ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors begin with the premise that in order to learn about how place, past, community, and preservation intersect, students would need to combine theory and practice. So, led by the team of faculty members from a variety of social science disciplines, students engaged in a multi-disciplinary study of social scientific theory about place, past, and community through readings, lectures, discussions, and written assignments. What the authors learned from teaching their students how to grapple with this process is that simultaneously asking new questions while figuring out how to answer them requires learning how to think differently, both about what you are doing and about why you are doing it. In particular, social scientists and heritage practitioners could work together to implement more social science in preservation practice. The site observations, for which they provided very detailed guidelines, asked students to observe the ways in which their chosen place represented its past in relationship to its community.
