Students to Capture History Through Digital Technology as Part of Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership Program
Waterford, Va (PRWEB) October 08, 2013 -- Throughout the upcoming school year, seventh-grade students at two schools in Orange County, Virginia will partake in a different way of learning about history that took place right in their own community. They will be participating in the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership’s nationally award-winning Of the Student, By the Student, For the Student® service-learning project. This groundbreaking initiative engages middle-school students in interpreting the history within their own backyards. The students use primary source documents, humanities scholarship, music, dance, dramatic readings, role-playing and digital technology to create vodcasts or mini-movies for Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park. From beginning to end, the students serve as scriptwriters, actors, directors, choreographers, set designers, costume creators, videographers, and film editors to gain a deeper connection with our national history.
On Citizenship Day, September 17, the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership kicked off the program with an assembly for the entire seventh grade student body at both schools, providing an opportunity to introduce the project to all the students. Living historians were on hand to re-interpret General Lee’s and Grant's opinions of each other after their first meeting on the battlefield (Battle of Wilderness).
On October 15-16, 2013, the 370 students will travel to Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park for Immersion Day, where they will work with park rangers, historians, and Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership educators to learn numerous aspects of the war, including life as a soldier, leadership, transportation, the African American experience, and technology to lay the basis of their movie topics.
For the next several months, the students will research, write, develop, film, and edit their creations. The final product will be premiered as part of the Battle of Wilderness sesquicentennial commemoration, scheduled for May 2014.
The Of the Student, By the Student, For the Student® program has engaged students at Gettysburg Area Middle School in Pennsylvania; E. Russell Hicks and Springfield Middle Schools in Maryland; Stonewall Middle School, Smart's Mill Middle School, and Sutherland Middle School in Virginia; as well as Harpers Ferry Middle School in West Virginia. The resulting mini-movies have become part of the official interpretative material for the National Park Service, including Manassas National Battlefield Park, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, Gettysburg National Military Park, Antietam National Battlefield and C & O Canal National Historical Park. In addition the JTHG Partnership has brought the program to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Charlottesville, VA and Ball’s Bluff Battlefield Regional Park in Leesburg, VA.
Of the Student, By the Student, For the Student has been recognized by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, won the 2010 WOW Award from the American Association for State and Local History, and received the 2009 Freeman Tilden Award, in recognition of “outstanding contributions to interpretation or education at a National Park”. This award is designed to recognize interpreters that develop, revitalize or deliver an innovative, pioneering or otherwise worthy interpretive or educational program.
This project has been made possible with the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, History, the National Park Service, Learn and Serve America, the Richard S. Reynolds Foundation, the Rust Family Foundation and the National Parks Foundation. Local partners include Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park and Orange County Public Schools. For more information about the Of the Student, By the Student, For the Student® project, or the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership, visit http://www.HallowedGround.org/education.
The Journey, The Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership, +1 (540) 882-4929, [email protected]
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