Training for community partnerships: A round-up of resources

16 September 2013 – Will Walker

Community members visit an exhibit at the Terra Cotta Heritage Museum, as described in this post about a student project in North Carolina.

One of the biggest challenges public history educators face is managing community partnerships. Such partnerships offer rich learning experiences for both undergraduate and graduate students, but they often entail numerous complications, which may lead some students and instructors to seek to avoid them altogether. Engaging with community partners is essential, however, to effective training in public history. Because of the many pitfalls that come along with the obvious rewards of such work, it is a frequent topic of conversation among public history educators at conferences and in online forums. Collected below are posts from History@Work that readers may find helpful as they navigate the trials and tribulations of work with community partners. The NCPH website’s “Teaching and Learning” page also contains links to useful resources–best practices documents and reading lists–that relate to community partnerships.

• The Guantánamo Public Memory Project travelling exhibit and national dialogue – Kevin P. Murphy and Jean M. O’Brien (July 15, 2013)
• Shoeless Joe Tumbles and Tweets – Peter Alter (June 19, 2013)
• Project Showcase: Museum on the Move – Bob Carriker (May 14, 2013)
• 2013 G. Wesley Johnson Award: How public history matters for undergraduates – Elizabeth Belanger (April 17, 2013)
• NCPH 2013 Student Project Award: Learning from community – Ellen Kuhn, Shawna Prather, and Ashley Wyatt (April 10, 2013)
• NCPH 2013 Project Award: The power of place within us – Yolanda Chávez Leyva (March 20, 2013)
• “Make it so,” but how? Best practices for new public history programs – Larry Cebula (Feb. 11, 2013)
• Unfamiliar terrain: Reevaluating a landmark’s past (Part 1 and Part 2) – Joseph Cialdella (Dec. 18 and 24, 2012)
• Social entrepreneurship in the public history classroom – Nicole King (Dec. 21, 2012)
• Lessons from the community engagement trenches – Aaron Cowan (May 9, 2012)
• Partnership success story in Pennsylvania – Jeanine Mazak-Kahne (May 21, 2012)
• Workload and the engaged historian – Jay Martin (May 28, 2012)
• An alternative space for public history: AmeriCorps – Jeff Robinson (April 24, 2012)
• Learning the limits of our tech-savvy students – Betsy Nix (April 9, 2012)
• Learning to see what service learning means – Denise Meringolo (March 23, 2012)
• When the student becomes the master (of history) – Kate Preissler (June 22, 2012)
• Thinking like a community: Beyond shared authority – Jeff Robinson (June 15, 2012)
• Planning for engagement – Kate Preissler (May 11, 2012)
• More heritage, hon? Community history and gentrification in Baltimore – Mary Rizzo (Feb. 12 2011)

~ Will Walker is Assistant Professor of History at the Cooperstown Graduate Program (State University of New York-Oneonta).