In a large high school, teachers from different departments have little time to discuss and integrate the content of their courses, often resulting in a disconnected learning experience for the students.  In order to remedy this problem, a veteran Spanish teacher, Debbie Brejcha, and I developed a double-period pilot course of World History Since 1500 and third year Spanish.   Our combined class aimed to make curricular connections and create an intimate community for our 25 students.  

            For our first interdisciplinary unit, Debbie and I designed a project that took our combined class out of the confines of the school to create connections between local community members and students.  Inspired by the stories in Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, we elected to incorporate the stories of our local World War II veterans into the curriculum of our combined course.  The project, entitled Local Heroes, sought to integrate the veterans’ experiences with the history content and to encourage intergenerational connections within the local community. 

The students created a list of interview questions to ask the World War II veterans.  Student pairs conducted videotaped interviews and then shared their interviews with the class.  The content of the interviews guided our study of World War II.  While reading about the Battle of the Bulge in a textbook, one student pair emotionally shared the experience of a former army soldier they had interviewed.  They retold his story of the battle.  The German troops had surrounded the U.S. Army, and there was little hope for an Allied success.  After the lieutenant informed the platoon that they would not survive, the war veteran wrote his farewell letter to his beloved wife.  Fortunately, the lieutenant’s prediction was incorrect.  The students shared stories, like the one of the Battle of the Bulge, with each other to help personalize the war.

After the interviews, the students wrote children’s books in Spanish about the veterans.  We took our books to read to a third grade bilingual class at our feeder school.  My students laughed as the third-graders corrected their pronunciation.  For the next step of the project, the students studied the controversy about the creation of a World War II memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C.  They wrote letters voicing their opinions to congressional members.  Lastly, we had a celebration at the school to share the videos, books, and letters with World War II veterans, their families, and the families of the students.  A veteran and his wife thanked the class for conducting the interviews.  He stated that 55 years later he finally felt appreciated for his efforts in the war.

Debbie and I were touched by the student enthusiasm for the project.  Every student turned in each part of the project, which was a first in our classes.  Our students also chose to become pen pals with the third graders in order to practice their Spanish.  No students missed the Local Heroes evening celebration, even though no grade was attached.  Some students volunteered to conduct additional one-hour interviews on their own time for other local war veterans who wished to be interviewed.  The hard work of our students enables the stories of the “greatest generation” to remain alive in our school video library for generations to come. 

The students embraced the Local Heroes project.  They experienced how it felt to be historians and discover history.  In an interview with the local newspaper, the Highland Park News, one sophomore student, Jon, said, “Reading a book and looking at photographs is one type of learning experience, but it has a certain ‘distance’ from the subject matter.  Discussing an event with a person who participated gives the subject matter a face.”

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