ELMWOOD — A group of over 100 students from Elmwood Junior High School are recording interviews and gathering artifacts for the purpose of documenting the history of the Village of Elmwood.
As part of the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program, the group seventh and eighth grade students are collecting primary sources, including original documents, objects, films, interviews and photographs that record a time, place or event in Elmwood history.
“The information has to come from somebody who was part of the event or information written at the time of the event, so this is a combination of interviews, plus research that involves looking for primary source documentation,” said Mary Ann Hanlin, a retired teacher in Elmwood School District 322 and organizer of the Elmwood History Project. “It’s to tell Elmwood’s story.”
The students began gathering primary source documents and conducting the interviews at the beginning of the 2011-2012 academic school year.
“We started it in the fall and it will last through the school year,” said Hanlin.
The students have interviewed several different people in the community, including business owners, soldiers of foreign wars, town officials, dairy farmers and regular people with interesting stories to tell. Among the interesting stories was a story of a man who walked from Colorado to be with his family in Elmwood. Another story told of a man who hitched up a horse and loaded up a wagon with gas-powered washing machines and drove around the county staying away from home until all of them were sold. Another story told of a man who bottled milk and left them on the doorsteps of Elmwood residents.
Recently, Lauren Stufflebeam, an eighth grade student at Elmwood Junior High School, interviewed Elmwood Director of Economic Development Dick Taylor about how the community recovered from the damage it suffered when two tornados touched down in the village’s downtown business district on June 5, 2010.
“I was a little nervous,” said Stufflebeam. “But it was OK, I guess.”
Elmwood Junior High teachers Cindy Alcaraz, Chris Herridge and Katie Janovetz are directing the students through the project.
“There are three teachers in the junior high that are working with this project,” said Hanlin. “One’s a science teacher, one’s a language arts teacher and one’s a social science teacher, so they’re treating it as sort of a cross curricular to make it work.”
Eventually, the Elmwood History Project will be posted in digital form on the American Memory section of the Library of Congress website www.loc.gov.
The project is funded with a $2,000 grant from the Library of Congress that three professors in the teachers education department at Bradley University, including department chairman Dean Cantu, David McMullen and Sherrie Pardieck, applied for and received.
The professors have been working with the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program since 2004. In a journal posed on the National Social Science Association website, the professors said the program allows junior high students to incorporate a variety of methods and strategies to explore the lives of real people, places, events, and objects that help them to understand, question, make personal connections, and apply the new concepts.
