Connecting Kids to History with Museum Exhibitions by D Lynn McRainey John Russick

Author:D Lynn McRainey, John Russick [D Lynn McRainey, John Russick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Museum Administration & Museology
ISBN: 9781598743838
Google: mPQkAQAAMAAJ
Publisher: Left Coast Press
Published: 2010-01-15T04:07:01+00:00

Conclusion: Is History Senseless?

Why turn to the senses to connect children to history? In Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change, Maxine Greene describes the teacher as someone who creates learning environments that challenge children to move beyond the routine into a journey or a search: “To see oneself on a strange island, clearly, is to imagine oneself in another space, looking at an unfamiliar world. To poke around is to investigate that world, to pay attention to it, to think about it.”32 The past is an unfamiliar world to children, and history exhibitions can offer environments for exploration. To “poke around” is what children do naturally. Sensory stimuli become guides for inviting children into the unknown places of the past and spaces of our museum galleries while also giving the past an unexpected richness and dimension. Drawing on their own sensory toolkits, children become active participants as their senses enable them to explore and to make discoveries. Sensory experiences awaken children’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, body, and imaginations to overcome their anxieties about this unknown place, their preconceptions about history, and the distance between then and now. Through the senses, children are able to find answers to their questions: What was it like? How was it different? How can I find out?

As museum professionals, we have thought long and hard about the same questions. History exhibitions filled with sensory stimuli can signal to the child to stop and take notice, similarly to how poet Stephen Kuusisto describes his own discoveries absent of sight: “I have been lucky sometimes to find places where I could work by ear and pause for whole moments, receiving treasures of sound and sense.”33 At the end of this sensory exploration, we return to the questions of our younger visitors to a history museum: Is this place for me? Why should I care? As an interpretive tool for a history museum, the senses stimulate emotions and memories; extend access to unfamiliar places and times; and invite participation. Through the senses, the past becomes accessible to the newcomer and is filled with unexpected possibilities. History now makes sense.

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