Authentic History with Museum Partnerships

Many communities offer an untapped resource waiting to enhance the learning in Social Studies classes - a local museum. At the elementary or middle school level, visiting with people at your local museum may provide you with an opportunity for your students to take a field trip and see the museum’s exhibits. Another possibility is that the museum may let artifacts from the museum visit your classroom in the form of some kind of a traveling exhibit (like a museum’s sampler platter). Whether a museum is down the street or across the country, it is worthwhile to see if artifacts are available through programs like these: Minnesota Military Museum's Traveling Trunks and National World War II Museum Operation Footlocker. If your local museum has not established a policy relating to items like this, you may want to show them these programs as examples of outreach that they could consider and pursue. How else can teachers and students be involved in their community museum? What if you have students who have been trained in historical thinking and are ready to be historical storytellers?

Last year, after the Advanced Placement World History exam, my twelve students still had about twenty days of school remaining (in our block schedule). Time met opportunity in the form of a partnership we forged with the Winnebago Area Museum. After I met with members of their board, my students visited the museum to get a sense of what its existing exhibits and artifacts were. Most of our work was completed in our classroom, but additional visits allowed students to peruse some of the records on-site that were not able to travel with us or be “scanned” for our electronic exploration. I should add that our school is a 1:1 environment with Chromebooks; thus, an added element some teachers might have with this would be scheduling time in a computer lab.

Meeting with board members and seeing the museum helped students develop visions for projects. I gave them this rubric to communicate expectations. Along the way, our biggest challenges related to indecision about project ideas, lack of mobile research information (one student spent more hours on her own than what I would have expected in order to access quality artifacts), and some technical issues with Weebly. Some of my students worked individually, and others worked in pairs or trios. The main factors in that were what student preferences and interests were.

Some examples of finished products:

Popular Culture Display

Website of Parker College

Main Street project

The 2016-17 version will be designed a little more tightly due to the time available - and to avoid some of the obstacles from “version 1.0” of this project. In addition, I will recommend using Google Sites (which is new and improved since last year) as the host environment for student portfolios. Board members are going to provide students with a set of documents or artifacts (in digital form whenever possible). Students will be in charge of figuring out how to present these objects as a group for an exhibit. The recommendation will be to start with a question and then use a combination of artifacts, highlights from artifacts, and additional interpretation to answer that question. In other words, they will apply skills similar to those which they have been developing throughout the year in our AP course.

Another iteration of this I am envisioning would be having students produce a historical event’s “counter-narrative” (a story told entirely from the perspective of an unrepresented or underrepresented part of the original account of an event). This could be a single-day project or one that all students in a class - especially if student numbers are higher - could complete individually.

Please reach out if you have questions about overcoming the logistics in making this work. We needed to collaborate - museum staff, students, and I - to work through a few issues. That aspect of this project was another way in which authentic learning occurred. I heartily encourage you to stoke your students’ curiosity and provide them with an authentic audience for their work. Carol Hill of the Winnebago Area Museum is also willing to answer your questions from the perspective of museum personnel: Winnebago Area Museum contact information.