Case Statement for NCPH Public History Working Group, 2017:
Public History Education and Environmental Sustainability
By Leah S. Glaser
Over the last seven years, I have organized a series of working groups and conference panels. I co-authored the white paper that led to the establishment of a permanent committee with NCPH. I co-chaired a program committee that used “sustainability” as the main theme of the conference. The purpose of all this, of course, was to examine viable solutions for public historians to support and advance the sustainability movement. Public historians can and should play an active role in the sustainability movement through research, interpretation, and civic engagement. But I have struggled with how to integrate it into my Public History program.
My case statement discusses some ways that I have tried to coordinate my classes with other campus-wide events, including the annual Global Sustainability Symposium. The logistics of interdepartmental cooperation is challenging. We designed our undergraduate minor as interdisciplinary, but aside from the Introduction to Public History course, undergrads have a hard time connecting the skills and knowledge on their own. I have tried to facilitate this through their participation in the symposium. Two of them have been the most successful collaborations. CCSU Global Environmental Sustainability Action Coalition is a group of CCSU students, administrators, faculty, and alumni “committed to providing information on how to live our lives in a way that is sustainable and in harmony with nature.” I have served on the Board of Directors for nine of those years. The mission is “to educate, empower and motivate members of the Central Connecticut State University community; civic, business, and political leaders; and society at large to embrace our ethical responsibility as global citizens to adopt sustainable lifestyles.”
In 2010, I made my local history and my graduate preservation class focus on landscape. This coordinated somewhat with symposium, which had a very general themes that year, but also with a local museum/ campus event known a “Night at the Museum.” That year, the focus was on landscape paintings. My public history students focused on the researching the history of the local parks and developing podcasts. My grad students, in turn, conducted cultural landscapes reports. These exercises forced then to see parks as both natural and cultural spaces.
In 2011, the theme of the Symposium was “Water, Life, and a Changing Planet.” That semester, I made “water” the theme of my local history class. In addition to the standard texts I usually assign for this class, they read Alice Outwater’s book, Water: A Natural History for background. The final project worked with the local municipal water department. Using the department’s own archives, the city’s local history room, and other resources, students wrote papers on a variety of topics including the history of water supply, water quality, water distribution, regionalism, and the history of the local water department itself. I was unable to get students to complete their projects in time to participate in the symposium, but the symposium worked to educate and inspire their work (at least for some).
In Spring of 2016, I co-organized our campus’ annual symposium on environmental sustainability. In honor of the centennial of the National Historic Preservation Act, the theme of the conference this year was “Building Sustainability: Preservation, Reuse, & Green Construction.” This was attempt to broaden appeal to non-preservationist environmentalists. Originally, I had hoped that students could help organize the conference, but the timing of the class made this difficult. Instead, I had the graduate students produce posters, as did Geography and Planning students around the symposium theme. The results were uneven. While some were able to integrate the different ideas, the Geography and Planning students had very little background in History and the History students struggled to articulate planning principles or translate environmental issues. However, seeing the students make these cross-disciplinary attempts outside their comfort zone seemed like a valuable exercise. Probably the best outcome may have been getting my colleagues to see the connections.
In this working group I would be interested to learn about what readings, strategies, program requirements, and projects others have implemented in order to formulate a list of Best Practices that properly train our Public Historians to view place in broad terms and face the challenges of climate change.