About the Imagined Mural Proposal Project:
The Imagined Mural Proposal is part of the ongoing Glassboro Memory Mapping Project (See GMM project), a collaborative digital scholarship project exploring history, memory, and place in Glassboro, New Jersey. The ultimate purpose of this placemaking project is to increase student and community emotional attachment to, intellectual curiosity about, and appreciation for the diverse and dynamic heritage of Glassboro, NJ.  This participatory historical and cultural geography project is a partnership between Rowan University Honors Cultural Geography, the Rowan University Libraries Digital Scholarship Center, the Glassboro Historical Society, and the Heritage Glass Museum. 

During the Fall 2019 semester, students in Honors Cultural Geography: Why Place Matters set out to design, research, and visualize a mural depicting a significant story in Glassboro’s past and why it continues to matter in the present. The development of this project provided these students with relevant, real-world experience (experiential learning) including fieldwork, research methods and writing, interview skills, critical and spatial thinking, creative and design thinking, GIS, metadata, handling archival material, and digital media development.  The students also gained unique personal experiences interacting and collaborating within a multigenerational community of Glassboro experts, while also working to preserve (and potentially conserve) endangered historical material and information directly related to the founding and economic development of the United States. 

This website includes a visualization of the student’s work, a proposed mural, and a short audio tour describing the significance of the visual elements depicted in their mural, including the importance of the site where the mural is located. 

We invite you to listen and imagine!