The Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School (limited version)
Application form: http://thefieldschool.weebly.com/application.html

What: The Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures (BLC) Field School trains participants in documenting, indexing, analyzing, and disseminating community cultural resources and histories of ordinary people and common places. The project team works with local community partners in a collaborative setting.

Where: Walnut Hill Community Garden and Art Lives Here Lot, Walnut Hill Neighborhood, Milwaukee, WI

When: Weekdays, July 7, 2025—August 1, 2023; 9AM-4PM (required attendance) + Required preparatory workshop via Zoom: Monday June 30, 2025, from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM.

The 2025 project will be a shortened and limited version of our full-length field school.

Project Objectives
The Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School is a nationally recognized award-winning project that combines place-based immersive learning with civic engagement. The focus of the 2025 Field School is to write a ground-up history of the Walnut Hill Community Garden community, that reflects the lived realities of the residents of this marginalized and segregated area. Using methods such as material culture and architectural documentation, history harvests, short and long form oral histories, community led walks, asset mapping, and spatial ethnography, we will document the geography, layout, and stories of everyday life. We will explore how residents remember, preserve, and pass down stories of place, environment, and ecology to the next generation and examine how researchers and scholars may be able to collaborate with local communities to archive and preserve these forms of knowledge. The Field School welcomes the participation of members of the community, and it is open to anyone who is interested and can make a full-time commitment (Mon-Fri 9am-4pm) for four weeks. Participants are eligible to receive academic credit (3-6 cr.). See attached application form for details.   

During the 5-week period, we will examine the following:
Current thinking on concepts such as “black ecologies” and “radical care.”
- How to collect, index, analyze, and disseminate oral histories.
- How to observe, map, and document everyday places.
- How to conduct and analyze community led walks and history harvests. 
- How to search the archives to find underrepresented stories.
- How to curate community exhibits and community archives.

Contact
For more information email senA@uwm.edu

Website and other urls
Field School website: https://thefieldschool.weebly.com/
Field School Application: http://thefieldschool.weebly.com/application.html
Field School Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDKZoe3nM4k
Podcast: https://wisconsinhumanities.org/episode-1/