Innovator Vol. 35 No. 3 - Spring 05: Learning Partnerships
Return to contents Going Beyond The Field Trip: The Henry Ford SOE Partnership
by Jeff Mortimer
When The Henry Ford (formerly Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village) in Dearborn, Mich., received a U.S. Department of Education technology challenge grant for what it called its Primary Sources Network, the intention was to create curriculum materials from the facility’s primary sources that could be used in the Henry Ford Academy, the charter high school that was being established on the museum grounds.
But after six years of development by a team of museum curators, School of Education faculty, staff and graduate students, and classroom teachers who tested the results, what has emerged, in addition to curriculum materials that are getting rave reviews, is a whole new set of perspectives on how museums and universities can support educators.
“It was a sizable chunk of money that was to be given to museums and/or schools to develop technology that would support people’s learning from museums,” Professor Bob Bain, who was Principal Investigator for its fi nal two years, says of the grant. “The people at The Henry Ford felt they had this incredible set of primary documents and artifacts and objects of Americana that were not being used as effectively as they could be.”
When the museum approached the Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education (hi-ce) at the University of Michigan, “The question was: Could you help us develop technology that would improve access to museum resources for students and enhance the quality of their learning?” says Bain, who was a high school history teacher for 26 years before becoming a faculty member. “ What we proposed to The Henry Ford was that we thought it was more than a technological problem. We saw this as a problem in learning and pedagogy which required us to study how people were using museum objects, to design curriculum that would give students a reason to use museum objects—as well as technology that would support teachers and students in using the curriculum—and to study what we were learning about this.”
The Henry Ford accepted the proposal, which expanded in a sense the purpose of what they were doing, and thus began this partnership. “I want to emphasize that it was a partnership,” Bain continued. “U of M is not the hero in this. Each of us brought very different skills and knowledge sets that improved the quality of the work we did together.”
“How it evolved over the years has obviously become something much greater than just creating curriculum for the Henry Ford Academy,” says Judith Endelman, director of Historical Resources and the Benson Ford Research Center at The Henry Ford. “When we started to work with the University of Michigan, they spent a lot more time on developing what Bob calls the scaffolding to create the curriculum.”
“The problem we found was that when students use the museum resources, unmediated by the kind of supports we think they need, they typically were interested in what they saw at the museum for a very short period of time, a minute and a half or two minutes, and then their attention went somewhere else,” Bain says. “When they returned to their classroom, there was almost no way for them to continue investigating anything they had seen, short of going back to the museum.”
Bain and his colleagues called this the “one-shot phenomenon: one shot to look at something, one shot to talk about it, one shot to take notes on it, one shot to reflect on it. All of our research told us that such an experience was not going to produce deep learning.”
But what they suspected could achieve that end was the incorporation of the artifacts into a continuum of inquiry and interactions before, during and after a museum visit. The five instructional units that resulted, three in science and two in history, do just that. “What makes an object a source is the question of the inquirer,” says Bain. “If you don’t have a question, that’s an object, and it either has to speak to you or it doesn’t. If you have a question, you’re going to make the object talk.”
The two pieces of software the team produced, the Virtual Curator and the Virtual Expedition, allow students to “visit” the museum in advance, so they are looking not just “at” but “for.” “We gave kids questions and problems and then took them to look at the object,” says Bain. “Then they couldn’t leave the thing.”
Of course, they had to eventually, but in contrast to the “one-shot” system, they didn’t have to leave their investigation. The software also provides links to more than a thousand primary and secondary source materials at the musem and other historical archives, many of which are not otherwise accessible to the general public..
The idea, says Bain, is “to engage students in a more sophisticated, disciplined inquiry, where the object became a critical piece of evidence in their inquiry, and to support novices in doing a more sophisticated analysis of an object than they could without our support and give them the opportunity, as all good scholars do, to go back to their sources regularly as they develop more understanding of the problem they’re working on.”
One of the stars of the software is the Mattox House, from Richmond Hill, Ga., that Henry Ford acquired in 1943 and moved to Greenfield Village. History students use it in their study of human migration and industrialization, science students in learning about construction techniques and materials.
“One of our goals was that the Virtual Expedition can be used in two different disciplines,” says Charles Dershimer, who helped develop the Primary Sources Network science curriculum as a graduate student and now uses it as a teacher at Henry Ford Academy. “The history people look at it in terms of what this house represents about the culture and the people who lived there. We look at it in terms of the environment it was built for, the building materials they used to build it, and how did they keep the roof from collapsing on their heads?” The materials were “road-tested” for two years in the Melvindale-North Allen Park Schools and at the Henry Ford Academy before they were deemed ready for dissemination. “We probably went through six or seven editions as we watched teachers teaching and students working with it,” says Bain.
The results have been enthusiastically embraced by teachers and students alike. Steve Best organized a three-day summer institute at The Henry Ford last August to train teachers in the use of Virtual Expedition. As director of outreach and professional development for hi-ce, Best has borne the principal responsibility for presenting and disseminating the software, which is what he was also doing at the Michigan Science Teachers Association meeting in Detroit six months later. “A number of teachers were there who had participated,” he says.” They came up to me and said, ‘I remember you from summer institute, we just loved it, we’re using those materials.’ ”
“It’s a course at the school that the kids look forward to,” says Dershimer. “They’re always asking when they can take it.”
Endelman got a taste of that enthusiasm when she took part in a question-and-answer session with Steve Mucher’s students in the Plymouth Canton Community Schools (like Dershimer, Mucher was part of the development team as a graduate student and now uses the fruits of his work in the classroom). One of a student’s tasks in the history curriculum is to design a floor plan for the Mattox House based on what he or she has learned from source materials, then email it to Endelman and see how it compares with what the curators did.
“We’re trying to develop closer ties to the educational community, really focus on teacher training. We have learned some things from working with U of M that we’re consciously applying. It is about impact, going beyond just being a place for field trips, which is how museums interacted with schools in the past.” |
“The most stunning thing about that experience was how passionate the kids were,” says Endelman. “It’s just a floor plan of a little house in Greenfield Village, but they cared about it so much. They had invested in it, created an argument, seen what we’d done, and they really wanted to know why we had made these decisions because they had marshaled their own evidence and their own arguments and had a proposal, and when ours contradicted theirs, they were upset … in a very mature way. It made me realize that they had learned a tremendous amount from this exercise. The Virtual Curator enables kids to really understand what it means to figure out a historical problem. They ended up knowing and understanding a lot more about our work and how we present history than most of our visitors do.”
There are many other ways in which this project is opening eyes on all sides to previously unexplored possibilities, such as how museums and universities can educate each other.
“What we’ve learned in the last six years has been unbelievable,” says Bain. “The power of presentation, how you construct displays, how you analyze objects—those are all things that curators bring to the table that are not second nature to history educators or science educators. The meetings that I had with the curators at the museum were like graduate seminars.”
And how museums can better educate both students and the general public.
“We’re hosting a National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute for teachers on our site that will focus on industrialization in America,” says Endelman. “We’re trying to develop closer ties to the educational community, really focus on teacher training. We have learned some things from working with U of M that we’re consciously applying. It is about impact, going beyond just being a place for fi eld trips, which is how museums interacted with schools in the past.”
Nancy Bryk, interim director of Historical Research and Education and curator of domestic life at The Henry Ford, was the U-M team’s principal resource and contact for work on the Mattox House. “It’s a great alliance for us,” she says. “We’re happy to provide what they think will work for teachers and students and I trust their judgment absolutely. I think it’s very exciting to have students exposed to unusual primary sources instead of getting it all regurgitated through textbooks. There’s no institution like this institution that can provide curriculum developers with primary sources, that can provide food for thought, case studies, links to very specifi c tasks, a touchstone to the past. This is one of a hundred ways we could use this partnership. What we say is bravo! More!”
Photo: Mike Gould
From Left to Right: Dr. Robert Leclerc, Brian Fairchild, Sean Washington, Ashlei Chears, Rebecca Hunter
Resources:
Henry Ford Museum Web site: http://www.thehenryford.org/
Primary Source Network, Hi-Ce Web site: http://hi-ce.org/projects/psn/index.html
