youth and their families in Rutherford County, Tennessee, and it is a collaboration between Voices of Our America at Vanderbilt University and the Boys and Girls Club of Rutherford County. The program’s purpose is to provide participants with opportunities to learn about, contextualize, and create a public history exhibit on the histories and worldviews of the African American community in their county. Through direct engagement with living community elders, print primary sources, and distinguished American Studies scholars, educators, and writers, participants will gain factual knowledge about their hometown, awareness of the place of their community in American history, and the critical skill sets needed to become active participants in gathering, documenting, and making histories. The workshops, interviews, and materials will focus primarily on the 1950s, a critical period that was at once difficult and hopeful for African Americans in Rutherford County and the U.S. more generally. Honing in on this era will allow young participants to learn from family members and community elders who were the participants’ age themselves during that critical decade.

2011: Food Story Slam: Performing, Archiving, and Sustaining Community in South LA

Project Director: Anjali Nath (anjalina@usc.edu)
University of Southern California

This project is a partnership between the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and Community Services Unlimited, Inc., a small non-profit in South Los Angeles that works with youth and community on issues of urban farming, education, food access, and leadership development. It will be a â€œFood Story Slamâ€ that involves South LA students and parents in writing and verbal storytelling about everyday experiences of food cultures, food access, and food practices connected to historical and migratory experiences. The final projects will be filmed to create a digital archive of local food histories of youth and community members to be showcased at the annual 2012 Earth Day South LA. â€œFood Story Slamâ€ represents a first step in creating greater linkages between American Studies students and faculty at USC and community members and youth working to transform access to food and nutrition in the surrounding community of South Los Angeles. It marks the beginning of a six-month writing and storytelling workshop to encourage participants to engage in critical questions of food systems by describing their own interactions with food, food culture, and food access in their own families and communities.

2011: The Uneasy Remains Film Project

Director: Gina Caison (gmcaison@ucdavis.edu)
University of California, Davis

The Uneasy Remains Film Project is a collaborative, interdisciplinary research and film project, bringing together community members, scholars, and professionals. The perspectives emerging in this film project come from Native students, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, and Native people from several tribal communities. Therefore, this project is only made possible by the creation of an intertribal, intercultural community with the shared goals of promoting human rights and presenting Indigenous voices. The project has prioritized developing curricular materials to accompany the research and the film.

2011: What is Local Living Economy?

Director: Michael Antonucci, (mantonucci@keene.edu)
Keene State College

The project will strengthen the partnering organizations’ existing relationship and will bring American Studies methods, materials, and scholarly research to the community partner’s efforts to develop and establish a local living economy. American Studies students will be engaged in community-based research that will build skills in data collection and analysis, and students will also benefit from presenting their original research at a conference and creating a website with research and community resources. The project’s activities will become the foundation for extended collaborative inquiry into the question "What is local living economy?"

2010: First Nations, Lasting Nations: A Working Conference on Indigenous New England

Project Director: Siobhan Senier (ssenier@unh.edu)
University of New Hampshire

This project is a conference which aims to consolidate emerging partnerships between the University of New Hampshire and local indigenous nonprofits. The conference aims to provide a forum for discussing effective university-community partnerships in Native American New England. Across New England, there is a growing recognition of the need to make the region’s contemporary Native American people and their concerns more visible. Maine and Massachusetts have taken the lead in requiring public schools to teach about regional indigenous cultures, and teachers in other states seem poised to include indigenous histories and cultures in their curricula. This conference hopes to draw on the current momentum in order to bring academics and Native community leaders together to discuss mutual needs, opportunities, and long-range goals and planning. It will build on existing working relationships between UNH scholars and local Native American organizations to discuss new ideas in curricular initiatives and community-based research projects. Geographically and demographically, the immediate target for the conference is Abkenaki people in northern New England, though the longer-term target population includes schoolteachers, concerned citizens, and other indigenous communities.

2010: MYPEOPLESTOWN

Project Director: LeeAnn Lands (llands@kennesaw.edu)
Kennesaw State University

This project represents a partnership between Kennesaw State University’s American Studies program, the Emmaus House mission of the Episcopal Diocese in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Auburn Avenue Research Library. It focuses on the experiences of children in their middle grades in the Peoplestown neighborhood of Atlanta, a struggling urban district in which 37 percent of families live in poverty and 69 percent of those between 18 and 24 have not completed a high school diploma. The project will work with children in the Emmaus House Summer Arts Camp and Saturday Arts Program to use performance, interviews, and photography in a place-based study that interprets and documents neighborhood history, culture, and civic life. It will develop and produce digital stories and community-elicited narratives, and it will produce a moveable photographic exhibit of approximately 18 panels. A project website is also under development which will display the children’s stories. MYPEOPLESTOWN will culminate in four public events between Auburn Avenue Research Library and Emmaus House, in addition to one event at KSU. The events will showcase local history, and it will celebrate the culture of Peoplestown and the role of community organizations in neighborhood development.

2010: Rhode Island Solidarity School Project

Project Director: Eric Larson (eric_d_larson@brown.edu)
Brown University

This project will enrich collaboration between the Department of American Civilization at Brown University and local community and labor organizations through the joint design and realization of seminars on crucial current issues in labor and community organizing. The main objective is to create a space in which diverse community members and union members can gather with academics and intellectuals in American Studies to explore the dilemmas and challenges of contemporary labor and community organizing.

2010: The Politics of Skid Row

Projector Director: Christina Heatherton (c.heatherton@gmail.com)
University of Southern California

The one-day symposium to celebrate the wide release of a scholarly reader on the Politics of Skid Row will highlight the new theoretical work being done by artists, activists, and scholars as well as present performance and artwork. One major outcome of this event will be the creation of an educational curriculum designed to be used to with the reader.

This project is a continuation of an ongoing collaboration between the Los Angeles Community Action Network, students at the University of Southern California, and the Southern California Library. For the past year we have been co-producing a scholarly reader in an effort to intervene on the issue of Skid Row. This reader will be published this spring 2010.

The proposed major event will be a one-day symposium to celebrate the wide release of this scholarly publication. It will highlight new theoretical work being done by artists, activists, and scholars. We will invite all contributors to present a small portion of their work/ artwork in order to begin a multi-faceted dialogue. In November of last year, the Community Action Network put on a performance at UC Santa Barbara. Through song, art, power-point presentations, and Q&A they presented the struggles of Skid Row to a standing room only audience of over 200 people. We hope to replicate this performance, alongside and in discussion with scholars who are considering these issues. With the help of the ASA grant, we will also make copies available to the public at little or no charge.

2009: Public Humanities Collaborative: A Sesquicentennial Celebration of the History and Culture of Lansing’s Old Town

Project Director: Ann Larabee (larabee@msu.edu)
Michigan State University

This project, undertaken by the American Studies program at Michigan State University, was primarily a series of eight events celebrating the history and culture of Lansing’s Old Town, a historic industrial district of Lansing that has, in recent years, undergone a renovation as the city’s cultural center. The events brought together a diverse set of perspectives on Old Town from different voices with an emotion or economic investment in the district. One highlight was a play called Voices of Old Town. The play was based on videotaped oral history interviews collected from a dozen former residents, architects, and small business owners. The play and the rest of the project involved the graduate and undergraduate students in American Studies at Michigan State, and it brought them into direct contact and collaboration with the community of Old Town. The response by the community, however, was at some times mixed. In general, stakeholders in Old Town lauded the overall project, but worried whether enough voices were represented. These criticisms were addressed in a final culminating part of the project, which is a digital history website undertaken with the aid of local community leaders and historians.

2007:

No winner listed.

2008: The Culmore Literacy and Popular Education Project

Project Director: Lisa Rabin (lrabin@gmu.edu)
George Mason University

In 2009-2010, the Culmore Literacy and Popular Education Project, a university-community partnership offering free bilingual ESL classes for Spanish-speaking immigrants, was sustained by the generous support of an ASA Community Partnership Grant. The grant funded teacher stipends for two George Mason University students of Spanish - one undergraduate and one graduate, both recruited by myself through our Mason Spanish program - to teach this course to residents of the Culmore (Falls Church), Virginia community in the AY 08-09 academic year. Classes were held at the Culmore Family Resource Center, a county social services agency. Instructors received training in the teaching of ESL and methodologies of sociolinguistics and American (particularly Latino) Studies from local ESL trainer Ms. Lynda Terrill and Mason Spanish professors Jennifer Leeman, Michelle Ramos-Pellicia, and myself. The training sessions were subvented by matching funds for the ASA CPG from administrative units at George Mason University. Free child care was provided by a concurrent class in Spanish for Young Heritage Learners taught by Mason undergraduate Margaret McAteer, who received internship credit in Spanish for her work.

This community partnership grant allowed George Mason University to offer literacy lessons and computer skills to Spanish-speaking immigrants in the Culmore community of Falls Church, Virginia. Influenced by the philosophies of popular education and interdisciplinary work in American Studies, the grantees’ courses placed a special focus on historical consciousness, encouraging students to frame their local experience within the larger history of Latino and Spanish speakers in the United States. The project now has a total of 25 students in two course in Beginning Spanish and one course in Advanced Spanish/Beginning English and computer literacy. The American Studies Association’s Community Partnership Grant enabled George Mason University expand the program by recruiting community members and Spanish and Latin American Studies undergraduates at George Mason to become experts in, and teachers of, Spanish for heritage (native) learners, popular education, and American and Latino Studies. A cohort of trained teachers will allow the project to open more classes to a larger number of students who want to join the program.

2008: Honoring and Inspiring Community Action: American Studies and Environmental Justice Movement

Project Director: Julie Sze (jsze@ucdavis.edu)
University of California, Davis

The Regents of the University of California, John Muir Institute of the Environement’s grant will help to create a photographic and theatrical exhibition of women leaders from poor communities in the environmental justice movement in California’s Central Valley. The exhibition is intended to honor current community leaders, publicize the challenges and achievements of the environmental justice movement in the Central Valley, inspire others to action and facilitate campus/community interactions. The project uses American Studies methods and themes, in this case, on the central role of story-telling in fragile places and environments, and with politically and culturally disenfranchised populations.

2008: Illinoistown: A Cultural History of East St. Louis in the Twentieth Century

Project Director: Martha H. Patterson (mhpatterson@mckendree.edu)
McKendree University

The semester-long collaboration between McKendree and East St. Louis Senior High was one of the most rewarding and challenging experiences of our professional careers. Dr. Martha H. Patterson, associate professor of English, and Dr. Ann V. Collins, assistant professor of political science, partnered with Mary Lofton, an Emerson-award winning social studies teacher at East St. Louis Senior High School (ESLSH) of East St. Louis to develop a course analyzing the cultural history of East St. Louis and to build a website telling the complex, often painful, but rich history of this small city known today as the epitome of urban blight.

This project seeks to bring together East St. Louis High School and McKendree University students to analyze the history, literature, culture, and politics of East St. Louis. The grant will assist professors and teachers and both institutions in developing a sophomore-level high school class and a university freshman honor’s class analyzing the cultural history of East St. Louis and building a website to tell the complex, often painful, but rich history of a small city known today by most Americans as the epitome of urban blight.

2006: Holocausts and Healing: Lessons from the African Continent for Milwaukee. Marquette University

Project Director: Jodi Melamed (jodi.melamed@mu.edu)
Marquette University

This project was a “community conference” jointly hosted by Marquette University and America’s Black Holocaust Museum which was intended to be an action-oriented public humanities event and community brainstorming session. The conference was designed to bridge the gap between American and African American Studies scholarship and those outside the university who might use such scholarship in support of community and civic activism, organization, and cultural and social life. In particular, the conference sought to address the relationship between two emergency situations in Milwaukee: the devastating economic effects of globalization on many African American men and women, and the extraordinarily high rates of Black male imprisonment. Another objective was to create new and lasting affiliations between Marquette University and America’s Black Holocaust Museum, as well as to development partnership with Milwaukee Public Schools, innovative charter schools, and initiatives such as the YMCA’s Black Achievers program which are centered around high school students. In the immediate short term, the collaboration was meant to improve the diversity and opportunities for student learning at Marquette University, to aid America’s Black Holocaust Museum as it seeks to update its teaching of Black history into the present, and to expose Milwaukee high school students to the importance of research and collaborative discussion to address social problems.

2005: Promoting Service Learning in American Studies: A Collaborative Student Internship Project with the New Mexico Office of the State Historian

Project Director: Estevan Rael-Galvez (egalvez@rain.state.nm.us)
University of New Mexico and the Office of the New Mexico State Historian

This project is an ongoing internship program between the University of New Mexico’s American Studies department and the New Mexico Office of the State Historian. The program was established in order to create a number of paid internships for undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of American Studies. During the academic year, three undergraduate and three graduate student interns have worked on one of several ongoing service learning projects for the Office of the State Historian, and they have gained hands-on training as they assisted in the planning, organization, and implementation of the Office’s educational programming. Interns’ responsibilities mirror those of the Office’s professional staff, and the collaboration has been extremely beneficial because it has allowed the Office’s small staff to nevertheless have an aggressive and wide-reaching public history agenda. Student interns have contributed immensely to various efforts related to the New Mexico Digital History Project, including the development of a large bibliography of New Mexico history and culture and a new database of text and images on the Office of the State Historian’s website. They have also worked on other initiatives, such as the Legacy of Letters Project, which will bring historic letters to life in a scripted performance piece and a coffee table book.

2004: Summer in the City: An Exhibit Celebrating Arbor Hill Youth Accomplishments

Project Director: Leslie Lewis (llewis@ithaca.edu)
The College of Saint Rose

The project, sponsored by the College of St. Rose in Albany, NY, celebrates the accomplishments of young people in Arbor Hill by exhibiting works they created during the summer of 2004. As a predominantly African American neighborhood, Albany’s Arbor Hill has been shaped by many of the forces that characterize African American life in the United States. Stories of resistance, migration, racial violence, spiritual resilience, de facto segregation, cultural innovation, economic exploitation, political militancy, and family bonds contribute to understanding Arbor Hill in the past and in the present. Although children and young people who participated in the “Summer in the City” project may not have explicitly articulated their lives and concerns using the concepts mentioned above, their lives are nevertheless affected by the political, social, economic, and cultural realities that have defined Black experience in the United States. Many of the works that the participants created portray, comment upon, and interrogate their own African American urban experience. The project brought American Studies practitioners into the community, working to uncover, preserve, and increase knowledge of diverse cultural heritages.

2003: Making History: A Pedagogical Preservation Partnership

Project Director: Kristina Bross (kbross@purdue.edu)
Purdue University

This partnership brings together Purdue University faculty from American Studies, English, Sociology, History, and the Library, the director and archivist of the Tippecanoe County Historical Association, as well as graduate students taking the course “Archive Theory and Practice”. The partnership considers conceptual, theoretical, and practical issues surrounding the creation and use of archives, and addresses questions such as: Why are some items saved and others not? How are collections organized and described? What can be learned about past times and what eludes us, given uneven archiving practices? What ethical matters and professional practices govern who can gain access to and use fragile remains of the past? Grant monies assist in developing faculty expertise and interest in archival research courses, and in the public dissemination of student work from those courses.

2003: Clay County, Minnesota Web Museum

Project Director: Helen Sheumaker (sheumahd@muohio.edu)

Minnesota State University/Clay County Museum and Archives, Moorhead, Minnesota.
This ASA grant has enabled the creation of an online museum composed of exhibits created as independent research projects by American Studies students at Minnesota State University Moorhead. The online museum uses materials and artifacts from the Clay County Historical Society’s Museum and Archives. The Historical Society has thousands of items that it can not display regularly. This online museum is intended to be an alternative display site so that more material from the Collection, and far more people, can access it. A final report (PDF) on this project, written by project director Dr. Helen Sheumaker, offers a fine example of this part of the project.

2002: Folklife and Fieldwork: A Community Curriculum

Project Director: Cory Lock (julial@stedwards.edu)
University of Texas, Austin and Texas Folklife Resources

This project is sponsored by a partnership of intuitions including the Texas Folklife Resources; Institute of Technology and Learning, University of Texas, Austin; Texas Commission on the Arts; and the Kennedy Center. The project â€œcomprises a series of projects to integrate folklore into K-12 Texas classrooms.â€ The ASA grant will specifically support project leaders Cory Lock and R. Neill Hadder in revising the Texas folklife curriculum, leading to the production of a final Texas Folklife Curriculum Guide in both online and printed forms. The guidelines will then be reviewed by education specialists and folklorists from around that state for further professional evaluation. The Guide helps teachers form a partnership between classroom and community, by using students’ own communities as sites for folklife studies fieldwork. The project embodies the spirit of the Community Partnership Program in that the ASA, academic institutions, scholars, local schools and cultural institutions are all brought into partnership to help American Studies practitioners meet the cultural and education needs of this local community.

2002: “Living Traditions: A How-To Guide for Teaching Texas Folklore”

This partnership grant allowed Neill Hadder and Cory Lock to revise and prepare for web publication “Living Traditions: A How-To Guide for Teaching Texas Folklore,” Texas Folklife Resource’s folklore curriculum for fourth through eighth grade classrooms. Further, in sponsoring their work in the nonprofit sector, the ASA Community Partnership Grant gave Hadder and Lock the opportunity to apply their academic training to local community issues, an experience invaluable to both of them as they neared the completion of their doctoral programs.

2002: Historic Fountain Square: Past Present and Future

Project Director: Thomas F. Marvin
Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis

This project focuses on the Fountain Square neighborhood of Indianapolis in order to document the “common lives” of its residents, to discover the historical trends that shaped the community, and to investigate the social forces that are transforming the community today. The project has created a web site that fosters an appreciation of local history through the active involvement of Fountain Square residents. Student research will be presented to the community both on the web site and in poster sessions at the Fountain Square branch of the Indianapolis Public Library.
Sponsored by the Center for American Studies, School of Liberal Arts, Sam Masarachia Scholars Program, Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, and the Center for Service and Learning at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis; The Indiana Historical Society; The Indiana State Museum; Indianapolis Public Library; and Southeast Neighborhood Development. The project will enable American Studies students to peform community based research and present the results to professionals and members of the local community. Moreover, the project will help students to see the connections between academic research and community life. The project will create a internet resource for the Fountain Square neighborhood, providing information about the community’s past as well as current local issues, while at the same time providing a resource for teachers and students who want to explore local history. The ASA grant will specifically help fund the project’s web development efforts; provide funding for research presentations; and fund stipends for two student research assistants. Like the first project, Historic Fountain Square brings American Studies scholars, students, local institutions, and the local community together in a partnership that can provide a unique and extended learning opportunity for all involved.

ASA