Lucinda Hannington, Director of Education & Visitor Services, Victoria Mansion
Proposal Type: Workshop
Abstract: This workshop provides museum educators with tools to create place-based content connecting historic sites to their communities, both past and present. Using a combination of role-playing as elementary students and discussion, participants will learn how to connect the history of a community to a specific site that might not relate directly to the popular history of that community. They will also have the opportunity to develop their own ideas based on provided prompts.
Seeking: School groups are, for so many museum educators, a huge balancing act. Designing programs for elementary students that focus specifically on a site or an object is something they excel at, but providing age-appropriate context and connections to the world outside the institution’s walls can be a challenge, especially when the site is not representative of the popular history of the community in which it exists. Participants in this workshop will experience, as though they are students, a multi-part, interdisciplinary, elementary-school program designed by Victoria Mansion, a house museum in Portland, Maine, as though they are students. Following the lesson there will be a description of the entire program, not just the part demonstrated, as well as a discussion of why certain topics were selected, how the program was developed, and a Q&A about the process used in making connections between a unique structure and the surrounding community.
As it is an inescapable topic these days, and one that can be quite confusing, attention will be paid to issues surrounding the Common Core, such as how to integrate standards into your programming without sacrificing creativity or content. Finally, participants will have the opportunity to design their own programs using the techniques discussed.
The goals for this workshop are to (a) help participants think about civic engagement as more than just service learning, but also as a way of delving into the local community’s history through one historic site and (b) to share our experiences in designing a multi-faceted program that is affordable for schools to participate in and will support existing educational efforts.
Primarily, we are looking to gauge interest in this type of workshop and if there is a particular area you would like to see more or less of. The format would be a three hour workshop led by Lucinda Hannington, Director of Education and Visitor Services, and Stacia Hanscom, Curriculum Development Specialist, both of Victoria Mansion. Approximately half the time would be dedicated to the role-playing as students and the remaining time divided between discussion of process and program design.
Related Topics: Museums/Exhibits, Teaching, Place
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to share contact information for other people the proposer should reach out to, please get in contact directly: Lucinda Hannington, lhannington[at]victoriamansion.org
If you have general ideas or feedback to share please feel free to use the comments feature below.
I really like the idea of this workshop, particularly when you say, “civic engagement is more than just service learning.” I wonder if you could pitch it as a workshop for public history educators as well as practitioners. Could educators take your idea into graduate classrooms and help their students develop education programs like yours?
This sounds like an awesome workshop concept, that I assume is intended as an all-day workshop. As Denise Meringolo suggested, perhaps you could pitch it to public history educators and museum/historic sites/NPS educators and have everyone role swap.
I think that is an important issue. Will you be focusing mainly on elementary school students? It is a reality that many historic sites have a lot of elementary school visitors. Creating engaging, challenging experiences for students of this age group that intersect with the teacher’s lesson plans is a challenge. Good luck!
Thank you for your feedback! Here are some quick responses:
This would definitely be useful for PH professors as well. I felt that last year at NCPH there weren’t a lot of options tailored specifically to museum educators, so we wanted to help to fill that void a little bit, but certainly, professors could gain from what we would be offering as well.
We were thinking a three hour workshop rather than all day, just to keep people focused and energized. All day on one topic can be exhausting for both the presenters and the audience.
We would be focusing primarily on elementary students, because that’s when kids are most likely to visit historic sites and also to be studying local history, so making those place-based connections at an early age is crucial. What we have found, since developing our program, is that once you have the basic outline, it’s easily adaptable to other grade levels. Our goal would be for educators to leave with a basic framework of “how” that they could then tailor to their own site’s needs.