Collaborating with local museum projects: Promoting educational history in your local area

Submitted by Joan Zaretsky

Last year, Chapter Presidents started a discussion of potential local museums to visit with their members as well as projects they may wish to initiate with their local museums. As retired teachers, we all know how our mental health gets a boost when we feel empowered to create new ideas and to support the learning of others.

Below are a few ideas of projects which you may want to develop collaboratively with your local museum. You may find in discussions that they have some specific ideas or requests which they would suggest once you open the doors to providing some support from your membership. Enjoy these suggestions and create your own new ideas to share with other Chapters at future meetings!

A good starting point may be to visit your local museum to understand what they currently have on site that supports the history of education in your area. You may select to buffer what they have with other materials your members may provide or restructure a display based on your members’ experiences and memories. You could discuss, and offer your support, in the development of any of the following ideas.

1. Create a travelling display of “Teaching Through the Ages” which could move to different museums in your district or larger area.

2. You could create a “history of education in your area” using the concept of a travelling suitcase. There was a suitcase contest developed by Heritage Canada in the past. The suitcases travelled across the country and were then returned to their home museums. They were not necessarily specific to education but local events or unique contributions to history which local museums wished to highlight. If each Chapter developed an educational travelling suitcase, it would be a spectacular project. Talk with your museum about how this project was run in the past. These suitcases could be a focal point at an upcoming RTAM AGM if a number of Chapters decided to pursue this idea.

3. The creation of some posters and/or online videos with photos and stories of some of your members’ experiences could be displayed in the museum. In fact, these photos and stories could be collected and published as a book for other museums across Manitoba if you wanted to get really involved in this suggestion. Often, the stories that are written in obituaries tell of some very unique teaching experiences and it would be nice to share the stories recalled by our members while they are still alive.

4. As well as a written story of your historical experiences, Chapter members may be encouraged to record virtual interviews of retired teachers from the area talking about their teaching experiences. These videos could be running on a laptop, iPad or other virtual display monitor within the museum displays. Some of our Chapter members may enjoy taking on this project. You could expand this project to talking with your local television channels to develop a program using these interviews. Getting local media involved would generate interest in the museums and promote the history of the local Chapter teachers. Don’t forget radio interviews discussing your project and local newspaper interviews. Any media coverage, including social media, would be wonderful for the local museum and a source of pride for your members.

5. Depending on the size of your museum and the willingness of the museum staff to offer you more space, you could create a whole new stable display which illustrates more current artifacts from recent years such as the 1950s – current times. Many museums have a one-room school setting with blackboards, older desks and older books but there have been many changes between then and now.

6. To encourage newly retired Chapter members to get involved, you could elicit them to generate some classroom ideas/ activities at various grade levels which could be used by your local museums when there are school visits. These could be used by the tour guides during the museum visits or by the home room teachers of the visiting classes as a follow-up to the visit. The “historical education theme” ties in well with Social Studies and History as well as cross- curricular ideas in the subjects of language arts, mathematics, science and others.

7. Students visiting a local museum may be encouraged to interview a local relative or family friend who was a teacher to find out more about the educational experiences of their parents, grandparents and others in the past. A set of questions could be developed to start these conversations.