Book Review: Family Ties by Andrea Terry (or More on the Challenges of Teaching with Museums)

By Cynthia Wallace-Casey, PhD 
University of New Brunswick 
(Fredericton) 

There’s something about the experience of a Victorian Christmas that makes many of us feel warm and fuzzy inside. Our sense of nostalgia seems heightened by the festive season. Because of this, perhaps we’re more prone to let down our critical lens on the past, and simply enjoy the visual candy. Surrounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of the season, we encounter compelling evidence to suggest that we can truly experience the past for real… as it once was. 

Andrea Terry, however, in her publication Family Ties: Living History in Canadian House Museums (2015), dispels such nostalgia, as she closely examines the annual Victorian Christmas programs at three Canadian house museums: Dundurn Castle in Hamilton Ontario, Sir George-Étienne Cartier National Historic Site in Montreal Quebec, and William Lyon Mackenzie House in Toronto Ontario. With a keen eye for cultural hegemony, Family Ties delves down beneath the sugary surface, to reveal how interpretive Christmas programs in each of these living history museums are actually a product of present-day values, place-based politics, and nationalistic agendas. 

Day Tripping

Amid cutbacks, alternatives to traditional school outings emerge...

G. Jeffrey MacDonald, Globe Correspondent (February 17, 2011)
 
The group field trip — a time-honored tradition beloved by students and educators alike — is getting a makeover as schools adjust to tight budgets and strict curriculum standards.

It is getting increasingly rare for districts to orchestrate an old-fashioned field trip, complete with taxpayer-funded bus ride to one of the region’s natural or cultural resources. Instead, schools are saving money by having students walk to nearby sites, raising private funds for transportation, or by taking fewer field trips than in years past.

Revere High School students, for instance, take only about half as many field trips today as they did in the early 2000s, according to former assistant principal John Perella, who is now assistant principal at the city’s Garfield Middle School. Six per semester used to be common; now they’re lucky if they take two.

“The field trip philosophy has definitely taken a hit lately,’’ Perella said. “Part of it is financial, and some of it is also be cause we’re trying to refine what we’re doing [to meet state testing standards]. The days of the full-day field trip are unfortunately gone.’’

Field trip cutbacks are playing out around the region and the state as districts do all they can to slash costs without eliminating personnel, according to Tom Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents.

“When you have to make a decision about whether you’re going to get rid of a teacher, or you’re going to get rid of a program like field trips that may be an extension of a curriculum, it’s an easy decision,’’ Scott said.

The shift in thinking has broad implications, both for schools and for institutions that depend on revenue from school group visits.

Some nonprofits are feeling the pinch. The USS Constitution Museum in Charlestown, for instance, saw school group visits drop by more than 15 percent, from an average of about 1,800 to fewer than 1,500 in 2010, according to museum learning coordinator Adriana Maksy. Wolf Hollow, a wolf sanctuary with an educational mission in Ipswich, has also felt the squeeze.

“The economy has hit us hard as we depend on school groups during the week,’’ said Wolf Hollow director Joni Soffron in an e-mail. Field trip visits to Wolf Hollow “are way off due to budget cuts in education. If schools are laying off teachers, they are not going on field trips.’’

Transportation fees in particular have climbed in recent years, as factors ranging from fuel to insurance have pushed the cost higher. As a result, teachers and students are increasingly setting off on foot to visit sites nearby, according to Sue Goganian, director of the Beverly Historical Society, which hosts field trips at three historic houses.

“It’s cushioned us a little bit to have some schools [nearby] that don’t rely on bus transportation,’’ Goganian said. “In some cases, a teacher will tell me, ‘We’re walking, [so] if it’s pouring rain, we don’t want to come.’ ’’

In Tewksbury, parents raise funds to help cover field trip expenses for students in grades K-2 at the Heath Brook School. The Beverly School District doesn’t have a budget for field trips because expenses are paid by students’ families, according to assistant superintendent Maryellen Duffy.

Even educationally, field trips are getting tougher to justify. In the course of preparing for state achievement tests, teachers and administrators are reluctant to have students spend even one day outside the classroom — unless the trip is certain to advance that week’s designated lessons.

“It’s not something that’s just green-lighted anymore,’’ Perella said. “Teachers have to present their reasons for going, back them up with evidence, and explain why it makes sense to do it.’’

Cultural institutions are beefing up programs that fulfill curricular requirements, sometimes in multiple subject areas. The Constitution Museum, for instance, is developing programming that imparts lessons in the core subjects of science and math along with history.

Organizations that spell out how their programs meet state standards have sometimes avoided the trend. Mass Audubon’s Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary in Topsfield has produced materials that explain how its programs fulfill curriculum requirements in areas such as science. Organizers say these efforts, coupled with growing interest in environmental education, help explain why 10,600 schoolchildren visited during the 2009-10 academic year — a 2,300-student increase from two years prior.

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem hosted 23,000 students in 2010, up from 15,000 in 2009. Two factors helped boost the numbers, according to Gavin Andrews, assistant director for family, student, and teacher programs. The museum launched an initiative to tell teachers exactly how its programs fulfill state requirements. And classes flocked to “The Emperor’s Private Paradise,’’ a special exhibit of treasures from 18th-century imperial China.

Institutions increasingly are sending experts to schools whose students can’t travel. The Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary has trained at least five naturalists to do in-school presentations, up from just one in 2001.

“A significant percentage of the students we meet are through nature programs on the school grounds,’’ said Scott Santino, a teacher naturalist at the Ipswich River sanctuary. “In some instances, we’ll bring samples with us. In other instances, we’ll have naturalists walk the school grounds and develop a program that [features] the nature on those grounds.’’

Outreach is also a growing emphasis for Historic New England, which owns the Coffin House and Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm in Newbury. Fewer students are visiting the properties, but through educators’ trips to schools, Historic New England met with 4,674 students in 2009-10, up from just 653 in 2001-02.

“We’re able to get across a lot of the same concepts,’’ said Carolin Collins, education programs manager. “But it’s really the sense of place that’s lost — the grounding in the actual historic environment.’’

Day tripping

Participatory Mapping: Place-Making as Process in Montréal’s Mile End

Maps are more than pieces of paper. They are stories, conversations, lives and songs lived out in a place and are inseparable from the political and cultural contexts in which they are used. (A. Warren, cited in Giacomo Rambaldi, "Who Owns the Map Legend?")

Places resonate. They are keepers of stories and avenues for remembrance. As the Mile End mapping project demonstrates, community place-based projects offer opportunities to give shape to the past, outline the present and envision the future...


NCPH: Off the Wall - Participatory Mapping Place-making...

Threatened Identity: What do We Lose When We Lose the Sense of Place? - Congress 2011 Big Thinking Lecture Delivered by David Adams Richards

by Cynthia Wallace-Casey
PhD Student, University of New Brunswick
 
As a writer of historical fiction, David Adams Richards is best known for his ability to explore elements of humanity within characters who "come from the fabric and the soil of the Miramichi." During Congress 2011, he spoke about this sense of place and what it means to those who identify with New Brunswick’s past.


Drawing upon the historical experience of mechanisation in the forest industry, Adams Richards explained how such concepts of modernisation are not new to Atlantic Canada. Here, he said, generations of people have weathered the sense of inevitable progress that is associated with global change. Often, such progress carries with it what Adams Richards describes as a "great anonymity" that threatens individual identity. It undermines a shared sense of belonging that comes from being part of a particular place and a particular way of life.

Within the abyss of anonymity, a sense of place is often regarded as a label of misfortune or unknowing ( "that people who live where we live would not know about what more successful people know about the world."); and so, to have a sense of place is thus to be restricted from being part of another more cosmopolitan place.

Yet, a sense of place can also be empowering. It carries with it a unilateral freedom that is grounded in a temporal sense of shared humanity. In the authors’ words:

Even on a patch of frozen soil, a solitary man is his own true nation, and free as he chooses to be. No moment or comfort is ever secure, no matter where we live; or future certain for any of us, no matter where we live. How we respond to this is up to us alone. Each one of us can choose to be free.

So, what does this have to do with history education? (You may be asking yourself right now). I see this Big Thinking lecture as very relevant to our discussions on the teaching of history for two reasons. Firstly, Adams Richards touches upon the imaginative element of history. His highly descriptive style of writing makes it possible for the reader to empathise with people in the past. This emotional layer adds a vibrant richness to the past that cannot be found in empirical evidence alone. But is it history? Indeed, in my humble opinion, the best historians are those who are able to fill in the spaces between the lines of evidence and contextualise the past in vivid, rich, detail.

A second reason why I feel this lecture is very relevant to discussions on the teaching of history, is that Adams Richards describes a particular sociological phenomenon whereby history intersects with collective memory. Indeed, through his writing, the author presents a darker side of life in Atlantic Canada: "a world of hurt and alarm ... a world that has faced globalisation for years and years.” Such a world is not unique to Atlantic Canada; yet it has become deeply embedded in our collective memory. Even so, it need not cage us in, because memory can be fluid and ever-changing.

The role of history education should be to enable each of us to look critically upon the narratives that shape – or threaten – our individual identities. As David Adams Richards has pointed out, how we respond depends upon us alone.

Listen to David Adams Richards’ entire lecture  here:

Who Speaks for the Forgotten? – Congress 2011 Big Thinking Lecture Delivered by Antonine Maillet.

by Cynthia Wallace-Casey
PhD Student, University of New Brunswick
 
Who speaks for the forgotten? This was the topic of discussion for Antonine Maillet’s Big Thinking lecture held during the recent Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Fredericton, New Brunswick (Canada). The Hon. Antonine Maillet is a well known Acadian author and linguist, whose fictional heroine La Sagouine (The Washerwoman) has come to epitomise the resilience and strength of Acadian heritage in North America.


La Sagouine dominates Acadian popular culture as a stalwart figure. Existing in somewhat contrast to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s romantic Evangeline (made popular by the 19th century epic poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie), La Sagouine does not pine for what has been lost. La Sagouine is strong. She is confident. Pragmatic. Optimistic. These are the descriptors that have transformed Maillet’s character into a symbolic figure for the 20th century Acadian Renaissance. In many ways she also represents the lifeways of many rural New Brunswickers before the introduction of Equal Opportunity social reforms in the 1960’s.


“This is a true story” – states Maillet in the opening line of her introduction to the published monologue entitled La Sagouine (1979). True – in that her character springs from a historical tradition. False, however – in that La Sagouine never really existed as a living person. She is fictional, yet also represents the nameless who will never be found in any archival record. She encapsulates a generation of Acadians who have long-since been forgotten. Who speaks for these people? How are they remembered? This was the topic of Maillet’s Big Ideas lecture.


Interestingly, Maillet’s discussion draws attention to the importance of not limiting historical inquiry to the written word; for just as the vast majority of us will never warrant inclusion in the school textbooks of 3011 and our names may never be found in archival collections (except perhaps by a great-great-grandchild tracing her past), so too are the voices of the forgotten lost to us except within the vernacular history of alternative sources of historical inquiry. How can we hear them calling to us? Antonine Maillet has sought their voices in the oral traditions of Acadia, that span from 16th century France to 21st century Louisiana, Nova Scotia, Québec, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick.


For those who are disempowered in any society, the keeping of oral traditions and the preservation of collective memory is very important. As Maillet points out, “they” can never take your voice. Indeed, our schools could benefit greatly from the humanist agenda of making space in our classrooms for such forms of vernacular history. This is because, with each generation, it is the youth who bear responsibility for perpetuating the essential elements of collective memory that define cultural identity. In the words of Maillet: “C’est vous [les jeunes] qui vont décider le futur de l’Acadie”


In Acadia, the collective identity of the voiceless has been preserved in the dialect and words of a language that is more ancient than the french of modern France. As Maillet so poignantly illustrates in her discussion about the forgotten, the generational links between past and present can be found within the stories and songs of Acadia. Here lie the traces of the voices of the forgotten. As educators, we would do well to never forget this.

Listen to Antonine Maillet's entire lecture here: