The Impact of Public History Projects on High School Communities
11 September 2024 – Bri Matson, Sophia Imperioli, Justin Porcelo and Lauren Perry
In the Fall of 2023, the Museum Club at East High School in Denver, Colorado began working with students at the University of Colorado Denver to expand the high school’s museum to better represent their current community. This collaboration highlights the value of incorporating public history in high school curricula. The co-authors of this article presented the project through a poster at the 2024 NCPH Annual Meeting. In reflecting on our project and poster session feedback, co-presenters realized that many educators repeatedly expressed that they have trouble engaging their students in traditional academic history lessons and further, incorrectly assuming that our project was plagued by a similar lack of engagement. On the contrary, the exhibit creation process was overwhelmingly successful because public history projects offer high school students a more engaging model for history education than traditional lecture-based courses. We hope that our experiences encourage educators to explore new options for their classes.
One of the many days when CU Denver graduate students collaborated with the East community in ongoing efforts to support the shared history of the high school. Photo courtesy of Peter Kopp, November 2023
Denver’s East High School has stood as a cornerstone of the community along Colfax Avenue for nearly a century. The East High Museum Club was formed during the 2021-2022 school year, when students in Matt Fulford’s “History of Now” class, a concurrent enrollment course offered through CU Denver, demonstrated an intense interest in learning more about their school’s history. These students are not interested in careers as public historians and did not engage with the museum before the History of Now course. Many students struggled to relate to historical figures and events in previous history courses because they never felt personally connected to the past. However, centering history around their own community and identities provided a perspective that felt relevant to their daily lives. As they engaged with history through these lenses, each of them became public historians, connecting with the past without the pressures of memorizing historical facts and dates. Mr. Fulford reached out to the CU Denver Public History Department to request assistance in expanding the museum during the 2022-2023 school year; however, the project was delayed for a year following a series of shootings on East’s campus.
The co-authors’ experiences with students at East High School closely resemble the experiences of public historians in the 20th century. Writing for History@Work in 2017, Denise Meringolo argued that public history’s origin as a distinct field can be traced back to the American Civilization Institute of Morristown, New Jersey. The 1964 project engaged both high school and college students from surrounding schools in “a multi-faced, multi-disciplinary, broadly collaborative, community-focused experiential learning program,” in an area where historic inequality and political polarization created significant conflict in educational settings.
The exhibit, “Beyond the Skirt” highlights women’s sport teams throughout East High School’s long history. The team photo below shows the 1914 basketball team that won the championship. Photo courtesy of Justin Porcelo, February 2024
Similarly, the Students at East High School are coming of age in an incredibly polarized political atmosphere. Their political consciousnesses have been shaped by this polarization. During our first meetings with the students, they showed strong interest in topics that closely aligned with their own personal interests and identities. For instance, the club’s student-athletes wanted to explore the history of the first female sports teams in East High. Others were musicians and wanted to examine music’s impact on their school’s history. The museum project gave the students license to investigate these interests, in sharp contrast with the survey-style lectures that dominate high school history education.
This ongoing project reveals that American high school students are interested in and more trusting of models of history which allow them to engage actively and seek connections with history as a model to understand their communities. In 2021, an American Association of Museums survey concluded that most young adults aged 19 to 29 are less likely to trust their teachers, professors, and schoolbooks with historical information than public history institutions like museums. This phenomenon stems from a curriculum that disconnects students from their history at an early age. In traditional K-12 education, social studies classes are not designed to engage students or encourage direct participation with historical fact. According to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the disconnect often makes history seem boring, predetermined, and even incorrect. When life experiences, family stories, community tradition or genealogy contradict what students learn in school, distrust begins to build. We can remedy this disconnect in the classroom.
Allowing students to be historians and public historians, instead of just memorizing facts, can allow them to scrutinize nuanced historical facts with a healthy level of skepticism and engage with their peers in a more informed manner. Switching history classes to a project-based curriculum will not only engage students but also help them understand both the how and the why, not just the what. Any distrust students have regarding traditional curricula can be addressed through discovery projects. By finding evidence, tracing patterns, and drawing conclusions, students can continue to explore connections between the past and the present for themselves.
East Museum Club’s president and vice president review one of the school’s historical yearbooks during one of the club’s lunchtime meetings. Photo courtesy of Justin Porcelo, February 2024
Despite the abundance of evidence suggesting that public history projects enable students to engage with their own history at a higher level—dating back to the discipline’s earliest history—we rarely present high school students with opportunities to engage with project-based public history in the classroom. The absence of these opportunities seems to explain conference attendees’ assumption that students might not want to work on museum exhibits. Students are less engaged with their survey courses. However, it’s time for public historians to reestablish the value of our field in secondary education, especially as high schools continue to embrace project-based learning as the most effective teaching method in other disciplines. Public historians can reconnect with high school students in a way that honors their identities, empowers them to investigate their interests, and connects their present realities to the past.
~ Bri Matson was the recipient of the Graduate Student Travel Award at NCPH’s 2024 Annual Meeting and presented the East High School Community History Project with co-authors Sophia Imperioli, Justin Porcelo, and Lauren Perry during the NCPH 2024 Poster Session. All contributors are Public History MA candidates at the University of Colorado Denver: clas.ucdenver.edu/history/graduate-students-2024.