Well, we are deep in History Final Projects season once again! I have an in-box full of research assistance requests, so I am going to share the joyous discovery I made through a new collaboration this year.
One of our History teachers moved to 9th grade, taking lead on curriculum — basically a completely new one — for that class. About half of this term has focused on ethnic studies, mostly using historical thinking skills to weigh multiple perspectives, and doing close reading of primary source material. The teacher came to me with the idea of having students make a museum exhibits, feeling there was something about the storytelling — the human experience — that she wanted students to strive to capture with their final project. Their topic is a social movement from an ethnic group living in California in the 20th Century or earlier.
Of course, that gave me a perfect rabbit-hole to go down! The available materials on exhibition design are wonderful, and I quickly discovered that it offered a fantastic framework that allows the development and demonstration of many historical thinking skills. Not only does it allow students to chose a voice for their writing, but the strictures and low word counts push back against writing in curlycues to try to “sound smart” that so often plague our 9th graders.
Some of the excellent sources I drew upon for lesson planning purposes included guides from the Smithsonian and the BC Museums Association. (NOTE: Debbie Abilock just pointed me to the classic work that almost every guide I read talked about, but the Internet Archive was down when I was designing the project.) Students will be making a digital exhibit with Thinglink. (Here is my very in-process example.) I’ll be vulnerable and tell you that I am due in class now, even though I have citations missing from pretty much everything at this point. The links here should point you to most of what I used to build the curriculum, if not the exhibit.
In any event, here is our first draft of class materials. I’m very, very open, as always, to ideas and feedback. (Please NOTE: We decided we absolutely want to keep this project in the curriculum, and we would definitely take more days to do it next year.)
I’m off to support storytelling about the Chicano Tattoo Movement, gospel music in Los Angeles, and more!
I used to do a “Bright Lights in History” museum design project with our 7th gr. world history class, and I loved it. Before the project began, I visited the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, and while I was there, I took extensive photos of various installations/exhibits, captions, labels, etc. In class, I showed all of the photos, and students worked in their teams to make lists of what they noticed about design and setup with each photo. Our guiding question was “How can you communicate your message through museum design?” We then constructed class lists of design and setup guidelines, and if they’d missed something important, I helped fill the gap. They always did such a thoughtful job when we turned the Library into a giant museum! Each class got a set amount of square feet to set up however they needed to to communicate the message of their museum.
This is a fantastic approach! I searched on the open web for examples, but would have loved to have had my own. The lucky part was that we had just had a field trip for 9th grade history to a local archive (helpful that Stanford is walking distance from campus) that included a tour of its exhibit space. Several students have hearkened back to that experience in thinking about their exhibits.