Monday, December 26, 2005
One Room Schools
Newfoundland and Labrador is a province where a great deal of one room schools once existed. In fact that is a wonderful book that details the life of a teacher in a one room school on the island of Newfoundland called Learning by Heart: A Poignant Account of Teaching in Rural Newfoundland in the 1950s by Angela Collins. The book is fictional in nature, but is based upon Collins' own stories and the stories of other teachers' of one room schools from across the province.
A few years ago, a faculty member at Memorial University of Newfoundland undertook a project to capture some of the oral history that was dying out as those individuals who had taught in one room schools were slowly passing on. His work was capture in The One-Room School in Newfoundland and Labrador: An Oral History Project and is a great view.
I raise these issue of the one room school and its roots in Newfoundland and Labrador because of the feature that is on NPR Topics: Education focusing upon those remaining one room schools in the United States. The items included in this feature thus far, include:
As more are posted to this series, I will alert the viewership of this blog as more entries are added. In the meantime, if others know of more resources concerning one room schools, please post them as comments to their entry.
