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157 According to David Vanderstel’s 2003 essay for the Public History Review, public historians are “those [trained in but] engaged in work outside the halls of the academy and those within the academy who prepare students for careers in government agencies, museums, libraries, historic preservation , and in private business enterprises.” Though a conservative definition , this explanation of the field shows that scholars must actively engage with museums, archives, and community groups. Thus, public history programs regularly ask students to go out into the community. In colleges with brick and mortar campuses, that pursuit is relatively easy to manage. When the study of public history involves adult students working a distance through an online or hybrid platform, however, the need to look outward becomes more important, even as it simultaneously becomes more complicated. Whereas students attending traditional institutions can go out into the same communities as their instructors—even with their instructors—adult students working at a distance must look to their own communities, oftentimes hundreds of miles away from the instructor’s location. Yet, work within the community remains essential: how can the tenets of public history be fully explored if students only look to an online classroom, with its members only known as virtual entities? How can students come to practice public history fully and effectively if they have only encountered online instructors and digital resources? suny (State University of New York) Empire State College’s Advanced Certificate in Public History, a program that is unique among graduatelevel public history programs because it is entirely online, seeks to answer this dilemma by sending its graduate students in public history out into their own communities, regardless of their geographic location and proximity to the course instructors. In so doing, the program asks its students to learn more about the role of history in local and regional settings, to probe the boundaries of public history as a discipline and as a practice. Anastasia L. Pratt 11Public History, Adult Students, and the Community: Moving Beyond the Distance-Education Classroom 158 P R E S E R V A T I O N E D U C A T I O N That focus requires that a set of predetermined criteria be in place. First, students must work within the boundaries of accepted theory and methodology , explored and explained within the structure of the courses. Second , course instructors must establish the appropriate support for the experiences that occur outside of the online classroom. Last, instructors must work to understand the host institutions, their staffs, and the learning opportunities they can provide for students. When those criteria are in place, students benefit greatly from the opportunity to work with museums , archives, historical societies, and other public historians within their own communities. This movement toward using the community as a learning space is supported by recent trends in distance and open learning. In fact, it recalls Ross A. Perkins’s explanation that “the primary goals of open universities, unlike their brick and mortar counterparts, have been and continue to be focused on providing educational opportunities to all, no matter their background, and doing so in a way that overcomes limitations of time and space.” On a practical level, the integration of online classrooms and community involvement requires the creation of supports throughout the program. Empire State College, characterized by its mission and its public history program, offers a chance to explore those real-life meanings as one public history program within the larger contexts of other public history and preservation programs and a program within the different contexts of distance learning and open education. This chapter explores the intersections of college and community, showing the manner in which the community as classroom fits within current public history and preservation pedagogy. SUNY Empire State College—A Brief History Established in 1971 to serve nontraditional students, Empire State College has long been committed to the idea that learning happens throughout one’s life, in and out of the classroom. As a faculty member at Empire State College, I have a special love for that commitment to lifelong learning , in all its forms. The School for Graduate Studies, which is the home of the Advanced Certificate in Public History, is selective, with a significantly lower acceptance rate than that of the undergraduate program, which accepts more than 98 percent of applicants to the college. The advanced certificates, however, require only a completed application (with a fee) and...

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