Hondo Valley
Outreach to the Schools Project
Plan of Work

Introduction

As part of the creative mitigation effort on the U.S. 70 Reconstruction Project, an educational outreach program will be developed by the SRI Foundation that specifically targets the teachers and students in the communities in the vicinity of the project.  The program will incorporate knowledge gained from both the Hondo Valley Oral Histories Project and from the archaeological data recovery efforts.  Proposed educational products will relate directly to specific Content Standards, Benchmarks, and Performance Standards specified by the New Mexico State Board of Education for social studies and language arts.  Any activities requiring science and mathematics skills and strategies will be correlated to the standards for those subjects.

The education and outreach project includes two phases.  The first phase is to develop lesson plans with supplemental teaching materials relating to the Hondo Valley Oral Histories project and the archaeological data recovered from the U.S. 70 project.  The second is to introduce the project based lessons through Project Archaeology workshops.  A full description of Project Archaeology is provided below.

Teachers, community members, U.S. 70 project archaeologists, and New Mexico Department of Transportation (NMDOT) archaeologists will be included in the development of materials and the distribution of materials to schools.  The end products of this program will be a CD-ROM containing the lessons, sets of the resources for teachers based on the materials created for  Hondo Valley Oral Histories, educational activities that relate to archaeology, history, and the oral histories gathered during the U.S. 70 Reconstruction Project, and a Project Archaeology workshop which will serve as the initial distribution method for the lessons.

Lessons

Making a living in the Hondo Valley

A set of three interrelated lesson plans geared to grades five through eight will be created. The theme for the lessons, “Making a Living in the Hondo Valley” will introduce children to archaeological information relating to subsistence and change through time.  Students will investigate current jobs and how people make their living in the Hondo Valley today, will utilize oral histories and historical data to learn how people made a living a generation or two ago, and archaeological information to understand prehistoric substance patterns.

Teachers will set the stage for learning the new materials with a discussion of basic human needs and a definition of culture.  Project Archaeology’s Intrigue of the Past: A Teacher’s Activity Guide for Fourth through Seventh Grades, Lesson 2, “Culture Everywhere,” will be used to introduce the concepts of basic human needs and culture.  The introductory lesson of “Making a Living in the Hondo Valley” will lead students through an exploration of current careers, jobs, and subsistence patterns within the local community.  Students will begin by developing an interview sheet and process for learning about the types of jobs people do in their community today.  They will interview parents and local relatives, neighbors, and community members.  They will sort the data by type and categorize it by the age of the respondent, type of job, and how the job contributes to the family and to the community.  Students will analyze the findings and draw conclusions about current subsistence patterns.

The second lesson will focus on the information presented in the oral histories.  Students will follow a similar procedure for analyzing the information as they did for the data in the initial lesson.  They will begin with discussions on how the types of jobs have changed through time and how the contributions within the community have changed.

The third lesson of the educational unit will introduce what is known about the pre-contact subsistence patterns in the Hondo Valley.  Some information collected from the archaeological investigations will be presented in the teaching materials.  In addition, students will have to conduct original research on general concepts of pre-contact subsistence patterns.  Students will use the process developed in the initial activities as a base for their investigations.  The final activity will take students through a process of comparing and contrasting jobs, lifeways, subsistence, and change through time within their community.

The lesson plans, oral histories, resource lists, and teachers’ background information will be formatted and placed on a CD-ROM in pdf format.  Adobe “free” software will also be included on the disk, for those who do not already have the software on their computer.  Teachers will also receive supplemental teaching information, including other public oriented materials created by NMDOT in conjunction with the U.S. 70 project.

The lesson plans and materials will be distributed to all fifth through eighth grade teachers in the Capitan, Hondo Valley, and Ruidoso school districts and to others upon request.

Project Archaeology

Project Archaeology is an archaeological education program geared to grades four through seven.  It was originally developed in Utah through the efforts of a multi-agency team to stem vandalism to archaeological sites.  In 1995, the New Mexico Office of Cultural Affairs, Historic Preservation Division (HPD) began a program that introduced Project Archaeology into the state of New Mexico.  Since that time, various agencies and organizations have assisted HPD with the effort to continue outreach to educators and students.   Most recently, grants through HPD have provided funding for the development of lessons and activities that supplement the original teachers’ activity guides, Intrigue of the Past: A Teacher’s Activity Guide for Fourth through Seventh Grades and Discovering Archaeology in New Mexico and to correlate the lessons contained in the activity guides to the New Mexico Department of Education Content Standards, Benchmarks, and Performance Objectives.

The program reaches teachers, students, and indirectly, families and community members.  Project Archaeology introduces teachers to archaeological concepts and preservation ethics through teachers’ activity guides, training workshops, and post-workshop support for educators participating in the program.

The Project Archaeology workshop is 15 contact hours long, meeting the Department of Education standard for one continuing education credit.  Teachers attending the workshop receive hands-on experience with twelve of the twenty-eight lessons in Intrigue of the Past; listen to presentations by local archaeologists; view videos on archaeology, cultural history, and the ethics of preservation; and take a tour of subsistence through time using historical and archaeological resources.

As noted above, the three U.S. 70 project-based lessons will be introduced through a Project Archaeology workshop.  The following is an example of a possible workshop schedule:

Workshop Schedule

Each workshop participant will receive a copy of Intrigue of the Past: A Teacher’s Activity Guide for Grades Four through Seven, Discovering Archaeology in New Mexico, a CD-Rom containing the new lessons and materials relating to the U.S. 70 archaeological investigations and oral histories, and a resource packet relating to archaeology and cultural history of the Hondo Valley.

School Districts

The schools that will be targeted during this project will be: Capitan, Hondo Valley, and Ruidoso.  These districts have a total of approximately 220 teachers and 3,914 students.  Project Archaeology materials target grades four through seven, but the materials are easily adjusted down to third grade and up through high school.  Teachers from all of these districts and potentially, teachers from Roswell and Tularosa schools, will be invited to the Project Archaeology workshops.

Capitan Municipal Schools

Hondo Valley

Ruidoso

Roswell Independent Schools has fifteen elementary schools with Kindergarten through sixth grades; four middle schools with seventh and eighth grades; and two high schools including grades nine through twelve.  Tularosa Municipal Schools has one elementary, one middle, and one high school.

Project Schedule

Research and a review of the archaeological reports and oral histories will begin in January 2004.  The project must be completed by the end of the overall U.S. 70 cultural resource project contract in June 2005.  A list of tasks and a schedule for the educational outreach program is presented below:

Schedule of Tasks

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