Chapter 4: The City as Classroom: Teaching in and With Historic Places

This chapter discusses the creation and implementation of an experiential course, “The City as Classroom: Teaching with Historic Places,” taught to American students in a semester abroad program in Florence, Italy. The course used the format of a classroom without walls. It is a prototype for using study abroad as a vehicle for student immersion in a culture and achieving a cross-cultural competence from that immersion.

In this course students explored the political, economic, religious, social, intellectual, and aesthetic (hereafter using the acronym PERSIA) aspects of a geographic location as a framework for building a deep understanding of its people and its culture. The PERSIA approach emphasizes the interaction and the multiple influences of each aspect thereby providing a dynamic interpretation of the world of humans over time (Ivey & Hickson, 1974; Stern, 2002). The instructors chose this framework for examining Florence and comparing it with other cities. This framework provides students with a model that is transferable to other locations they might visit or reside in. Major concerns highlighted by the framework include: What is unique about this city and what does it have in common with other cities? How and where can one find this information? What can be learned from viewing a city through the framework of the social studies? This course was designed to meet the needs of both history and teacher education students and to be broadly interpretive across academic disciplines.