Teaching with local history and museums

We have we talking about how the school systems suck at teaching history, and any thing in general.  Apparently there is a program out there helping to teach history.  It is the Historical Environment Education program (HEE).

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1525/tph.2011.33.1.33.pdf

History classes in grade school and high school is not the best it could be, but there is a program out there trying to change that.  The program is the Historic Environment Education (HEE) and it concentrates on getting teachers to taking kids to museums or getting them to interview relatives.  There are some schools taking kids to museums where they travel back in time, seeing what life was like during the expansion and grinding corn to make tortilla shells.  There is also another school getting the kids to interview family members and then talking about the subjects brought up in bigger context.  Doing these things help children see the things that happened in the world also happened in their neighborhood.  It brings history home instead of just reading about it.

            This idea of letting students go out and ask question about history (how did we get here, why is this how it is done) helps them learn.  It is another technique, besides making students read or listen to a straight lecture.  Let the students find things out then discuss it in class.  All students learn in different ways, but most will understand history better if they can touch it, see it, or hear an experience from a close relative. 

            This practice, HEE, brings the concentric circles down to local level rather than just a national level.  Once students understand history, or they see that it happened in the area where they live, they will see that the past shapes their future.