The Massachusetts Studies Project (MSP) is an outreach project for educators and students in the Graduate College of Education's Institute for Learning and Teaching. MSP's mission is to ground educators and students in their own communities through local history, local culture and local environmental studies.

To fulfill its mission, MSP presents Massachusetts-related information and curricular materials through online databases that encourage community research and involvement in relevant experiences; professional development training for teachers to integrate technology and relate local resources to curriculum frameworks; development of instructional materials and resources where not otherwise available and community learning events focused on cultural heritage and local history.

The MSP collaborates with community organizations to accomplish its mission, including current collaborations with the Boston Public Library, the Boston Memoir Project, Historic New England, Dorchester Historical Society, Lexington Historical Society, Marshfield Historical Society, Massachusetts Archives, Massachusetts Bays Education Alliance, Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies, Massachusetts Geographic Alliance, the New England Archivists, Norwood Historical Society, Quincy Historical Society, SCI Dorchester, and the Thomas Crane Public Library. Within the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB) MSP collaborates with faculty and staff in the Department of History, the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, the American Studies Department, the Center for Urban and Cultural History, Healey Library Archives and Curriculum Resource Center, Urban Harbors Institute, and the William Monroe Trotter Institute.

MSP's community initiative, the Mass. Memories Road Show (MMRS), invites Massachusetts residents to share family photographs that document the history of their communities. The MMRS organizes public scanning events in each of the 351 communities in Massachusetts, partnering with schools, historical societies, public libraries, and other civic groups. All images are incorporated into a searchable database on the MSP website, www.MassMemories.net. The Road Shows create a powerful visual portrait of the towns and neighborhoods of the Commonwealth and provide images of real people and real stories for educators to use as the basis for lesson plans and projects.

The Mass. Memories Road Show has been selected for co-sponsorship, and at least three years of support, by the Board of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. Road Shows have been held to date in Norwood, Dorchester, Quincy and Roslindale, with future events in FY 08 planned for Deerfield, Whitman, Sharon, Natick, Lexington and Roxbury. The most recent Road Show, in Quincy, MA on June 2, 2007, received extensive coverage in the Boston Globe and the Patriot Ledger, and will be followed by a series of educational programs and events in the Quincy Public Schools in the fall of 2007.

MSP's website (www.msp.umb.edu) is an ongoing Project initiative, with regular additions of new features and content, and receives more than 96,000 hits per year. The website offers a wide array of field-tested lesson plans, primary resources, curricular units, and databases searchable by grade level, subject, community, county, and theme. Some examples of online curricular units include: Desegregation in Boston and Nantucket in the 1850s; Industrial History in Fall River, Gardner, and Lowell; Wayland in the Civil War; Place in Massachusetts History; Boston Harbor and the Islands.

Each year, MSP offers graduate-level Professional Development Workshops for teachers. MSP's current course series includes "Massachusetts Communities in American History", which guides teachers in exploring the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, and the Immigration Era through the material culture found in buildings, documents, and artifacts of their own local community, and "Boston Public Library: Art, Architecture and the Public Square", funded by the Mass. Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Each of these courses has been granted permanent status as professional development offerings through the Graduate College of Education.

In March, 2008, the Project was awarded funding National Endowment for the Humanities funding as part of the Digital Humanities Initiative to explore social networking in the humanities.