Building a Sustainable Future for Appalachian Communities
In this regional collaboration, 16 Appalachian Studies Centers in 11 states work together in service for the region. ATP seeks to support and encourage student research and interaction among those campuses and constituent communities.
Students propose solutions to community-defined problems and explore ways to meet the needs of these individual communities.
A travel grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), a regional economic development agency, provides funding for students to present their project at three-day event in Washington, DC. Students deliver their research through a group presentation and a poster, discuss community issues and learn to network.
Purpose and Goals
The purpose of the Appalachian Teaching Project is to support community-based research and civic entrepreneurship by strengthening educational partnerships among students, faculty, and citizenry in Appalachia.
Students will strengthen leadership skills and awareness of community assets that can foster sustainability.
Students will be engaged as active learners and participants in community projects.
Students will engage in traditional and active research to assist communities in creative approaches to sustainability through asset-based development.
Arts-Based Research
The methodology the Minor in Appalachian Studies uses for the Appalachian Teaching Project is community, arts-based research.
As defined by McNiff, 2007, arts based research is “the systematic use of the artistic process…the actual making of artistic expressions in all of the different forms of the arts, as a primary way of understanding and examining experience by both researchers and the people that they involve in their studies.”
How can we help The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center increase its digital capacity to reach a new generation, both in Rabun County and beyond?
Overview
Students will use archival research and storytelling circles to create a folkloric narrative about planting by the signs. They will then create a Crankie, a nineteenth-century medium featuring a panoramic scene, rolled up inside a box, then hand-cranked so that it scrolls across a viewing screen.
How can we increase public access to heirloom seeds and their stories in north Georgia?
Overview
Students created a seed dispensing machine, exhibited previous ATP art, performed readers’ theater and conducted seed related workshops for children and adults.