SUNYPotsdam Teams Up With Elementary Kids

By LORI SHULL

Johnson News Service

POTSDAM - There are lots of stories along the state's second-longest river, and students from SUNY Potsdam and Colton-Pierrepont Elementary School are teaming up to tell some of them.

Senior anthropology students are putting together a package to teach younger students about oral history and then setting them loose to record stories from the communities along the Raquette River, as part of the Blueway Corridor Project.

"I think an oral history purist would probably argue that you're not really getting great oral history," assistant professor of anthropology Alan L. Hersker said. "Oral history is really a tool. What we're trying to do is create a sense of oral history, not just between communities but intergenerational as well."

To that end, the college students will send tools to the elementary schools so the young children can interview older residents who have memories or knowledge about the river's uses in their communities.

"One of our perennial problems here in the North Country is losing our young people," said Mr. Hersker, who developed the idea for the project with the anthropology department chairwoman, Karen Johnson-Weiner. "I wonder if kids really appreciate what we have here."

Mr. Hersker's 12 senior capstone students have been creating a PowerPoint presentation about how to record oral histories for the elementary pupils, as well as information for teachers and historical sources to use as a reference or background materials. Those resources will be sent to Katherine V. Brown's sixth-grade English class at Colton-Pierrepont.

Her pupils will pilot the program, which then will spread to schools in towns along the Raquette.

"There is nothing we would love more than to have it go from Tupper Lake to Akwesasne," Mr. Hersker said. "Already we've had people from the Akwesasne Freedom School who are interested."

The Raquette River Corridor Blueway Project is a movement to promote the recreational opportunities and environmental awareness along the river. It is a state-designated small boat and paddling route with designated stops along the path of the river for resting and overnight stays. The river is more than 170 miles long, and, unlike most New York rivers, flows north through the Adirondacks until it empties into the St. Lawrence River.

This project will be the second oral history exercise Mrs. Brown's class has done this year. Earlier, pupils interviewed people they felt were teachers in the community, from a student's uncle who is a scuba instructor to another child's grandmother who taught her how to crochet.

"That was sort of a warm-up, and I was glad we had that to practice for this," Mrs. Brown said. "The kids will take notes and have recorders. We'll just talk around and see who will be interested."

The elementary pupils will do their interviews in April and finish the project before the end of the school year. The final project likely will be "some kind of visual," Mrs. Brown said.

"Oral history is the vehicle here that we're using to create a sense of community," Mr. Hersker said. "I really think it has the potential to be transformational to the community along the river."