Project Proposal: History through 18th Century Clothing
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Overview
The project will initially be an ambitious, multi-semester course project, and then become a course tool, with the goal of teaching students about 18th century American history and culture. The project will be part of an interdisciplinary curriculum at a private college preparatory school, Conserve School in Land o' Lakes, WI. As a cooperative effort between instructor and students, the site will be an ongoing project for several semesters, therefore the use of the site as a pedegogical tool will evolve as the site develops.
Project scope
The site will serve as a resource for students to explore the world of 18th century America through clothing. The site will contain information on various aspects of 18th century life, as they relate to clothing. Through a single lens, students will be able to examine topics as diverse as politics, economics, agriculture, aesthetics, and fashion. They will also be able to use the project as a way to improve their technical skills, and use clothing patterns to explore practical problems in geometry.
Since use of the site will require a knowledge of 18th cenutry clothing in order to achieve the other pedegogical objectives, a critical component to the site will be an 18th century clothing primer. The primer will provide basic information about clothing in a combination of graphic intensive “lecture” and participatory formats, including self-quizzes. It will also include a glossary of terms, with written descriptions, and where possible, pictures or drawings of the terms. The primer will be hypertext rich, allowing students to obtain more information from related entries in an easy to use manner.
A 3D immersive world will provide a reconstructed context for students to explore, giving them visual and audio information that will work with the curriculum to develop critical thinking skills, resulting in projects in which the students must analyze the social contexts presented, discussing and explaining them using materials from their research elsewhere.
A document collection will be created by the students over several semesters, teaching students how to work with primary source documents as well as the technical skills needed to build the collection. Students will learn to categorize and classify documents as well as to seek out relationships between documents. Once the collection is built, students will use it to answer questions that are only practical to research with an electronic collection that has advanced search capabilities.