How This Project Can Be Useful

• Highlights a great way to connect with and honor people who have served in the military.
• Highlights a means for capturing a precious resource – the stories of aging veterans.
• Demonstrates a project that makes history come alive and personalizes it through in-person interviews.
• A means for building community pride – every community in the United States has World War II veterans – each could have a book like this.
• A means for connecting with elders in the community.
• Shows a superior product produced by students at an alternative school – students who had not succeeded in a traditional program.
• Demonstrates the inclusion of student as part of the product, which allows the reader to get a personalized sense of the individual student contributors.
• Highlights the power of Expeditionary Learning with high school students. The reflections include poignant comments from students about how this history class differed from past ones. For example one student says, “When I think of history class, I think of boring books and sleeping during classes. This class was all hands-on and nothing is given to you. My partner and I had to get all of the information ourselves. Nobody was there to tell us what to do step-by-step; we did everything ourselves” (page 62). In another reflection a student says, “We then had to write a selection for this book on the interview. This really meant a lot to me because my grandfather was in the war, and he hasn’t spoken a work about it to me” (page 67).
• Represents a mutually beneficial project – one that aids the students’ understanding while doing a service to veterans – letting them tell their stories and honoring them by publishing the stories in a book.