Many Voices Many Stories

What this site is about

This website is devoted to activities that invite students’ stories and findings about where they live and how that place has changed over time. Ours is the story space that begins with interviews with town fathers and mothers, notices the architecture of the oldest buildings in town, and fuels observation and research of the rivers, land forms, technology, and culture we live with every day. We invite students and teachers to turn to the familiar and uncover the stories of change.

If you are a teacher, we invite you to submit your lesson plans and stories about how you teach about change over time. We are particularly interested in sharing student products and reflections. You can adapt an activity, create one from scratch or work with a team. View our sample lessons, review the criteria/rubric, then upload your abstract pointing to your lesson. We ask you to host your own lessons, reflective comments and your students’ work along with their comments. That way you can have your students view other students’ products. And this then becomes a place where students’ can publish their stories about change over time.

One of our goals of this site is to provide a resource for teachers to teach students how to think about change in multiple disciplines. Another is to allow student voices through the district lesson page.

“Lewis and Clark is a classic American story,” says James Ronda as he addresses a group of teachers in Astoria, Oregon. Here, their journey successful, they contemplate how far they have come and how they will return. They think about the lessons learned, and how what they have discovered about the land, the people, the plants and the animals will affect the future of their country. The journey has had a profound effect on the members of the Corps of Discovery. The problem solving, collaboration and daily observation of life along the mighty Missouri and Columbia rivers forever changes them. Their maps, observations and journals change how we think of ourselves as a country - almost boundless, expansive and full of opportunities.

There are many stories in this journey, not the least of which, is the story of how a small group of people took the pulse of the land they traveled through. Theirs is the story of the visitor, passing through, but keen to learn and see everything. Like any good story, theirs is full of the surprise at even the smallest detail.

Ours is the opportunity to tell the stories since that journey across country. Ours is the story across time. What has changed in the intervening 200 years since the Lewis and Clark expedition? How do we take “the view from the banks?” What will our stories of change contribute? How can technology be used to tell that story more effectively?
Follow the links below to view the lesson plans, to submit a lesson, to view standards, or to explore resources for developing and delivering lessons.