Cross Case Features: Context

Lincoln High School: Community Context

The Lincoln school district has cultivated long-term collaborative relationships with other community entities such as the local museum and neighboring school districts. The strong, mutually cooperative relationships among key people at these institutions can be seen in the Asian Studies course offered at the high school in cooperation with the neighboring districts and the museum of art for the past fifteen years. The class meets one evening per month at the museum and three evenings per month at the high school.

Most recently, these districts and the museum have begun the Asian Experience program. This five-year grant-funded program provides selected K-12 teachers intensive professional development in Asian art and cultures at a summer institute. Museum staff covered China in the first year and will cover Japan in the next year. A comparative study of China and Japan is scheduled for the third year with a return to China and Japan in the final years. Most of the first group of teachers, handpicked by a Lincoln high school teacher, had many years of teaching experience, but almost no previous professional development in Asian studies. Participating teachers receive a stipend and commit to developing a set number of lesson plans. The lessons are available on the museum’s web site.

Besides the lessons and accompanying examples of art on its web site, the program also offers a class at the museum where students from different districts join each other via distance learning technology. In addition, funds from the grant provide scholarships for thirty students, ten per year, to travel to China and Japan and experience home stays in Japan. One requirement for students to obtain the scholarship is completion of an audio tour of part of the museum’s Asian collection.