Communities all around Delaware make excellent learning laboratories for classes that are seeking to increase historial-thinking and understand the evolution of our 21st century environment. With that in mind, I often take undergraduates out for fieldwork, especially this time of year as autumn gets underway on the Peninsula and the days are ideal for strolling. The focus of these experiential learning exercises is to demonstrate how to understand the history that is all around by showing them where to look, what to look for, and how to examine the visual evidence.
So we spent this morning in Delaware City considering how physical, economic, cultural and political forces shaped growth and development of the quaint little town at the eastern end of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. This applied research in a classroom without walls gave us the perfect place to gather evidence and talk about how and why this place looks the way it does. In preparation for the trip that explored the physical and built landscape, technological changes and demography, we scrutinized photographs, maps and other primary document that served as the foundation for our investigation.
Next week, we are going to venture down below the canal to look at two other towns, Middletown and Odessa, for a comparative case study. Together these towns provide the perfect laboratory for comparing and contracting how and why development of three Delaware communities took place and analyze the different paths they took over the centuries.
