| Sumario: | This thesis explores cross-generational community history as a tool for the initial stage of problem identification in participatory research. I suggest that by using personal narratives and an historical perspective, community members and outside researchers can add richness and depth to their analysis of natural resource management issues. Cross-generational research invites both youth and elders to participate in the research process thereby including the voices and perspectives of both past and future resource managers. A colleague and I combined historical, cross generational and participatory research methods to investigate the history of one community's, natural resources. The project was driven by both applied and theoretical objectives which resulted in two, levels of research: the students' investigations into the community's history of natural resource use, and our research on the student’s experience and the value of cross-generational community history as a methodology. For the applied aspect, we trained adolescent students in Orinoco, Nicaragua, to interview elders about resource use and environmental change, and to use 35 mm cameras to document current resource use. The oral histories included elder' s recollections of traditional natural resource use and harvesting practices, their perceptions of changes in the abundance and diversity of natural resources over time, and their explanations for why these changes occurred. The student~ interviewed community "experts" about historical changes in: hunting, fishing, loggm_g, ta~·mmg: and herbal ~ed1c11:1e. The students and an advisory committee chose to use the transcended mterviews as a text m their schools. A non-governmental organization has published the interviews illustrated by the students' photographs for this purpose. As a theoretical contribution, this thesis evaluates cross-generational community history in Orinoco, and supplies insights for natural resource managers which can be adapted to other cultural and environmental contexts. As part of the training process, the students learned to identify and define the natural resources in their community. The interviews introduced individual students to unfamiliar changes in local natural resources, heightened the group's awareness of changes in general and placed those changes in the framework of political, economic and ecological factors. The student's concern that continued scarcity of fish, game and timber would further impoverish the village increased after completion of the project. This case study indicates that natural resource managers can use cross-generational community history to identify gaps in participants' knowledge of the ecology or the political economy of natural resource use. Knowledge of these gaps can be used by natural resource managers to design appropriate educational and organizing activities in conjunction with local teachers and community leaders. While the results indicate that cross-generational community history can raise adolescent researchers' consciousness of the significance of natural resources, the collection of detailed and specific data appears to require either an extended training and research period, or more mature researchers
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