Exploring approaches to civic engagement through “Kitchen Conversations”

, , , , , ,

Editor’s note: In this final post in our series on teaching with articles from The Public Historian, Kate Wilson discusses her experiences using Ruth Abram’s essay, “Kitchen Conversations: Democracy in Action at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum” (The Public Historian 29, no. 1 [February 2007]), in the classroom. We welcome comments and further suggestions of articles you have used! If you have a TPH article that is a favorite in your classroom, please let us know. 

Sign outside the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

Sign outside the Tenement Museum. Photo credit: Shelley Panzarella licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

I teach public history in a master’s of heritage preservation program in a large urban university in Atlanta, where the legacies of civil rights and Civil War coexist daily. My students, many of them from this region, are directly engaged with dilemmas inherent in interpreting and confronting the southern past.  Some work and intern at sites still struggling with the representation of slavery or devoted to interpreting southern history as a white-dominated narrative. While the “Moonlight and Magnolias” image is declining, many sites are still reticent on the issue of race, such as historic plantations or farmsteads that do not represent slavery or the lives of the enslaved. These patterns persist even as the demographics of these sites’ surrounding communities are changing and diversifying.  How can a site attract local African American visitors, for example, if the Sons of the Confederacy still hold their annual meeting there? How can a small historic town in the Atlanta suburbs attract community development and celebrate a sense of place while being honest about and confronting its segregationist past as a “sundown town”? Often class discussions lead students to question: Who are the stakeholders in this past? Can we conceive of an interpretive arena that incorporates fundamentally incompatible perspectives (such as African Americans and whites celebrating Confederate heritage)? Do we even want to try? Should we offer politically neutral spaces or seek to advocate for historically marginalized voices?​ 

We have no definitive answers as yet, but one article that helps us think through such questions is Ruth Abram’s “Kitchen Conversations: Democracy in Action at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.” I use this essay in my introductory graduate seminar on public history. “Kitchen Conversations” details a program the Lower East Side Tenement Museum debuted in 2004 to help visitors make a connection between our immigrant past and present. Kitchen Conversations is an add-on to the standard site tour, a facilitated discussion that uses “history as starting place for dialogue on related contemporary issues.” Its end goal is civic engagement through dialogue that challenges assumptions about immigration, connects the site history to contemporary issues, and catalyzes further learning about those issues. The facilitated discussion model establishes ground rules for all participants in order to support mutual sharing and hearing, a spirit of inquiry, and respect for diversity and for the individuality of everyone’s voice. The museum carefully trains docents to be neutral, encouraging facilitators who ensure inclusion and safety. One important lesson that emerges is that it is important that participants all go on the same tour together before engaging in facilitated discussion. Students agreed that the shared interpretive experience was a precondition for the program’s success, providing a common knowledge base and reference points for conversation. Likewise, the fact that the program was self-selecting and strictly voluntary contributed to its success.

Of all the readings I assign, “Kitchen Conversations” is consistently among the most popular. Student response to the article is almost always positive and they often mention the piece in final oral exams as very influential. Students are excited by the possibilities offered by the facilitated discussion format, even if they are a little uncertain of how to specifically realize it effectively. I have always valued the essay because it pushes students to think outside the box of the usual exhibition and programming offerings, to consider how public history interpretation can provoke (in the words of Freeman Tilden) visitors to make a connection between past and present. The reading comes about midsemester, after we have established other key concepts such as shared authority and shared inquiry, the nature of memory, and ideas of relevance.

Earlier in the semester, the students read Jürgen Habermas and explore the conception of the liberal public sphere. We discuss ways in which the Habermasian ideal of the public sphere implicitly underlies much of public history programming. We often assume that if we expose people to history and give them a space to come together and discuss or share, then we will have generated some kind of mutual communication and shared understanding. But critiques of Habermas—and indeed of this idealized notion of public discourse in a democratic society—focus on the fact that this sphere is not a level playing field for diverse actors and speakers. Are we basing our programming models on assumptions that amount to chasing a liberal chimera?

97 Orchard Street, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Lower East Side, Manhattan.

97 Orchard Street, Tenement Museum. Photo credit:  Wally Gobetz licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

We also consider whether a museum devoted to the immigrant experience can be neutral on the subject of immigration. One student critique called out the “disingenuousness” of the Kitchen Conversations program. The museum is obviously pro-immigration, they claimed, and the program emerged from a need to get people to think about their stance on new immigration and current issues. They asked: Do the staff secretly hope that people’s attitudes will change? And we considered: Do we, when we mount programs on controversial issues, claim we want to create a space for dialogue but actually hope to move participants to a specific understanding of whatever social issue we are addressing? How do we balance larger civic engagement with our other role as community advocates and champions of hitherto unheard voices and perspectives?

On the other hand, students are excited by the way in which the Kitchen Conversations seem to offer an alternative to a more passive consumption of historical content, creating a space for visitors to process and reflect on what they have experienced at the site and explore a usable past. In the current political and social climate, such an idealized public sphere seems further away than ever. Media is fragmented and we experience a heightened polarization of society. The idea that facilitated discussion offers a way for people who normally wouldn’t talk to one another to engage with each other face to face is a compelling one. Yet politically neutral facilitation carries risk and may not appeal to marginalized visitors or others who seek a more definitive account or perspective, particularly related to histories of injustice. When we consider how the Kitchen Conversations format might manifest in our local context, it is challenging to consider what past-present connections could be made neutrally, although civil rights sites seem to offer the most natural setting for experimenting with the format and encouraging visitors to reflect on the meaning of that history in the age of Black Lives Matter.

To that end, “Kitchen Conversations” has inspired some students to design projects that create an arena for exploration and dialogue around race and the legacies of Jim Crow in Atlanta. One recent student project, for example, drew on the facilitated discussion model to create a post-tour program for visitors to the Ebenezer Baptist Church at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park. Teaching public history in the fall 2017 semester in particular, with the debate over Confederate memorials raging in our own backyard, we gratefully turned to one model for how to pursue relevance and promote dialogue between multiple perspectives, even as many of us took a firm stand in the public debate. Whether in the kitchen, the classroom, or county courtyard, conversation was imperative.

Kate Wilson is associate professor of history at Georgia State University, where she teaches public history.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.