Partners in Learning: Using 21st Century Technology to Share 19th Century Material

Barbara Doyle-Wilch and John H. Pollitz

Last Spring, my third grade twins took a trip to Black Hawk State Historic Park in Rock Island, Illinois. I doubt there is any class in the entire Quad Cities from kindergarten to high school who does not take a trip to that park at some time during their school years. It is 175 acres of beautiful undisturbed land; a hilly area with bluffs cascading down to the Rock River, which is also home to the Hauberg Indian, Museum. The curator gave a wonderful description of Indian life of the Sauk and Fox tribes who lived on the site, and the class was impressed by the Native American artifacts. They had read Little House on the Prairie, but they still had a hard time imagining what life was really like here so long ago and so different from what they experience today.

When they came home bubbling with enthusiasm, I took them on a trip back in time to Black Hawk Park. Through our home computer to the Home Page of the Augustana Library, I showed them pictures of Black Hawk, a.k.a. Ma-Ka-Tai-She-Kia-Keak, the famous Indian warrior who was born there in 1767. I explained that the Sauk Indians had a village of 7,000 on that site and that it was one of the largest villages in the United States. I showed them pictures of Black Hawk's descendants, who came back to visit the area that had been so important to their people 100 years earlier. We looked at my pictures of the park when it was a colossal amusement park (before cars!) and saw the first toboggan slide into the river, the "chute the chute." I read them oral histories of the first settlers in the area, which described their pioneer life. We even looked at drawings of the flowers indigenous to the park, drawn by a local artist and published by the British Museum. Through the Internet, we saw rare pictures and read original manuscripts about the history of our area, which before "Partners in Learning" would have been unavailable to school-age children. And we did it from home!

Partners in Learning

"Partners in Learning" is a pilot project, using Library Services and Construction Act Funds from the Office of the Secretary of State/Illinois State Library, that uses the latest technology to share resources among libraries and school children. The idea for the project began with a plan to investigate new ways to bring electronic technology into the classroom. It is a two pronged approach to making the Internet relevant to the children's education by combining electronic access to rare material held in the Augustana College Library with World Wide Web resources. It seemed natural that Augustana College play a role as mentor in helping bring this resource to the local schools. The college had been the first institution in this area to begin implementing Internet technology throughout its campus.

"Partners in Learning" is based on the premise that technology is not an end in itself but a tool that teachers can use along with the other tools they use daily. For this reason, close coordination with the teachers in the development of the project was a primary objective. Working together, the project team searched the Internet to identify resources that were appropriate to the local K-12 curriculum. The team organized the resources in a way that librarians, students and teachers could easily access worldwide information.

The second aim of "Partners in Learning" was to develop a database of locally held materials relevant to the schools' curriculum and make it available to students electronically. This database consists of materials from the Augustana College Library's Special Collections Department. Much of the material is very difficult for elementary school and high school students to use under normal situations. All of the material is rare and access to it is strictly controlled. One of the dilemmas for special collections departments everywhere is that they have wonderful resources, but because of the materials' fragile nature it is often difficult to get into the hands of those who could use it most.

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Augustana College has a long tradition of collecting information about the local history of the Upper Mississippi Valley. The Specials Collections Department has a rich collection of manuscripts, photographs and postcards that document the history of this Western Illinois region. Digitizing these materials will supply librarians and teachers with original source material for classroom use. By working with primary material, the students will not only learn history but will learn how history is written. Through this technology, teachers can move beyond the lecture and textbook and access rare material that will further spark the imagination of young students and enrich their knowledge of local history. By combining this local material with national and international resources through the Internet, "Partners in Learning" provides a model for further development of electronic collections that support K-12 education.

"Partners in Learning" was designed to be carried out within a limited scope and, if successful, expanded to encompass more resources and include more schools in the area. A natural place to start was with schools in the college's local community. We already had an established relationship with Rock Island High School. Students from the school often use the college library for their more sophisticated research needs, and teachers occasionally bring college-prep classes in for special training with the college librarians. We also wanted to see how younger students might use the technology employed by our project, so Horace Mann Choice Elementary School was invited to participate. Horace Mann has a year-round academic calendar and includes students from kindergarten through 6th grade. It represents an innovative learning environment that draws students from the entire Rock Island school district. Classes at Horace Mann are not broken into grade classrooms, rather children are grouped by ability into either primary (kindergarten through third grade) or intermediate (fourth through sixth grade) levels. There are two teachers and a computer specialists from Horace Mann participating in the project. One teacher is from the primary level and the other teaches in the intermediate level. With this group we are able to involve students from all elementary levels.

Planning and building the database

The initial planning meetings for our project were held at the Augustana College Library in the spring of 1994. At that time we began to take up general questions about database resources and specific questions about personnel. Linda Milton, librarian at Rock Island High School, and Alice Traylor, computer specialist from Horace Mann Elementary, were responsible for identifying the teachers from their schools who would participate in the project. At the college we hired two students. Troy Stobert and Susan Grupe, to do the majority of the construction of our database. Troy worked on the structure of the database, and Susan began scanning images from a Civil War diary, postcards and the John Hauberg Collection, held in the Augustana College Library's Special Collections Department. By October we had over more than 300 images digitized and the initial pages of our database designed.

The participants agreed that the material should be closely tied to what the teachers are currently teaching. It was not the purpose of the project to change curriculum but rather to enhance it. Through discussion with teachers we found that the college's Special Collections could best support units on local history and that other units could be supported with Internet resources from distant sites. We also planned to support a high school biology unit but were concerned that it would be difficult to find appropriate materials. However, in subsequent meetings we realized we did have some material that could assist the students studying the vegetation at the local Black Hawk Park. It was determined that the college library would support the students project by scanning images of the park circa 1900 that were contained in the John Hauberg Collection. Photographs of the park not only play a role in our local histories but also are useful to the biology students as they illustrate how the park fauna has changed over the years.

At the suggestion of Mike Breidenstein, the high school biology teacher, we also digitized photographs from a book of plant drawings. The 1990 book. Plant Studies from the American Prairies by George Olson, contains pen and ink drawings of plants that can be found in the Black Hawk State Historic Site. The author was an Augustana College graduate who gave us permission to use the pictures in our database. As the project developed, we found that the Black Hawk State Historic Site has been the unifying theme that ran through all of our subject areas and grade levels.

In meetings with the history teachers from Rock Island High School the project team decided that the Civil War would be the focus for that aspect of the database. The Special Collections Department at the college library owned two sets of diaries written by local soldiers. When the teachers began their unit on the Civil War we planned that the students would connect to the database and transcribe the handwritten documents. This way the students would not only leam the history but also how historical research is done with primary documents. They would also be contributing their completed transcriptions to the database. During the initial year, the students started

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with images from the pages that were easiest to read. We wanted to start with material that offered the best opportunity for a successful experience as the teachers and students learned how to use this technology. In the future, other classes will transcribe some of the more difficult passages.

High School Activities

Our first test of the project in the classroom took place in the winter of 1995 with history students at Rock Island High School. Lou McLaughlin and Rick Miers, high school history teachers, introduced the Civil War Diary of G. D. Molineaux to their classes as a team activity. Each group of two students were given a page of the diary to transcribe. Because they were covering the Civil War before the images of the diary could be loaded on the main computer, we decided to experiment in the most non-technological way. The students composed their transcriptions from photocopies of the diary. At least the teachers were able to develop a model for how they will guide the students next year as they work from the electronic database. Lou and Rick designed the assignment so that after all their students did the preliminary classroom work, a small group of keenly interested students that would carry out the transcription to completion. The students who stuck with the project received extra credit.

Two students took leadership roles in guiding the others through the transcriptions. They read through all of the handwritten pages and were able to give other students interpretations of some of the cryptic phrases. Once the transcription was complete, the students' work was transferred onto the "Partners in Learning" database. By this time, the main computer had been installed and the World Wide Web site was established. The teachers and the transcription group made a visit to the college in the spring of 1995 to look at the actual diary with which the students had been working. This was the first time the students were able to hold the original notebooks.

It became obvious how the project had captured the imagination of the students. They talked about G. D. Molineaux and his family as if they knew them. The students discussed how they had to rethink their own language and learn about how people wrote and spoke in the nineteenth century. At one point, one student expressed the belief that Molineaux was a hypochondriac because he continually mentioned his many illnesses. This was an opening for the teachers to introduce the concept of public health during the Civil War. They explained how people did not understand the concept of germs and camps were established where drinking water was drawn from rivers downstream from latrine runoff. The students learned

that more soldiers died from cholera than from bullets during the Civil War. Lou and Rick were able to work off the students' enthusiasm generated by the material and use the "teachable moment." During the upcoming year, new high school classes involved with the project will transcribe other pages from the notebooks. The experience of the past year has helped the teachers fine tune their assignment. They also will use Internet resources for this and other units throughout the coming school year.

Elementary School Activities

During our initial meeting, the team of librarians and teachers decided that the elementary school portion of the database would concentrate on visual images rather than text-based resources. This would be most useful to students in the primary level. Later we decided to include the interviews from the Hauberg Collection to support local history units in the intermediate grades. A Native American section was created to support curriculum units on multiculturalism.

Ann Cottay and Carol Waiters, the elementary school teachers involved in the project, have worked very closely with the staff from Augustana College Library in the development of the "Partners in Learning" database. They were very interested in trying new ways of enriching their curriculum. Neither of the teachers had much experience with computers in their classrooms beyond teaching keyboarding, but they wanted to explore how to use the Internet in the classroom. We were very excited about involving young children in the project, and the teachers quickly saw the possibilities for using our rare materials. Much of what we have done with them during the past year has been in the area of planning and training. Many of our meetings have involved showing the teachers exactly what is available to them on the World Wide Web. Ann and Carol, along with Alice Traylor, came to Augustana College and "cruised" the Internet looking for resources to include on the elementary school's "Internet" section of the database. The teachers were active in shaping not only the content of the database but also the format. They reminded the library staff that when we built our lists of Internet resources we needed to put the lists in alphabetical order. This way our resource would reinforce other educational goals that the teachers were promoting.

The Augustana College Special Collections contain a large number of postcards with views from the Quad Cities that date back to before the turn of the century. These provide the basis for a database of visual images that document the area's local history. Judy Belan,

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Special Collections Librarian at Augustana helped the teachers from Horace Mann elementary school pour over our postcards and chose images that supported their curriculum. They picked our postcards that showed their students what town life looked like in our region, concentrating on locations that would be recognizable today. Most were from the turn of the century but we also included ones that documented the two great floods that occurred in 1965 and in 1993. Postcard images included many views of parks, churches and street scenes from three of the cities that make up the Quad Cities-Rock Island and Moline, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa. Once again Black Hawk Park played a major role in this part of the project since we included many historical images showing the park's significance to the region. We also decided to tap the Hauberg collection of photographs for images of farm life that could be used in primary level curriculum units. Ann Cottay is planning to teach a unit on transportation that she thought could incorporate some of our postcard images. The college staff searched out and scanned more than 80 images from the postcard collection showing early transportation from mules and trolleys to airplanes. The most entertaining images turned out to be of the postcard pictures of steamboats and paddlewheelers on the Mississippi.

In Conclusion

Although the funding year is completed, this is a project that is not finished. The Augustana College Library is committed to pushing the project forward. We have discovered the potential for expanding access to some of the wonderful resources that we have in our Special Collections Department. With this project, school children in Rock Island can see images from the

history of their towns that they may have never had the opportunity to view. They also can quickly and easily move to remote Internet sites and see resources appropriate to their studies. The project has convinced us that this type of project can be replicated by other libraries throughout the state. By electronically opening the doors of archives across the state, every school child will benefit. We know that Augustana College is not unique in possessing valuable treasures; other libraries can follow this model as a way to share their treasures with the rest of the state and the world.

Footnote

John Hauberg (1869-1955) was a local historian and photographer of the Quad City area. Hauberg was educated as a lawyer and practiced law in Moline until after his marriage to Susanne Christine Denkmann in 1911. Susanne Denkmann was the daughter of lumber giant F.C.A. Denkmann, partner in the Weyerhaeuser and Denkmann Lumber company. Hauberg moved his practice to Rock Island, but in 1914 realized that his other interests and commitments precluded a career in law. Hauberg was very active in the life of the community. He founded the United Sunday School Boys Band, organized the Black Hawk Hiking Club and was active in local and state YMCA organizations. In 1927, he was instrumental in the creation of Black Hawk State Park, now Black Hawk State Historical Site.

When museum was established at the park in 1937, Hauberg supplied the Native American relics for its displays. The museum was later dedicated as the Hauberg Museum. In 1940, he was instrumental in bringing the Native Americans from the Mesquakie Tribe in Tama, Iowa to the park, starting an annual tradition of pow-wows held each fall. That year, Hauberg was elected honorary chief of the Mesquakie, an honor he treasured throughout his life. His interest in history led him to establish the Illinois Junior Historian magazine in 1947. The magazine continues as the Illinois Historian. As a young amateur historian John Hauberg conducted more than 350 oral history interviews with the people who had settled the area of Western Illinois that became known as the Quad Cities. We included a fraction of these interviews as well as the images of his photographic glass negative, which were recently acquired by Augustana College Library Special Collections Department.

*Barbara Doyle-Wilch, Library Director, Augustana College Library; John H. Pollitz; Assistant Library Director, Augustana College Library.

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