Learning Places
You Can Help Save Cultural Resources by Learning Places
Enroll now in a service-learning online course for those willing to volunteer to save an historic property of their choosing while learning continuing education credits. Your service-learning efforts will assist others trying to save, cultural resources. Many grass roots efforts have taken up this challenge using new learning technologies to aid communities. Now you can attain a year's worth of continuing education learning units within a six-week long distance learning course that engages you to apply acquired historic preservation knowledge. You can be the one that helps save a significant property, of your own choosing, in a local community that wants and needs your professional services.
Grants have been applied for in the hopes of making this course available for minimal cost or free. The instructor, Barry Sulam (see below,) will use the course 's first year achievements to fulfill the grants and complete, as a MSU American Studies doctoral candidate, research into the question:
"What impact, if any, can a grassroots effort using online service learning courses for continuing education, make in Saving NR Listed, Cultural Resources?”
““An overlooked aspect of historic preservation is the movement for the preservation or conservation of rural areas”, where there is “ ... more focus on vernacular architecture, on environmental considerations ... retention of the agricultural economy.” ”
By Learning Places, you will be entrusted with ancestral knowledge, preserved for generations, so that you could carry on for future leaders saving a cultural legacy. Whether you need continuing education or want to go home again and help save any number of needy historic properties, you can through this first year's cohorts for this course and in later offerings there will be new modules that will use your work as case studies for others. Become a founding member of this grass roots learning community by contacting the instructor and help direct the course's first launch by going on Survey Monkey.
Join the cohort of participants in this online course and give back a little time while you're learning something new and valuable for yourself and others you choose to assist. Learn and apply, in a stepwise manner each week, the core competencies of historic preservation in a systematic method developed for this course. Apply your abilities and skills as you help Identify, Document, Evaluate, Assess your chosen historic property. Learn about these special places from local resources then lead in proposing a Stewardship plan that will make a difference in this online grass roots effort!
Donations are tax deductible.Contact us to let us know if you would like to volunteer directly with this project.
Project Leader
Dr. Barry Sulam is a licensed architect registered with the State of Montana, a former faculty member at Montana State University’s School of Architecture and a graduate of the Doctoral Program for the American Studies Department at the College of Letters and Science. Barry had a career as a regional historical architect with the National Park Service (NPS) when he initiated the Cooperative Program for Architectural Conservation at MSU’s Cheever Hall in 1997. His familiarity with the cultural resources of the West expanded with the NPS Intermountain region’s parks and partners in the northern Rockies.
Past projects in historic preservation in Montana and Cascadia include:
Glacier National Park:
National Trust Favrot Grant funded Historic Structure Report for Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier N.P.
Produced the 6 part documentary “Shipwrecks: Submerged Cultural Resources in the National Parks for Montana Public TV, including Fire and Ice episode for Lake McDonald.
Community Planning assistance through Montana State outreach for Cascade, MT.; Deer Lodge and Grant Kohrs Ranch NHS.
Sand Point Idaho:
Produced a study of Design Guidelines for a planned unit development preserving open space in Sand Point, Idaho