Welcome to Clarion University of Pennsylvania's first ever Public History course! Taught by Dr. Marc Sanko, it has been designed to follow advice given in Ben Filene's "Passionate Outsiders" from The Public Historian.
In that article, Filene calls for educators to embrace an atmosphere of creativity. He writes,
"We need students who have the spark of creativity...we need to find students who have the passion to fire a popular history movement...we need to accept that in this more open-ended, project-based work, "learning goals" are less precise. If one is doing public work that community partners feel passionate about, the relationships, the process, and the emotional tenor of the project matter more than the length of the literature review or the professional polish of the end product. If creativity and collaboration skills are central to the work of the field, we need to allow classes in creativity and collaboration..."
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Benjamin Filene, "Passionate Histories: 'Outsider' History-Makers and What They Teach Us," The Public Historian, Vol. 34 No. 1 (Winter 2012), 32-33.
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With Filene's advice in mind, the students in this class are focused on a semester long partnership project with Drake Well Museum located near Clarion University in Titusville, PA.
Throughout the semester, students are working to contextualize artifacts and find creative new ways to bring these artifacts to the public. The end goal being that we as a class have gotten our hands "dirty" using creative and innovate methods to research, discuss, and share the history of Northwest Pennsylvania.
