A Conceptual Map of Rhode Island History

As many of you know, Heritage Harbor Museum has been focused on securing the institutional and physical framework for a statewide history museum for all Rhode Islanders. Lately, we have not been actively engaged in performing research, building collections, or coordinating community participation in exhibit planning; these are core elements of our plan, but first we must ensure that there will be a museum to showcase the work yet to be done.

Nevertheless, we have completed an inventory of the research by Heritage Harbor staff and contributions of many members of the community that we have in our research files, as well as themes and topics that have been proposed to us over the years. From that inventory we organized the themes and topics into a concept map. We believe that this document, which we call our Theme Structure, is a fairly comprehensive framework to organize our exhibits and to guide a fuller understanding of the history of Rhode Island History from many perspectives.

"So, nice job," you might say, "but what is it good for?" The Theme Structure is a tool for our collaborating partners to imagine where one's stories fit in to the big picture of RI history, not just as part of the history of one's own community. That way the stories of diverse communities in the state can be understood in relation to each other through the exploration of common threads. Teachers can use the Theme Structure as a framework for an exploration of the state's rich history. Students can use it as a map highlighting opportunities for investigating a broad range of topics, people, and places. Most of all, Heritage Harbor Museum will use it as a framework upon which we will build our exhibits.

Why would we share it if it is going to give away the stories we are planning on telling? Because the history is out there already. It is in your neighborhood. It is in the stories your neighbors and parents and teachers tell. It is built into the houses on your street, and the bridges that cross the bay. We all have pieces of history around us, and inside of us, and ahead of us. The most valuable thing we can do is make the connections, provide the context, and facilitate the dialogue.

To download a copy of Heritage Harbor Museum's Theme Structure, click here.

A common vocabulary for working collaboration

Heritage Harbor Museum is a work in progress involving some likely and some unlikely partnerships. Collaboration has been the modus operandi of the project since it took its first steps towards the creation of a museum for Rhode Island's diverse communities. While we have always been enthusiastic believers in the benefits of collaboration, we have had to come to terms many times with its challenges. Among those challenges can sometimes be the very words we use.

In the 18th century there were scholars who believed that the chaos of language should be tamed, and that a rational standard for communication could be created that would make it possible for everyone to understand everyone else without confusion, misinterpretation, or ambiguity. The push to domesticate English from its many variant local dialects and vagaries of spelling brought us Samuel Johnson's dictionary in the mid-1700s. Noah Webster understood the need for a common language for a young nation and published the first American Dictionary in 1828.

I, personally, love clever subtleties and fashions of language and the delight and confusion that they can create. Words have histories and lives of their owns, children and grandchildren, foreign cousins, and neighbors who forget to mend their fences. When the Order of the Phoenix member, Tonks, greeted Harry Potter with a cheery "Wotcher, Harry!" I heard echoes of the greeting that met Roger Williams on his arrival to the land that would become Providence, "What cheer, Netop!"

Nevertheless, when trying to be on the same page with collaborators, be they members of the community who have limited experience with museums, or architects and engineers with their own professional vocabularies, it has more than once been a point of confusion when we museum and education folks talk about programs, accessibility, and teachable moments, or mention audiences that are underserved.

For this reason, a group of representatives of the National Association for Interpretation, National Environmental Education & Training Foundation, the Audubon Society, the US Forest Service, the Association for Living History, Farms and Agricultural Museums (ALHFAM), the National Park Service, the Society for American Archaeology, the American Association of Museums (AAM), the Museum Educators Roundtable (MER), the American Association for State and Living History (AASLH), the US Geological Survey, the Visitor Studies Association, and other federal agencies and non-governmental organizations, met during 2006 to take part in the Definitions Project. The result of this collaboration has been released as a standardized vocabulary to be used by interpreters, environmental educators, historians, and others in informal settings such as parks, aquariums, zoos, nature centers, historic sites, and museums.

So, while we all can continue to be innovative, and sometimes even adopt terms that we still have to explain (at Heritage Harbor we like to talk about "multivocal interpretations" and a focus on "living memory" that might not be instantly understood by a listener), we know that basing our ongoing collaborations in a shared vocabulary will streamline understanding and help us all achieve results we can be proud of.

Visit the Definitions Project website, www.definitionsproject.com, to download the pdf version of the current word list or browse through the definitions online, and spread the word!

Search Smithsonian by State Standards

The Smithsonian Institution has created a new tool for its website that allows teachers to search for resources for alignment to each state's performance and content standards. Just select your state, the grade level, and the subject area and it will give you links to SI produced materials online, such as online exhibits, teachers' guides, and lesson plans. Visit their website at http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/.

They are hoping that educators will test drive the feature for the next couple of months and then visit the site again in May to comment on and rate the resources.

While you are there, if you have not done so already, check out the great online resources on that site as well as the programs and services they offer - online workshops, grant opportunities, outreach initiatives, and more.

Heritage Harbor Museum, as a member of the Smithsonian Institution Affiliations Program, plans to bring resources and learning opportunities from the Smithsonian to Rhode Island. If there are any programs or services that you see on the website that you would be interested in bringing to Heritage Harbor Museum, please let us know.

History is around us

At the risk of oversimplifying things, I am going to contrast museums that are about the objects that they showcase, and those that are about the people and events that give them artifacts meaning. The first may be characterized by rare or priceless objects in glass cases, paintings with motion sensors that sound the alarm when someone gets too close, and visitors who silently and reverently ponder each object for a few moments then move to the next object and repeat the silent and reverent pondering. The excitement of that kind of museum is that the objects in them are rare, exotic, valuable, and unimaginable without experiencing them first hand. It orders the world by separating the extraordinary from the ordinary. The other kind of museum takes the ordinary, the world around us, our neighborhoods, our traditions, our neighbors and ourselves, and shows how we are all connected to history and to each other in powerful and meaningful ways. It orders the world by connecting the ordinary and the extraordinary.

I recently had the chance to see two museums that follow this second vision.

While I was attending the New England Museum Association conference in Cromwell, CT earlier this month, I drove up to Hartford to see the new exhibit at the Old State House called “History is all around us.” Even though it highlights some great objects from the collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, which mounted the exhibit, its message is that history is a part of our everyday lives in ways that we often overlook. Empty your pockets and you can find a history lesson on your money – people, symbols, dates, and words that are part of our national story. Things stuffed in your closets and drawers and attics are history, reflecting trends, fashion, and events that shape our lives. The names, locations, and forms of buildings, streets, and parks bear witness to people, dreams, and forces that shaped the built environment in which we live and move. The stories we tell, food we eat, work we do, and even the ways we learn are part of the patterns of tradition and change, commonality and diversity that make us human.

It is a great exhibit to explore how many ways history is part of everything and everyone, and how everyone is connected to each other through history. It just opened a couple months ago and has a bright newness to it that is like a new toy right out of the box. More than anything, though, it has a fresh connection to real people that makes it one of the most effective bridges between the inanimate collections of a venerable institution and the living people for whom history is as alive as their memories.

While I was in San Francisco for a friend’s wedding (we had worked together at Old Sturbridge Village years ago), I visited the Museum of the African Diaspora. While not a large museum, and there were no objects in their permanent exhibits, it is extremely effective at illustrating its central message: we have all been shaped by the people and cultures of Africa. Using photographs, text, video, recorded sound and voice, and changing exhibits, the museum explores the traces of African cultures that have spread to every continent and are manifest in music, dance, food, visual culture, and relationships. Using science and historic research, it sheds light on the unrepresented nature of Africa’s diasporas, from the spread of all humans from Africa into all parts of the world, to the forced diaspora of the slave trade, and the migrations of people from a continent changed by human trafficking and colonization. What I found most remarkable about the museum is that the exhibits are not just about people who are from or who can trace their ancestry to Africa. Instead of using objects to convey the message, the museum uses all sorts of people and their own words and faces to express how we share a history, and how we each have a place in that history. Through our favorite recipes, popular music, modern dance, personal adornment, storytelling, and visual art, we all bear the traces of the African Diaspora. Somehow, instead of simply showcasing the things that are most distinctly African, such as the tribal masks and statues that most often represent Africa in ethnographic and art museums, the MOAD has found and made meaning from the traces of Africa woven into the fabric of life, history and culture all around us.

In case you haven’t guessed, Heritage Harbor Museum will be the second kind of museum. We will likely be somewhere between the “History is all around us” exhibit with lots of illustrative artifacts from one rich and well-established collection and the Museum of the African Diaspora, whose permanent exhibits are entirely based on image, text, audio, and video. Like these two, however, we are going to be the kind of museum that explores the ways that all of us here in Rhode Island, ordinary though we may seem on the surface, are connected to each other, to history, to the nation, and to the world in dynamic and extraordinary ways. While we do hope to have exhibits that do highlight the extraordinary things we don't see in our everyday lives, the greatest treasure we have to give is to highlight the ways that our ordinary lives can really be, and really have been, extraordinary and special.

Universal Design in the Museum

Any phrase that evokes the universe, all-encompassing and complete, has got to include some pretty expansive goals. The word universal comes from the Latin universalis, meaning "of or belonging to all." Universal Design, therefore would be design of or belonging to all. As a goal or guideline it could be expressed as an imperative: Design for everybody.

When you start out new, you've got a great opportunity to build something that you hope you won't have to fix too much. Existing museums and other educational facilities have had to make accommodations, fixes, and modifications to make their buildings meet the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Unfortunately, I know people who still have had to enter in back doors and service entrances because these were the only routes into an existing building that were "accessible." There have been times when I've seen one kid separated from a school group so that she or he can take the elevator to the exhibit area of a museum while 23 of the class took a grand staircase. The route through the museum was not designed for every body.

Don Deignan, one of HHM's board members, has made sure that each of our potential contractors understands, and that Heritage Harbor Museum remains committed to, Universal Design in all of it's physical spaces. Basically, if we design for everybody, there will be no need to accommodate for barriers. Everyone enters the same way, everyone has the same access. If you do it well, visitors don't even notice that barriers might have existed in the first place. We have been working with the architects on our project to ensure that the museum's architectural experience works for everyone.

When it comes to planning for the exhibits and programs, we have to think the same way: Design for everyone. There are some great resources out there about Universal Design for Learning, or UDL, that extend that same thinking: eliminating the barriers to learning that often exist in one-size-fits-all education. One of these resources is the Center for Applied Special Technology where they describe Universal Design for Learning in this way: Universal Design for Learning calls for ...

• Multiple means of representation, to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge
• Multiple means of expression, to provide learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know
• Multiple means of engagement, to tap into learners' interests, offer appropriate challenges, and increase motivation

Classroom teachers look for ways of opening up the range of educational experiences for their students, and alternatives to written tests for evaluation. Museums themselves have long been seen as one of the alternatives, but even so, passive exhibits designed as a one-size-fits-all experience have also set up barriers to some learners. In contrast, some exhibits incorporate a broad range of means of conveying information, providing experiences that facilitate learning, and even respond and change according to visitors and their feedback.

These are the kinds of questions that we need to ask before we design the exhibits and the programs:

• What are the barriers to learning or to physical access that you or your students have encountered in museums?
• How could be different so that they might be meaningful to students who don't normally "get" museums?
• What kinds of learners usually get the most out of museums? Who typically gets the least? Why?

At the Pequot Museum, where I used to work, there are layers upon layers of information and experience in the exhibits. Design Division, Inc. designed the exhibits there to have sounds, sights, smells, and lots of things to touch. There are opportunities to use each of the multiple intelligences, elements that enable learners to interpret the exhibits in as many ways as possible. Everyone can engage the exhibits in the ways that they are are able.

That is what we hope to do with Heritage Harbor's exhibits: design exhibits so that everyone has a way to connect with and interpret them. For teachers, we hope that this gives you a broader palette to design experiences for your students. For all learners, we hope this gives ample choice and accessible opportunities to challenge oneself and explore history and memory in new ways.

Rhode Island History Source Materials for Teachers

Al Klyberg, now a member of the Heritage Harbor Museum board, sent this resource summary for posting on this blog. You may find it a helpful overview of the Rhode Island history resources available in print.

Bibliographical Source Materials for Rhode Island School Curriculum:
State History

Rhode Island celebrated it entrance into the 20th Century by shedding the symbols of its government that linked the state back to colonial times: the old State House of Providence and the Colony House in Newport. A new state house arose on Jefferson Plain overlooking the City and crowning the new railroad yards that had taken over the salt water cove in the heart of the city. In retrospect, it may seem odd that a Newport mansion-style seat of government would be erected in such close proximity to the state’s central rail yard, but transportation was always a key element in the state’s economy. At the time of the building of the new state house, three hundred trains a day passed through the nearby rail facilities. It was the heart-beat of the Rhode Island economy, then the most highly industrialized state in the union.

The major cultural document attending the appearance of the state house was the historical work by Edward Field, The History of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the End of the Century, in three volumes. Field was the editor of this chronological and topical summary of the state’s history. The contributors were all notable experts in their related fields. The next major work that came along, more directed, perhaps, to pedagogical needs, was Charles Carroll’s Rhode Island: Three Centuries of Democracy, published in 1932. Carroll was a professor at Rhode Island College, specializing in law and government and Rhode Island education. His interests and curiosity led him to combine Civics and State History in this work that was timely as a source for many programs of the state’s Tercentenary Celebration in 1936. Although not aimed at a student audience it was a promising gateway resource for teachers of Rhode Island government, politics, and society.

The first real full work aimed at a student audience was Paul F. Gleeson’s Rhode Island, the Development of a Democracy, published by the State Board of Education in 1957. It was intended for the secondary education level. Gleeson’s work was preceded in 1955 by a little work entitled Rhode Island a Brief History, authored by Earl Tanner. This was also aimed at a high school or college-level audience. The Governorship of Dennis Roberts had other works slated for civics and state history purposes: a junior high text and a senior high text on the Rhode Island constitution.

During the celebration of America’s Bicentennial in 1976, the Commissioner of Education’s office sponsored The Rhode Island Box, a social studies activity trunk. It was not a text, although it was accompanied by a printed guide and held a container of biographical sketches in file folders. The trunk contained a three dimensional map of the state, a board game, and a total of some three hundred activities, skills, and factual materials. They were organized around seven themes: “Time and Place,” “The Land and Us,” “Individual Rights and Responsibilities,” “Arts,” “All the People,” “Now and Then,” and “Famous Rhode Islanders.” Each school district was provided a box; those that have survived are usually found in a media center. They were highly regarded. Unfortunately funds to train teachers in their use were lacking.

Another legacy of the Bicentennial was William G. McLoughlin’s Rhode Island: A History. Published in a series of state histories by W.W. Norton, McLcLoughlin’s work is probably the easiest and most rewarding one-volume, little history of Rhode Island. It benefited from a string of more scholarly works that preceded in the late ‘50’s, early ‘60’s, like David Lovejoy’s Rhode Island and the American Revolution, Irwin Polishook’s Rhode Island and the Union, Peter Coleman’s The Transformation of Rhode Island, and Sidney James Colonial Rhode Island.

A number of other publications have proven durable over the years. RhodeIsland: A Student’s Guide to Localized History, by Clifford Monahon, was part of a series of pamphlets for the states brought out by the Teachers College Press of Columbia University in 1965. In 1980, Natalie Robinson, Margaret Newcomer, and Hadassah Davis published, The Student as Historian, Learning Local History Through a Variety of Experiences. Also, Hadassah Davis and Natalie Robinson published History You Can See: Scenes of Change in Rhode Island, 1790 – 1910 in 1985. Laura B. Roberts Museums and Classrooms: A Teacher’s Guide to Using Rhode Island’s Museums, issued in 1986, offers many good suggestions for making the most of a museum field trip. Marion Wright and Robert Sullivan’s Rhode Island Atlas, published in 1982 with a grant from the Rhode Island Permanent School Fund, is a boon to classroom teachers.

In 1992, as part of a 150th year anniversary of the Dorr Rebellion, the Rhode Island Historical Society published Might and Right, a compilation of the best scholarship on that landmark Rhode Island constitutional event; a couple of years later, the Society brought out What a Difference a Bay Makes, fifty scholarly essays on the Bay from multiple perspectives, and, with URI’s Narragansett Bay, A Friend’s Perspective pretty much gives teachers all they would ever want about the Bay’s history and its huge role in Rhode Island history. Over the years, the Rhode Island Labor History Society has published important works on working people. Scott Molloy’s Trolley Wars is particularly good on labor’s struggles in the transportation sector. His forthcoming work on Joseph Banigan, Irish rubber boot manufacturer, is very good.

Although intended for general audiences, several works of Rhode Island history are popular with teachers: Patrick T. Conley's An Album of Rhode Island History, 1636-1986 and George H. Kellner and J. Stanley Lemons' Rhode Island, the Ocean State. John Williams Haley's “The Old Stone Bank” History of Rhode Island, in four volumes, published from 1929 to 1994, continues to have merit, as does the ethnic pamphlet series brought out by the state heritage commission. Quarterly journal articles in Rhode Island History and Newport History are also rewarding.

For research purposes, Rhode Island: A Bibliography of its History, compiled by Roger Parks and published by the University Press of New England, is the most comprehensive bibliography. Appearing first in 1983, it has received periodic updates, and is still the place to begin to find books, pamphlets, and doctoral theses about Rhode Island history.

I might add that the Providence Journal has published several excellent historical series with teacher resource guides in recent years. This year's series on Nathanael Greene, based on the Greene papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society, and the Rhode Island Slave Trade with an accompanying curriculum guide drawing on recent investigations by a number of Rhode Island organizations.

Are there resources you use that you would like to share on the blog? Feel free to include them in comments or send them to sparker@heritageharbor.org to post.

The Smithsonian Affiliation: What's in it for us?

Heritage Harbor Museum is a member of the Smithsonian Affiliations program. Wow! Isn’t that great! A Smithsonian Affiliate! Right here in Rhode Island!

Ummmmm, but… what does that really mean? Yeah, the Heritage Harbor Museum website and the Smithsonian Affiliations website have the standard description of what it offers; borrowed objects and exhibits, professional development, expertise, maybe a subscription of Smithsonian Magazine for museum members. Okay, that’s great. But what will it mean for us?

One of the best things about the Smithsonian Affiliations program (not counting the Smithsonian Institution itself) are the other affiliates. While Heritage Harbor Museum is still planning and pulling together its program, there are over a hundred and forty other affiliates who are already taking advantage of Smithsonian resources in interesting ways. They are our best examples of what the affiliation could mean for us, and many of them are beginning to offer programs and exhibits back to the Smithsonian and other affiliates. The Smithsonian Affiliations website has information on the other affiliates and links to their websites. You can visit the site and check out the other affiliates, but I’ll highlight a couple that have been most inspiring for us.

One is the Pinhead Institute. This collaborative educational organization in the small mountain town of Telluride, CO (population 2,221 in the last census) isn’t a museum, but it has an inspirational vision, creative energy, and full-time staff of one. Their mission: The Pinhead Institute builds bioliteracy locally and globally. They have brought Smithsonian scientists and curators from other affiliates to teach in Telluride schools. They have sent students as interns to Washington and to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. They have embarked on a collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History to create a comprehensive online Encyclopedia of Life. This little town has created a lot of excitement in Washington and among the other affiliates because it has used the affiliation to its fullest, and it allows the Smithsonian to touch every part of the town: schools, community groups, libraries, and other non-profits. Without borrowing an object, they have brought the Smithsonian to their town.

On the other extreme is the Durham Western Heritage Museum in Omaha, NE. Unlike the Pinhead, they’ve gotten the most from their affiliation by borrowing Smithsonian objects. Their American Originals: Collections from the Smithsonian was “the largest group of Smithsonian Institution artifacts ever to be loaned and displayed outside of their permanent location in Washington, D.C. by an affiliate.” It was organized exclusively for the Durham Western Heritage Museum and included objects from several SI collections, such as the Scarecrow’s costume from the film The Wizard of Oz, 19th century jeans made by Levi Strauss, Teddy Roosevelt’s safari gear, Cliff Claven’s postman’s uniform from Cheers, the first Krispy Kreme machine, and dozens of other American icons. While we talk a lot about borrowing objects from the Smithsonian, this museum continues to bring America’s national treasures to their local audience in a spectacular way.

We have the same opportunities as these organizations if we just know what it is we want and explore all the possibilities. We are eager to explore possible collaboration with the Smithsonian and with other affiliates, such as the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which has some of the early patent models from Rhode Island inventors, or the Lionel Hampton Center's International Jazz Collection with its original recordings and other collections from the Newport Jazz Festival. Visit the Affiliations website, see what others are doing, and see who we could be working with. Let us know if you see something we should explore. The Smithsonian Affiliations program opens up incredible possibilities.

Need your input on Museum Security

This business of getting ourselves a museum to plug our exhibits and programs into is complicated stuff, and every week there is some new angle. Each new angle requires us to think outside of our normal curatorial or educational view and consider something different.

This week the angle has been security. It's one of those things that, when done well, you'd never even know it was there... at least until you need it or you get yourself in trouble. We haven't yet got a security plan, but we are working with some consultants to consider what technological systems need to be in place to safeguard our visitors, our staff, our collections, and the objects and exhibits we will have on loan.

As a Smithsonian Affiliate with ambitious plans to borrow objects on long-term loan and entire exhibits for months at a time, we have to assure the Smithsonian that their stuff is safe with us. This involves access control, video cameras, motion sensors, etc. As a public amenity, we have to assure our visitors, teachers, and parents that being at the museum is entirely safe under normal conditions, as well as during emergencies. Fire suppression, alarms, public address, and easy access to exits need to be built-in, and policies need to be worked out ahead of time.

Just being in a city brings issues as well, especially when their audience includes children. When Al Klyberg and I were in Baltimore this spring on our way to Washington, we decided to stop to visit a couple museums. The Baltimore Children's museum is located in the heart of downtown Baltimore. As soon as we entered the lobby of the museum, we were greeted by a museum staffers who politely asked us our business. We explained to her who we are and why we had come, but she told us that we couldn't enter the museum since adults not escorting children are not allowed. Security for children is foremost on their minds and on the minds of the parents and caregivers of those kids. Disappointed that we had not called ahead to arrange a visit, but respectful of the ground rules, we headed on to D.C.

Some museum rules seem overkill. When I visited the new Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Illinois, I was astounded to find that I was not allowed to bring in a pen or pencil to take notes, even after I explained my interest to the guard and promised that I would only write on my pad. Cameras were allowed, writing implements were not. It seems to me that safeguarding the collection has to be weighed against the educational goals of the museum.

No photography? Many museums don't allow cameras in their exhibits, but a lot do. But with every kid already having a cell-phone in their pockets with cameras, how in the world could you control that? In what ways might it be a good thing? Pictures might add much to a project related to their visit. Sending pictures from the Museum to their friends via cell-phone might just be the kind of advertising money can't buy. What are realistic ground-rules for a museum, and what restrictions just don't make sense any more?

What security issues do you deal with in schools? What are the security issues that educators deal with when taking kids on field trips, and what do their parents worry about when they go? How can a museum create a safe space for learning? Backpacks? Cell phones? Have you had any bad security experiences at museums, and how would you like to have seen them resolved?

You'd be surprised at how the little things are connected to architecture, surveillance systems, alarms, and how many security guards we need to plan to hire. We'd appreciate your input on these things, as well as any other security related issues we should be aware of from your perspective. Thanks!

Smithsonian webcast - "Learning on Location with Handhelds in Museums"

The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies announces the next lecture in the G. Brown Goode Smithsonian Education Lecture Series.

Professor Eric Klopfer, the Scheller Career Development Professor of Science Education and Educational Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will speak on: "Learning on Location with Handhelds in Museums." The lecture takes place Thursday, September 21, 2:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. in the S. Dillon Ripley Lecture Hall. Dr. Klopfer will be introduced by Dr. David Evans, Under Secretary for Science. The lecture will also be web cast live, available at http://museumstudies.si.edu

To read an abstract of Professor Klopfer's lecture as well as more information about the lecture series, please visit the SCEMS museum studies
website: http://museumstudies.si.edu

The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, in collaboration with the Science Education Department of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, organizes the G. Brown Goode Smithsonian Education Lecture Series. Through this series, named after the Smithsonian's earliest proponent of museums as educational institutions, Smithsonian staff can help keep abreast of emerging developments in education pertaining to many aspects of their work, from exhibit design to outreach in the schools.

Living Memory: Intergenerational Learning, and Historical Thinking Skills

The Indianapolis Children's Museum has a collections policy under which they only take objects that are from the last seventy years. Former ICM vice president, Paul Richards explained it this way: only things within living memory. For the Children's Museum, the idea is that history has energy for their visitors when someone in the visiting family has some kind of memory associated with it and can share that with the child they are accompanying. The cut-off is such that the periods that they actively collect for are within the lifetime of your average grandparent.

While kids need to be exposed to history much older than that, there is something about a museum visit that engages the whole family in learning and teaching that is really great. At the Columbus Science Center (CoSI) there is an exhibit called "Progress" which has two main streets with storefronts, workplaces, and homes. One represents 1898, the other 1962. The purpose is to show the changes that took place in everyday technology between the two periods, but it doesn't really succeed on that level. It works for entirely different reasons.

1898 looks like a ghost town. One element of the exhibit is that there are telephones in each store and home, but it requires someone to operate the switchboard to work. Since there were only a couple people in the exhibit when I visited, quietly inspecting their surroundings, and no one else was trying to use the phones, they didn't really do anything. Boring with a capital B.

Stepping across the threshold from 1898 to 1962 is meant to be a revelation of the "Progress" that inspired the name and raison d'etre of the exhibit, but instead there is clearly another threshold that is crossed that energizes the 1962 exhibits. We cross over into the realm of living memory. Adult visitors have memories about practically everything there, know what things were, how they were supposed to work, and remember people, family members, or things they themselves once had. They can show their kids or grandkids everything from the kinds of radios that were the latest thing in the 60's to what the first microwave on the market looked like. The television station or the gas station exhibits make interpreters of every adult there. In that exhibit parents and grandparents talk to their kids, kids listen and ask their parents or grandparents about stuff, and there are crowds in places like the appliance store and the lunch counter. I saw one grandfather demonstrating his technique for keeping a hula hoop going to his grandkids, who couldn't wait for their turn.

From the 1930's to the 50's, the wild west was a favorite subject of film and literature. Tom Mix, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Annie Oakley, the Lone Ranger are among dozens of heroes of popular culture. Now think back seventy from that. That's the 1860's to the 1880's. That was all about living memory, not ancient history. No one living today can remember that far back. You'd have to be a historian, or watch a lot of the history channel to have the depth of knowledge that living through a period would give you. But back in the 30's, 40's, and 50's your grandparents might very well have seen some of that stuff, or at least heard about it at the time. While the truth of history was a lot more problematic than kids were getting (the extermination of Native people, racism and prejudice, and gender inequality are just a few historical truths that weren't adequately addressed), it still begs the question "What has happened in our lifetimes that we could communicate to young people with that kind of enthusiasm?"

Somewhere along the way, a lot of museums lost the thread of living memory. A few have caught it. The Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, and Strawberry Banke Museum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire are two museums who broke from their way-back machine mentalities and opened post-WWII house exhibits among their 18th and 19th century houses. They have been incredibly popular and have brought new audiences through their gates. But most of all they are touchstones for memory and conversation pieces for families. Kids often find post-war design fun, and parents remember grandparents, friends, and events in their lives that they might not have had occasion to talk about with their families before. These are exhibits which really activate families to engage in teaching and learning from each other.

While Heritage Harbor Museum will cover the broad range of Rhode Island's history, there is a huge amount of history that Rhode Islanders have lived through that the Museum plans to cover. In schools, kids are going to have to learn what might be called "historical thinking skills," i.e., the methods, tools, and interpretive approaches that make sense of artifacts, documents, oral histories, etc. At the same time many adults are looking for was to get those artifacts, documents, oral histories, etc., out there to be made into history. Look at the phenomenon of scrapbooking. On Wickenden Street in Providence there is a new store called the Curatorium (because "everything deserves curation"). A&E and The History Channel, and Ken Burns bring history spectacularly into our homes. The last 20 years have been the biggest boom in museum construction ever. While many cultural critics are bemoaning an amnesiac society that has lost its history, it is clear that memory and history are as important to people as ever.

Heritage Harbor Museum is not going to have a collections policy that is going to lock us into the last seventy years. However, we have a keen awareness that everyone we meet is excited that there will be a place where their history and the history of their community will be told. The times each of us has lived through, or that our parents made, is very real to us and in many cases is dying to get out. Heritage Harbor Museum will be a place where people can show their kids what they have been a part of, what they experiences, who they were, how we got to be where we are today, and what we have lost along the way. For kids, the traces of the past that are all around us, in architecture, the not-so-new stuff that is still hanging around your parents or grandparent's bedrooms, that 70's show, or in the second-hand store might start to become clues in a story, or the props of a world that existed the moment before you were born. How are you going to make sense of it? How are you going to make sense of these people who lived through those times and get so excited by it. We'll see. It certainly has a life of its own. It's living memory.

Kinetifacts and project-based learning

John Worrell, archaeologist and former Director of Research at Old Sturbridge Village, introduced me to the concept of kinetifacts back at OSV when he explained how we, and visitors, could learn about history by repeating the actions and activities of the past. How and why certain things were done as they were, and the ways that processes, systems, and people were shaped by activities that were once part of daily life begin to make more sense when one experiences the feel of a tool in one's hand, the way one's body responds to the moving weight of a burden, how quickly one tires to the repeated acts that made up hours and hours of work.

The ah-ha moments of connecting with the past, or an understanding how things came to be, come to people in a variety of ways. Paintings, photographs, and restored rooms and buildings allow you to visualize events and epochs in ways that bring them to life in your imagination. Written documents communicate the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of people who made things happen or to whom things happened. Artifacts can be intermediaries through which stories and histories are proven to have very material reality and connect us to events, people, and places. Kinetifacts, on the other hand, need our bodies to even come into being and to begin to make sense. For some they connect immediately with our logical minds, for some it becomes something that just feels a certain way and makes sense with our bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.

Heritage Harbor Museum has long looked not to other traditional history museums for inspiration, but to science centers, children's museums, and living history. Most traditional history museums rely on objects in cases, wall panels of text and image, and interactive displays that more often than not are clever ways of delivering yet more textual and visual information. Science, children's, and living history museums seem to offer more active learning and involve visitors and students much more directly in the exhibits. In those context the text, images, and artifacts are there to inspire, provide explanations, and make connections.

Integrating active kinetifacts as a central elements of exhibits is one way that Heritage Harbor Museum hopes to provide a different kind of museum experience; another is to integrate project-based learning. At the Columbus Science Center (COSI) kids work together to lift a car on a giant see-saw, learning that with a fulcrum, a long enough lever, enough weight (enough kid-bodies), and teamwork they can do something they could only imagine doing unless they were superman. That act will probably stick in their minds more durably than any textbook or wall panel. When they get to that lesson where the physical dynamics are explained, they will have a point of reference, including a very body-based component. We imagine we could do the same with a reproduction of the record 1142 lb. tuna caught off Block Island in 1981, using rigging and teamwork to hoist it up and take a trophy picture beside it.

Rhode Island itself has been described as an experiment. The growth and success of the state could actually be understood as a project-based history, rooted in experimentation, innovation, industry, the creation of new communities, and necessity. In exhibits on Narragansett Bay, ingenuity and industry in Rhode Island, and transportation, we are planning to incorporate activity areas, labs, workshops, and kits that engage visitors in the very kind of problem-solving that has been demanded by the conditions of life in Rhode Island since its earliest days. We want to find ways for visitors to perform some of the mental gymnastics that made Rhode Island the silicon valley of the 19th century.

We believe that in a history museum like Heritage Harbor Museum, visitors (students) will engage exhibits that integrate images, text, artifacts, and kinetifacts in ways that inspire, challenge, stir memory, and bring people together. There are not many comparable museums out there that we can find of the scale and nature of this project, so we are in kind of new territory. We are going to have to do a lot of creative thinking to take this conceptual framework and turn it into real and successful exhibits that work for learners of all ages, but we believe it can be done.

Any ideas? Any thoughts? What has worked for you? Have you been to museums or seen programs that might provide us models or inspiration, people we could talk to, or research material for our development process? Are there things you'd like to do with your families or students if only you had the place or resources to do it? Feel free to comment here or email me at sparker@heritageharbor.org. Thanks, and welcome to our blog!

New Heritage Harbor Museum website and blog

What cheer, netop! If you have found your way here, it is most likely by invitation and you have already been involved in the planning or evaluation of Heritage Harbor Museum (HHM) education initiatives, or we met somewhere and I thought you might like to check out our site.

I'm Shawn Parker, HHM Manager for Education and Program, and I'm incredibly hopeful for this project and excited at the possibilities for serving schools, communities, families, and individuals who are always learning.

This is my first experience with blogging, and I'm not exactly sure what to expect, but I believe that something positive may come of it. In practical terms, educators who participate in Heritage Harbor Museum's education advisory committee and educators' events will use this blog (http://heritageharboreducation.blogspot.com) to read about our progress, discuss the Museum's initiatives, and ask questions. With the optimism that a project like this requires, I am hoping that you'll give us thoughtful feedback, including honest criticism, and suggestions so that the Museum will be able to become the best educational resource it can.

In addition to this blog, HHM has a new website that went live a couple weeks ago. Using the same http://www.heritageharbor.org/ web address, you can see new renderings of the building and read the latest news about the project.

To introduce Heritage Harbor Museum's plans for education, I'll start with the broadest terms and get more specific in later posts. To start, Heritage Harbor Museum has adopted a Heritage Harbor Education Program Strategic Framework that guides our planning for the facilities, exhibits, and programs. As its statement of purpose it declares:

The Education Program at Heritage Harbor will contribute to Rhode Island's development as a learning society by embedding challenging learning opportunities in all Museum exhibits and by engaging learners of all ages in experiences that enhance their understanding of Rhode Island's heritage and culture and their development of essential knowledge and skills.

The plan identifies four linked initiatives as part of its education program: 1) learning materials, 2) a learning center, 3) teacher development, and 4) family and community learning. In subsequent posts, each of these initiatives will be described in more detail.

Okay, that's a start. Feel free to comment, make suggestions, or ask questions about the post or about the site in general. My goal is to post at least once a week. I look forward to the conversation, being part of a community, and working together.