STUDY PRINT PROJECT LAKE AND PENINSULA SCHOOL DISTRICT During the 1978-79 school year, the Lake and Peninsula School District began a project for multi-cultural education under the current Materials Development Grant. Conceived by the Learning Tree consultants--Lucille Frey, Sanna Green, and Laurita Hefner--in conjunction with school district staff members; this project was designed to work toward the objective of centering instruction on the village. Instruction could later move to 1ess familiar topics. Motivated by strong concerns expressed by local school advisory committees at a Schoo1 Board meeting in October, 1978, the following criteria were emphasized throughout the project: (l) the project should reinforce a sense of identity and of the past; (2) it should involve the students in an awareness of changes within themselves and their world; (3) it should be useful in the Bilingual program, and should help to integrate that program with the total instructiona1 program; (4) it should assist in teaching the basic skills of writing, reading, science and math, but the work's initial impact would be nonverbal--that is, it would begin with the visual sense; (5) the project would be open-ended and self-perpetuating--something which could be continued after the consultant's specific assistance was completed; and (6) most importantly, the work would be done only under the guidance and input of local community members.

The project consisted of five main parts: (a) getting students involved in photography work, especially as this work could be related to their understanding and use of communications skills; (b) collecting copies of old photographs, and the stories behind them, from village people and making these old photographs into study prints; (c) utilizing recent photographs taken by teachers and by the consultant who carried out this project, Laurita Hefner; (d) involving Bilingual teachers, regular classroom teachers, and other interested people in writing curriculum suggestions for using the study prints; and (e) conducting in-service on the use of the study prints so that all the different ideas could be shared among the teachers. Any of us connected with the project would be eager to talk further about our experiences with the study prints. Thus far, we have found that this approach--especially with its initial emphasis on a concrete and visual effect--has met with great enthusiasm. It has awakened interest and information which we never knew existed, allowing people new opportunities to discover more fully what they already knew and to use that knowledge as a base for further learning.