In May, Roadside Theater concluded a four-year curriculum development project with Harman Elementary School in rural Buchanan County, Virginia.

The project began as a 10-day artistic residency with one group of students. It was so successful that the teachers, principal, and school board decided to extend the work a second year and include all 250 students and 20 teachers in a community project to reinforce cultural identity throughout their curriculum. The partners agreed that the Harman project would rely on community participation.\

Before school consolidation in the '60s and '70s, Buchanan County's creeks and hollows were dotted with one- and two-room schools. These schools were not only classrooms, but community centers where holiday gatherings were held and the entire community turned out at the end of each summer to clean, paint, chop wood, and load in coal for the coming school year. In the newer, consolidated, larger schools, the community members didn't feel welcome and couldn't see a way to take responsibility for these schools or what went on inside them.

Through the cultural curriculum project, community people were again welcomed into Harman Elementary, not as observers, but as participants in the children's education. Students also visited them in their homes, eager for the stories they could tell. Community folks participated in public story and music swaps the students held in the school's multi-purpose room and were an enthusiastic audience for the students' performances of the stories they had learned from them about Garden Creek, Bull Mountain, Convict Holler, the Breaks, and Potters Knoll.

Over the course of the four-year project, the work expanded to include the creation of a written, cross-disciplinary, cultural curriculum; an Appalachian story and music archive in the school library; and an Appalachian Culture Fair.

At the fair, students performed plays, played music, displayed their booklets of family histories and collections of Appalachian toys, clothing, and herbs and roots, and cooked Appalachian food for the attendees. The event, originally planned as a one day activity, turned into a three day celebration by popular demand.

This year, the school, by request, made a presentation of their curriculum at the Principal's Conference in Roanoke, and two studies of the project, conducted by Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia, were presented at the 1996 meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York.

Most important, teachers and the principal at Harman Elementary report a dramatic increase in reading and math skills, in student enthusiasm for school attendance, and in community support for the school.

In a region where two out of every five students who reach the ninth grade drop out before finishing high school, five out of nine adults have no diploma, and the adult literacy rate is close to 50 percent, the accomplishment of this multi-year residency was judged to be significant.