Living History in Eastern North Carolina: How Washington County High Schoolers are Uncovering Their Past

At first glance, random piles of candy, centuries-old nurses uniforms, and a lighthouse might not have much in common. For a group of high school students in eastern North Carolina’s rural Washington County, however, those three things and many more components made up an unique and exciting Place-Based Education project. Over three days, led by East Carolina University (ECU) faculty, the students engaged in a deep exploration of how history is constructed and interpreted, using local resources right in Washington County as the vehicle for their studies. 

The idea for this project began in the early days of the 2025-26 school year, when Dr. Jerry Johnson, Director for ECU’s Rural Education Institute (REI), brought together a few faculty members to brainstorm ways to engage local school partners (ECU’s Rural Education Institute anchors RSC’s Southeast Regional Hub). Chief among those were Dr. Mary Huffman, Assistant Professor in ECU’s Elementary, Middle, and Secondary Education Department, and Dr. Tyler Youngman, an Assistant Professor in Library Science. As conversations developed, Washington County School District, which recently joined ECU’s network of Community Schools, became a perfect fit for their early ideas. 

The ECU team began conversations with Washington County Schools, with Wysonza James, Community School Coordinator for ECU’s REI, serving as a main point of contact at Washington County. Dr. Youngman recalls that “It was a dialogue. We didn’t come in with any kind of plan, we didn’t come in with a predetermined outcome or goal. We just wanted to have a conversation… That approach to creating this curriculum came from a place of partnership and speaking with the community and school, rather than speaking for them.” The result was a focus on understanding history, both through an exploration of local places and exercises aimed towards conceptualizing history as a discipline and everyday facet of life. 

The team settled on a three-day curriculum, to be done in Washington County, and led by both ECU faculty and local experts. Dr. Huffman shares that emphasizing local assets was a key goal for the two participating teachers: “We got together and it was a really neat brainstorming opportunity. We let the teachers go and talk about what they would like to see if we could visit different places around the county… we wanted to showcase all of the important places around their school district.” 

The first day  of the curriculum settled around a goal of understanding what history is and how it gets made. Dr. Youngman explains that “We wanted day one and two to really be about that holistic process of how history and heritage get made, and how we participate in that process as active agents who can shape historical narrative and storytelling, rather than people who are passive consumers.” This included tactile explorations into artifacts; Dr. Huffman has over 2000 historical artifacts in her office, and brought five themed trunks to share with the students. 

To further explore how people draw meaning from the past, Dr. Youngman led an exercise on the second day based entirely around the categorization of something a bit more contemporary: candy. Students were given random piles of different types of sweets, and simply told to organize it however they wished. He shares that “Everyone did it differently: some by the taste, some by the brand, personal preference, physical structure, and color. Those are all distinctions that they made… they made decisions based on the differences that they identified and that were important to them. We used that as a lesson to say that [with] the way we think about history and heritage, there are many kinds of stories to tell, but the ones that we keep with us are the ones we find important.”

For homework between the first few days, students selected and described  an artifact from their own homes, with an aim towards personalizing the past and drawing connections between students' lived experiences. Dr. Youngman shared that “It was really about establishing that connection between each other, and seeing not just how artifacts relate to each other, but how people relate to each other based on their shared or different history and heritage.” Dr. Huffman adds that “When we got back together, they were really able to– by explaining and describing and doing a think-pair-share– find these connections.” 

With a solid foundation built about what history is and how people conceptualize the past, the curriculum culminated with a full day of field experiences, where students visited five local sites around Washington County: the Roanoke River Lighthouse, the Underground Railroad Monument, the Roanoke River Maritime Museum, the Washington County African American Museum and Cultural Arts Center, and Somerset Place. 

At each site, students took on rotating roles to focus their attention on a specific aspect of analyzing history. “The goal was team-based collaboration at each site,” describes Dr. Youngman. “The first two days were about understanding and organizing history, and the third day was about experiencing history.” The roles included a photographer, a transcriber, an interviewer, and a connections coordinator, responsible for linking the experience at the site to lessons from the first two days. 

Dr. Huffman reflected that students shone in all roles, and personalized their engagement and investigation, sharing that “They started interviewing each other, which we didn’t even prompt them to do. They were interviewing each other like they were going on the local news… many of the students found newspapers, yearbooks, and artifacts of their own families… It was so authentic, and really rich with how they were bringing it all together.” 

For Wysonza, also a resident of Washington County, that authenticity of experience is what students will take with them long after the school year concluded. She notes that “The planning, the opportunities, the learning experiences– they might not ever get again. It was hands on, it was different. They were able to explore. It was a wonderful experience for me– I’ve been to these places before, but it was a different approach, and it meant a lot to me. When I go back to these places, I can now see a different vision of what this is all about.” 

While everyone agreed that the students experienced transformational learning, the impact extended beyond the classroom. Dr. Youngman notes that the experience boosted connections between the school and the sites that played host during the field experience: “It was great to see how excited the sites were, about having students as visitors. Community partnership was extremely important… The mutual support and investment in each other really helped drive student engagement with the tasks at hand and deepened their engagement with local history and knowledge.”

The team hopes that this is the first project among many, and that in future years they can expand to reach more students and teachers. Community Schools such as Washington County make for a natural partnership, and the rich and diverse historical heritage of rural Eastern North Carolina serves as a perfect living learning laboratory. For students, programs like this deepen their connection to place, and as Wysonza reflects, for participating adults as well: “Me living in Washington County, I think we take it for granted; there is a history here that we don’t look at. Some of the kids have never been to areas and places that we went to, and they live right here.” 

Rural Schools Collaborative is deeply grateful to our partners at East Carolina University for sharing their work with our network, and offers special gratitude to Dr. Loni Crumb for always connecting us to projects like this.