By: Laurie L. Kearney
In September of 2017, I started my Public History internship with Historic Newton as an Education Collection Interpretation Intern. Historic Newton has a very active presence in their city. They were founded in the 1950s and today run two museums, The Jackson Homestead & Museum and the Durant-Kenrick House & Grounds. They also maintain the town’s historic cemeteries, offer many educational programs to their community including programs for adults and school children, and have online programs that include exhibits, historical information and teacher resources. Their mission is to illuminate their city’s history in the context of the nation’s history.
Historic Newton is dedicated to providing educational opportunities, not only for Newton residents, but for the broader community via the world wide web. Historic Newton offers many educational programs for school age children, and these programs were the focus of my role as intern. In recent years, Historic Newton has developed a daylong lesson on old burying grounds in conjunction with Newton’s middle school teachers. Their two museum spaces feature multiple exhibits on Newton’s history, including sections on slavery and the Underground Railroad, and the domestic life of a Newton family spanning over a century. Online visitors can find exhibits on the Charles River, Newton artists, penny postcards, and the Underground Railroad. Currently, Historic Newton is writing a new curriculum on immigration and has several new programs in the works for the community.
Over the last thirty years, museum education has become an integral part of exhibit planning. Before the 1960s, museums were spaces where people went to simply look at exhibits. In the 1970s, museums began to be thought of as nontraditional learning spaces (versus a traditional classroom setting) and history museum staff began developing exhibits with learning objectives in mind. As a result, there has been a shift from passive to active learning. Today, when people visit a museum they expect to learn something new from an exhibit, a community program, a walking tour, or an activity; most likely, a museum educator had a hand in its development. Museum educators are a vital component of a well-staffed museum. They are specialists who assist institutions in achieving their educational goals.
Museum educators may work with a variety of people, whether they are in-house professionals, community residents, or local public school teachers, to develop programs that are both engaging and informative. Working with teachers on developing curriculums, results in lessons that are meaningful to students, respond to the curriculum, and that teachers are eager to teach. This kind of collaboration creates ownership for the project, which helps the community value the exhibit or program. Through collaboration and exhibit design, museum educators create meaningful programs, lessons, and exhibits for their participants.
As the Education Collection Interpretation Intern, it was my turn to put these ideas and theories into practice. My responsibilities included updating the existing program “If You Lived in the Jackson Homestead” to make it more participatory for young audiences; creating a new exhibit for the “Please Touch” table in the Historic Newton Gallery; and researching items in their education collection for further use in Historic Newton’s educational programs. My goal was to create hands-on activities that allow young children to encounter the past in meaningful ways and engage them in age-appropriate historical thinking.
The “If You Lived at the Jackson Homestead” program is one of Historic Newton’s much loved and older programs, but both staff and visiting teachers identified the need to make it less lecture-based and more participatory for its young audiences. Feedback from teachers indicated a need for more resources for use in their classrooms to support this program. My initial observation of this hour-long lesson for children ages 4 to7 revealed the need for a new approach – these young children spent 30 minutes listening to the presenter deliver information before they had an opportunity to participate in a hands-on activity. My challenge was to figure out how to incorporate participatory elements into the 30-minute information-based session, to make it fun and meaningful for the children. I came up with several ideas then refined them with the help of Newton Public School teachers and Historic Newton staff. In addition, I revised objectives, artifacts, instructions, and follow-up for the existing artifact-handling activity, devising a game that allows children to practice comparing past and present through images of objects of the past and their versions in the present. This new approach to the activity and the other additions to this lesson added a strong participatory component, which better engaged the children.
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