Winds of Change
Through the Montana Heritage Project, students preserve the past and prepare for the future
Harlowton, Montana—The wind races down from the Crazies and rushes through the Musselshell Valley like a wild stallion trampling everything in its path. It's amazing that the Moore family's old sheep shed is still standing. The tempest shrieks through the gaps in the structure and rattles the loose, weather-whittled boards. Inside, a small group of students hopes the noise won't obscure the voices of the two men who have brought them here; one pupil tests a tape recorder to be sure their storytelling will be preserved.
The Moores settled this homestead and started ranching here, at the base of the Crazy Mountains, near the end of the Civil War. Today, the fourth and fifth generations of the Montana clan, P.J. "Jim" Moore III and his son, Steve, are sharing their family's story with four Harlowton High School students and their English teacher, Nancy Widdicombe. To bring the history to life, the Moores have brought the group—equipped with paper, pens, lists of prepared questions, cameras, audio and video recorders—to the site of the original homestead, to the cavernous sheep shed where their ancestors cared for their flock more than a century ago.
Widdicombe explains that this ranch is one of only a handful left in the area, "the last bastion of old family-owned ranches around the state." Her students know that if these stories aren't recorded now, they will be lost forever, marked only by the ruins of a few wooden structures. So the students are heading out into the community to discover the stories of the area's historic ranches and record them for future generations.
This educational endeavor is just one of many around the state that are part of the Montana Heritage Project, a seven-year-old effort focused on community-centered teaching. Instead of relying on textbooks, students take part in academic learning in their local environment.
"Getting kids excited about the adventure of scholarship is what it's all about," says Heritage Director Michael Umphrey. "Classes without real-world application are much like football teams that have practices, but never play games." Here, "kids get to be participants instead of spectators, and that generates the kind of energy one sees at athletic events," he says.
When schools and communities collaborate to "gather, preserve, and present local knowledge," a Heritage document reports, several things happen:
- Students' educational experience is enhanced
- The school gains high-quality teaching materials
- Students are engaged with their families, neighborhoods, and communities
- The curriculum is infused with a service ethic
- Students and teachers find sound educational uses for powerful technologies
Related academic materials take on new significance for kids. In Harlowton, for instance, to prepare for the historic ranch study, students devoured nonfiction books about the history of the region. Titles included Steven Ambrose's Undaunted Courage, an account of the Lewis and Clark expedition; Mari Sandoz's The Buffalo Hunters, a history of the Indian tribes and living legends of the Old West; and Mary Clearman Blew's All But the Waltz, a collection of essays about life on the Montana plains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Students also learned to operate audio and video equipment, and used computers to create PowerPoint and Web presentations of their work.
Numerous educational goals were addressed as students learned to seek out information, assess and evaluate data, draw conclusions, and record their findings. And, Widdicombe says, the interview process taught students the skill of "listening —really listening," which encouraged the ranchers to "share amazingly truthful bits" of their history.
"The families realized how much the students already knew, which showed true interest and dedication," says Widdicombe. At the same time, "the students were impressed" with the ranchers' devotion to the land, commitment to hard work, and flexibility in times of challenge. The material the students gathered was so rich that they decided to publish it in a book titled Images of the Upper Musselshell Valley.
Throughout Montana, Heritage students have helped libraries and museums build oral history collections and add to historic photo archives. They have performed data collection for Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks and engaged in field archaeology for the Bureau of Land Management. They have compiled histories of local organizations and helped nominate significant buildings for the National Registry of Historic Places.
Public presentation of the work, reports Umphrey, is a key component of the projects. Students in Harlowton, for example, unveiled their project first to the community and then to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. When students see that adults take the work seriously and believe it should be preserved in archives, they take the work seriously, too.
"It's a conversion experience," says Umphrey. "They see their families, classrooms, and neighborhoods not just as an environment in which they pursue their individual desires, but as communities of which they are members."
