Taking Time for Role Reversals in Museums

by Cynthia Wallace-Casey,

PhD Candidate

University of New Brunswick

(Fredericton)

One of the biggest challenges I've encountered when working with both adults and students in community history museums, is the problem of time. There never seems to be enough time to make connections: connections with student visitors, connections to individual artifacts, connections to big ideas in history. Too often it seems, a school field-trip to a community museum evolves into little more than a hurried walk through history, where students are presented with only the alluring highlights of each exhibit space. Although armed with the best of intentions, in such instances museum educators become little more than information gatekeepers, adjusting their tour ‘on the fly’ to the immediate needs of a group leader—without any prior knowledge of the students or their interests. For students themselves, such a scenario leaves no time to ask questions, no time for individual engagement, and no time to establish historical connections.

There is a solution to this, however, and it rests with role reversals, along with repeat museum visits. As I have found in my own research, with repeat visits to a community history museum (combined with curatorial classroom time) traditional gatekeeper roles can be reversed—thus ‘flipping the museum’—to enable student-driven exploration of the past. In my own case study, students visited their local community history museum four times over six weeks. In between, they also re-visited their experience through classroom activities, which included close reading (and corroboration) of artifact sources, as well as mapping of museum narratives. In this way, students were empowered to break out of their passive role as knowledge-receivers—to become engaged in discovery, observation, de-construction, and re-interpretation.

By returning to the museum over an extended unit of study, students benefited from having ample time to establish thoughtful connections within the museum. In addition, with each repeat visit, role reversals became increasingly more evident, as students themselves adopted the social role of museum curators. Thus, arriving at the museum for their first visit, students attentively followed the guide, listening to the words and taking notes. Arriving for the second visit, it was obvious that all of the students were now eager and prepared to engage in dialogue with the exhibits, as well as the curators. They were focused, familiar with the site, and armed with a mission. This sense of purpose continued with each return, as students became increasing more accustomed to the learning environment, and seized upon each opportunity to direct probing questions of the curators. By the fourth and final museum visit, it was clear that museum roles had been flipped, since instead of simply following the guide and taking notes (as had been the case during their first visit), students were now fully in charge of the tour—with each presenting curatorial statements of significance about their chosen artifact, while the adult audience simply listened. This reversal process proved to be very effective,

Challenging the Big Ideas of History

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

In a journal article that I have yet to find anywhere to publish, I have argued that history education must begin with Big Questions rather than Big Ideas. In this context I have posed the somewhat dubious question: when adopting historical thinking outcomes as a way of engaging students in the past, should we be enabling students to ask Big Questions (which are the foundation of source-based inquiry), or should we be directing them towards the Big Ideas that embrace such subjects as social cohesion and national identity?

Certainly, there exists a large body of cognitive evidence to suggest that a Big Ideas approach to teaching about the past presents serious limitations for students’ abilities to engage in history. Bruce VanSledright and Margarita Limón (2006), for example, have identified pre-occupations with teaching first-order concepts and ideas as stemming from a perceived nation-building Big Ideas role for social studies education (p. 561-562). In this sense, Big Ideas are often equated with maintaining a society’s status quo. Similarly, Stéphane Levesque (2009) has cautioned us on the intellectual limitations of a Big Ideas teaching approach “designed to tailor the collective past for present-day purposes” (n.p.). Likewise, Veronica Boix-Mansilla (2000) has also found, that to associate Big Ideas with a presentist perspective on the past is to presume answers where they cannot yet be found, because the past is still unfolding (p. 413).

Big Questions, however, in the Collingwood tradition of historical inquiry, suggests a dialectic role for history. This vision of teaching historical thinking, as Sam Wineburg (2001) has observed, has the potential to place students in the role of wrestling with multiple stories: “not just as arbiters of others’ accounts [i.e. judges] but as authors of their own [i.e. self-emancipators]” (pp. 131-132). Similarly, as Keith Barton and Linda Levstik (2008) have found, by making Big Questions an explicit part of classroom instruction, teachers can provide a forum for students to talk about history and make sense out of diversity in the past (p. 262).

Over the past eight weeks, I have been working with a group of grade seven students, exploring how to engage middle school students in historical thinking with museums. Undoubtedly, as anyone who has witnessed a classroom visit to a museum can attest, engagement in museums is seldom an issue. What is often the issue however, is empowering students to look beyond the Big Idea of the museum exhibition, and to ask their own questions. In this sense, I propose that historical thinking requires a slightly different set of procedural skills - because reading objects (by nature of the medium) is very different from reading texts or images.

So returning to my opening question... what should come first in history education? Big Questions or Big Ideas? Currently I can report, that in this stage of my data collection, I am persuaded even more that asking Big Questions is key to breaking away from the status quo that many museums are all-to-often prone to maintain. I look forward to elaborating further upon this distinction, when my research is completed later this year.

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: