What is the relationship between towns and their schools?
The Vermont Town Schools Project will work with local partners to build an oral history collection to gather perspectives on the experiences of community schooling in Addison County. Join this online gathering to learn more and help shape this emerging project.
Potential ways to participate:
Join the community advisory group
Sign up to be interviewed
Join a team of interviewers (training provided through the Vermont Folklife Center)
Share your input on what can be learned through this interview project
Imagine how the oral history collection might be used in the future.
Choose from two dates
Two sessions are scheduled to allow for as much accessibility as possible. Each session will be structured in the same way but may look different depending on who is present. Attend one or both!
Saturday, May 22 - 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Wednesday, June 2 - 6:30 - 8:00 pm
More about the Vermont Town Schools Project
The Vermont Folklife Center (VFC) invites participants to join a preliminary exploration of the relationship between towns and local public schools in the five-town Mount Abraham Unified School District (Bristol, Lincoln, Monkton, New Haven and Starksboro). Based on conversations with community leaders, the VFC proposes to work with local partners to gather perspectives on the experiences of community schooling by conducting interviews.
Building an oral history collection is a practical way to preserve testimonies and narratives on local experiences and values as well as develop a learning resource for the public to draw on. This inquiry occurs in the context of recent policy reforms that impact the future of town schools. VFC seeks public input to clarify the goals of the project.
With partners in the five-town area, the Vermont Folklife Center will co-host two Public Listening Sessions that will introduce how to launch community-led documentation projects using collaborative ethnographic approaches. Moreover, the Listening Sessions aim to explore the potential goals and methods of the Vermont Town Schools Project and take the first steps of gaining feedback and guidance from community members about how they would like to direct this project:
What topics, themes, and perspectives are important to represent in the interview collection?
In what ways might the collection be accessed and used in the future?
Who should be involved?
This is an opportunity to create multiple roles for participation and to gain community support and involvement at the beginning stages of the study.