Project Item Type Metadata
Content Experts
Barbara Clark Smith
James Gardner
David Kobrin
Elizabeth Butler
Deliverables
planning and implementation, The Object of History will draw on the expertise of a planning and advisory committee that will include curators, museum educators, historians, teachers, web designers, and programmers. This diverse group of advisors will be drawn from the staff of NMAH, CHNM, and school districts in the National Capitol area. Through a series of three planning meetings during the first six months of the grant, the committee will oversee the project and make specific decisions about the historical, pedagogical, and material cultural content of the “object lessons.”
make the final selection of the six objects and topics from the following tentative list of ten: 1750s Silver teapot (American Revolution); Sunstone from the Mormon Temple at Nauvoo, Illinois (antebellum reform and religion); Mary Todd Lincoln dress made by ex-slave Elizabeth Keckley (slavery and Civil War); White/colored signs (Jim Crow and segregation); Buffalo Bill Wild West Show Poster and Theodore Roosevelt’s Chaps (Western settlement and mythology); Ballot Box (Progressivism and political reform); Model T Ford (industrialization and consumer culture); NRA eagles (New Deal State); first Barbie doll (women and gender in the 1950s); Woolworth lunch counter (civil rights).
work with committee, educators and curators, to storyboard each object lesson and develop the teaching and contextual materials to be included in each Teaching the Object of History section. This phase will also include the writing and editing of “How to Read Historical Objects,” the more general set of materials that will accompany these object-specific lesson plans, documents, links, and readings.
development of the of the six object clusters
the design and building of the interactive technology that will be used for the live Curator Chats
recruitment and publicity plan that will result in registering high school U.S. history teachers who plan to have their classes participate in the interactive phase of the project
twenty-four on-line chats (four for each of the “six object lessons”) in which NMAH curators will interact with high school students around the country. the planning committee will reconvene three times to review and comment upon the effectiveness of the “object lessons.” And because the six interactive “object lessons” will be spread out over six months, we will be able to respond to these comments, address concerns in midstream, learn lessons from experience, and make changes accordingly to improve the quality and effectiveness of the project even while it continues.
we will embark upon a series of activities designed to disseminate our framework for interactive educational programming to smaller museums. These efforts will include developing a set of downloadable object lesson templates, publishing articles and advertisements about our experience, making conference presentations, and providing five free consultancies to other institutions
Second, we will use quantitative and qualitative evaluation techniques to assess whether we have achieved our project goals
]]>