United Stories: Revitalizing Heritage Field Trips in Douglas County, Kansas

FAIN: ZED-283291-22

Douglas County Historical Society (Lawrence, KS 66044-2961)
Will Haynes (Project Director: May 2021 to October 2025)

Development and implementation of a new K-12 educational field trip program across a consortium of local historical sites and museums, retaining three staff positions.

Under the leadership of the Douglas County Historical Society/Watkins Museum of History, the six history museums and historic sites of Douglas County, KS have, over the last five years, collaborated to present programs and build audiences. With the pandemic in 2020, school field trips, the sites’ primary engagements with local school systems, were cancelled. In 2021 onsite educational experiences remain curtailed. Building on past collaborative success, this project proposes an effort to re-establish field trips at county heritage sites in the spring 2022 semester by uniting topics under one compelling theme, Seeking a More Perfect Union: The Enduring Struggle for Freedom. Presenting field trips as a connected story and highlighting them as such through the Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage map app, will encourage educators to visit multiple heritage sites to provide a more complete learning experience and may increase student participation to pre-pandemic or even greater levels.