By focusing on their own communities, schools in the Project are helping set a new institutional trajectory for formal education. At the local level, students can produce knowledge as well as consume it, and they can see that their efforts are important. That is, they can accomplish real work. In other words, learning begins with a question. Every teacher has had the unpleasant experience of having his or her finely wrought utterings filtered out as so much noise.
Much traditional curricula consists mostly of such well-intentioned noise.
But when Megan Maki from Chester is caught up in the work of trying to find the lost story of the girl buried outside the cemetery in the Sweet Grass Hills, or when Scott Warnick from Simms is researching the lives of the people who met briefly and tragically at the nearby Marias River massacre, or when Delila Croucher of Libby is struggling to ensure that future residents of Libby don't lose the Leckrone Cabin that has been a part of their cultural heritage, they find good reasons to research, analyze and create texts. They learn academic skills that will serve them well as individuals at the same time they devote their efforts to gifts to their communities. No longer are school assignments handed in, graded, then handed back to disappear forever. Now students are building archives of community memories, collecting photographs and documents, contributing original research, recording interviews with community elders. Their academic work becomes important as they try to understand the world as it has existed in particular places.