This article provides a model for an international community-based public history field experience, with a university student-engagement case study in two Belizean communities. This field experience involved experiential education, interdisciplinary research, and collaboration between American and Belizean university students; public history, cultural anthropology, and archaeology scholars; US and Belizean institutions; and community residents. Resulting products included an exhibit on local cultural heritage and educational materials. I explore the pedagogical and scholarly utility of the field experience to public history by discussing the educational process, project results, and student learning outcomes, highlighting in particular contributions to student training and engaged scholarship.
Examining the Pedagogy of Community-Based Heritage Work through an International Public History Field Experience
Alicia Ebbitt McGill is an assistant professor in the department of history at North Carolina State University, where she contributes courses in heritage studies and cultural resource management to the graduate program in public history. Her research in Belize focuses on how constructions of heritage are promoted through public venues (e.g., tourism, education, and archaeological practice) and the ways cultural actors such as teachers and youth negotiate heritage constructions and navigate colonial legacies and cultural politics over time. In her scholarship, she brings a historical lens to examinations of heritage practices and an ethnographic approach to public history.
Alicia Ebbitt McGill; Examining the Pedagogy of Community-Based Heritage Work through an International Public History Field Experience. The Public Historian 1 February 2018; 40 (1): 54–83. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2018.40.1.54
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University of California Press