I am a recent graduate of the public history graduate program at Rutgers University. I currently serve as the digital media coordinator for the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, where I wrangle bloggers and tackle our social media platforms.
In the last two years I've created an oral history database using StoriesMatter for the Salem County Historical Society, collected data on school group attendance for the education department at Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I've digitized the Balch Institute Ethnic Images in Advertising Collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. I volunteer at the Alice Paul Institute in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey and the Digital Center at HSP.
In my spare time I am often silly and irreverent.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
A Virtual Tour of the Now-Closed Liberace Museum in Las Vegas – Flavorwire
The Liberace Museum needs to reopen so I can ogle those costumes and instruments. The sequins! The feathers!
Beware Social Nostalgia (NYT OpEd)
“There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.”
—Stephanie Coontz
Long story short? Be a historian.
PubComm13, or How I Learned to Love Camden
On April 26, 2013, graduate students and professionals in the public humanities participated in the third annual Public History Community Forum—PubComm13. This year’s event was held at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey in the Cooper Street Library in Johnson Park. Participants toured historic Cooper Street before the lunchtime keynote address. A series of roundtable discussions and a large group Q&A closed the day.
Hail to the Humanities
“Why are the humanities deemed useless? I have taken courses in English, art history and women’s and gender studies, and I found that these demanded more of me than my other, more “practical” classes. Humanities develops the skill sets necessary for success beyond Dartmouth. I learned to observe, analyze, think critically and write. Each of these skills allows one to develop into an effective and productive worker and prepares one for real-world tasks.
In fact, humanities prepare students for an additional requirement of the work force: creativity. Success in any field requires ingenuity and originality of thought. Humanities courses prepare students to assess existing arguments and push theirs one step further. Students develop the natural curiosity necessary to ask the right questions as well as the analytical and creative skills required to solve them.”
Op-ed: The Noble Origins of Black History Month Are Now Outdated
In this piece Cynthia Tucker argues that the “separate and unequal celebration” of black history month is, if not unnecessary, no longer functional. She argues that “black history is American history” and she is not wrong.
I would be interested in reading more about solutions to this problem. Public institutions are under significant pressure to celebrate “months.” Asian American history around the Lunar New Year, Black history, women’s history, Christmas… They run the risk of significant backlash if they fail to step up to visitor expectations.
Still, history is context and carving out special days, weeks, or months is not context. Where do we start?
"Beers to Brassieres in 150 Years" and Beyond: New Developments at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum
“Since opening in 1992 in what was previously a tenement building at 97 Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum has interpreted the lives of the working-class immigrants who occupied the building during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Now, with it its first new permanent exhibit since 2008, Shop Life, the Tenement Museum is building on its past to move in new directions, opening up new stories and using new media to tell them.”
10 Bizarre Lost Tourist Attractions We Wish Were Still Around – Flavorwire
It’s true, I’d love to see a peacock farm. I’m happy to note that Ken Nyberg’s scrap metal sculptures are still visible around the great state of Minnesota.
Inhibiting the Exhibition: A Response
So how do we push the power balance further in the visitors’ favor without totally abrogating our responsibility to be accurate, honest, and authoritative? How could we inhibit the exhibition?
Ed Rodley has gone and done it again. His latest blog post, “Natural’s Not In It” has given me a revelation in how to bridge two disparate thoughts I’ve had for awhile now—Open Authority and critical pedagogy.
About a year ago I had an “intellectual ah-ha moment” in which I realized that, “my opinions about social engagement in museums really do boil down to my views on education: just as the classroom should be shaped around student interests, the museum experience should be shaped by visitor interests.”
You can read the above post to see just how passionate I am about the Reggio-Emilia teaching model. Reggio is a progressive constructivist approach to pre-primary education that is dependent on learning being led by the interest of the child. Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” also deeply impacted my thoughts on the balance of power between teacher and student, and caused me to internalize the connection between didactic teaching methods and oppression. (It causes one to pause over the use of omniscient and authoritative voice in exhibit labels…) I feel strongly that non-hierarchical models, where the teacher-student remains equal in learning, should be integrated into the interpretation of cultural heritage in museums.
Ed’s post articulates this concept in a new way that is really helping me make the leap from critical pedagogy to open authority. He attempts to re-frame the convoluted exhibition-development process by looking at the term “inhibition,” which would presumably be the opposite of “exhibition.” I was confused by how “inhibiting” anything could be seen as positive, but things quickly became clear when the factor of “power” entered the picture (read: “authority,” if we’re overgeneralizing.)
Ultimately, the conclusion is that…
[exhibit developers should] be more explicit in inhibiting the dominating power of the exhibition so that visitors have more personal agency and power within the space.
Ed has effectively turned my frame of reference for Open Authority on its head. I have always looked at Open Authority as a means of increasing the visitors’ power in order to have an equal voice in the interpretation within an exhibit. But I like Ed’s notion that authority within an exhibit is a zero-sum game, and raising everyone’s power level is implausible. Instead, Ed is positing that we take it down a notch.
Putting my two-year-old-teacher hat on (from bygone years), I look at this in a Reggio-esque way. An exhibit developer inhibiting their power within an exhibition is similar to how, as a 2’s teacher, I would stoop down to the level of my students so that I was not towering over them authoritatively. Instead, I was eye-to-eye with them, and speaking with them not in a sing-song-y, condescending tone, but in a normal cadence like I would with any other adult. Open Authority is not putting the child on stilts to increase their power, it’s stooping to their level so that we’re all on a level playing field.
This brings me back to Freire’s critical pedagogy, and the important point that dialogue with the oppressed [didactically instructed children/visitors] is essential to humanizing [empowering] them. For the museum professional, entering into this dialogue requires inhibiting our current power structures, and only then will we get closer to an Open Authority.
I’ll close on an interesting tidbit. The 40 pages of my thesis on Open Authority do not include Freire, in spite of his work deeply impacting my thinking on democratization in museums. I did, however, craft a paragraph linking the two thoughts in my earlier drafts (it just ended up on the editing room floor.) So here’s my first stab (written a year ago) at summarizing how critical pedagogy connects with Open Authority, even conveniently ending on a note of “empowerment”…
Philosopher Paolo Freire first framed the issues of authoritative voice by defining the re-humanization of the “oppressed” as the empowerment of the under-served through community dialogue and critical thinking (2000). While his revolutionary work targets the educational system, many correlations can be drawn to the museum field and the singular representations of peoples in exhibit narratives. At its very basic, Freire’s perspective reminds us to respect the learner and to not speak for them, but to let them learn for themselves while providing guidance along the way. Museums will do well to more fully implement this deeper form of constructivist learning, and in so doing become true forums for community dialogue. The purpose of the forum is to allow others to have a voice, and provides a means for reflection and critical dialogue, which Freire considers to be imperative to empowered learning (2000).
So thanks, Ed! I feel lucky to have colleagues who continue to challenge my thinking and help me to make sense of the fine, idea-connecting threads that get stronger as we weave together our (seemingly) errant thoughts.
First Lady Lou Henry Hoover passing out Christmas baskets at the Central Union Mission in Washington, DC. December 24, 1930.
-from the Hoover Library
Oral Exams
I took my oral exam on Tuesday. One of my questions was to compare and contrast two methods of material culture analysis. So, I’m sitting in front of three professors on Tuesday, desperately to remember every detail of both Prown’s and Flemming’s models. Rather than ask the question as written. my professor (mentor, and boss) all nonchalantly pulled out an image of a porcelain doll excavated during a dig at Rutgers-Camden. Instead of just talking, I had to DO something. It was terrifying but also sort of amazing when I realized… I CAN DO THIS! I can totally do this. I got this.
And I did.
And I passed.
That’s a good moment. I hope everyone gets to have at least one of those moments in their lives.
