Neighborhoods: places where people live, work, and play, defined by streets, signs, animals, plants, and other landmarks of local note. Neighborhoods provide a dynamic and ever-changing location for young people to learn about community, themselves, and their peers. The Neighborhoods Project, created by local teachers and CDS staff members, offers North Carolina elementary school teachers an innovative and effective way to meet social studies goals outlined in the state's standard course of study. The project provides a way to engage students in their own communities, focusing on their individual lives and stories through photographs, narrative writing, and storytelling.

The Neighborhoods Project can also be adapted for an exciting summer or after-school activity coordinated by artists, educators, and community activists. It provides a series of experiential learning activities that encourage the use of photography, oral history, and narrative writing in an exploration of community and citizenship. The Neighborhoods Project helps young people begin to see their everyday environments and themselves in new ways.

A Neighborhoods Project curriculum booklet will be available to artists, educators, and community activists in fall 2002. The Neighborhoods Project at the Center for Documentary Studies receives support from the Civic Education Consortium, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, and the North Carolina Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of North Carolina and the National Endowment for the Arts. For more information contact Barbara Lau at 919-660-3676 or balau@duke.edu.

1999 E.K. Powe Neighborhoods Project 2000 E.K. Powe Neighborhoods Project 2001 E.K. Powe Neighborhoods Project

Each spring, second-grade students at E.K. Powe Elementary School in Durham become neighborhood detectives as they use the documentary arts to explore the five neighborhoods that make up their school district. In its fifth year at E.K. Powe, the Neighborhoods Project has helped students and teachers work together, share their experiences with each other, and learn about the importance of shared and different pasts and where local communities are headed.

W. G. Pearson Elementary School

In spring 2002, the Center for Documentary Studies began a Neighborhoods Project at a new partner school, W.G. Pearson Elementary. Located in an area rich in African American history, W.G. Pearson draws its students from the neighborhoods surrounding the school. Students will have the opportunity to hear stories about community life in the past, share their own experiences in their neighborhoods, and use interviews and photographs to document what they have learned.