Walking Into the Past:
A Guide to the Rosenbach's School Neighborhood
Mapping Projects

How it Began:
Most kids today live in a world where physical places seem to be connected by highways and wires and are interchangeable. They live in a culture that often values the present and the future, but not the past. With little sense of where we are in place and time, why should we want to preserve things from the past?

In response to this reality, Bill Adair, Director of Education at the Rosenbach Museum & Library, collaborated with artist John Giordano of Philadelphia's Fleisher Art Memorial to initiate the Neighborhood Mapping Project, beginning in spring of 2000. They asked the question: What would happen if you walked out the door of your urban school and looked around? What would happen if you looked at things and learned their stories--like building histories? Or what's beneath the manhole covers? Or the names of trees lining the block? It turned out that a walk outside was a walk into the past, that drawing and mapping your community was a way to look at who you are and the path that has led you to this school and this time.

This website tells the story of what happened when students and their teachers took this walk and where it led. It shows how for many students, their immediate geographic environment holds the first primary source material they will encounter and how learning to value these things can encourage kids to feel a sense of place -- and appreciate their city's cultural legacy. These goals are central to the mission of the Rosenbach Museum and Library.

Our story is divided into four major sections, each with several parts:

I. Getting Started tells how we introduced the program in third and fourth grade classrooms and how the overall program and curriculum were organized.

II. Getting Out There explains how students began by exploring and then mapping their immediate neighborhoods.

III. Getting Focused tells of the community walking tours students took and how they learned about patterns in their environment. It also shows how they focused in on details, drawing and photographing many aspects of what they observed.

IV. Getting It Together shows how, after learning so much about their neighborhoods and creating so much great visual work, the classes created their own printed neighborhood maps as a final product.