Liberating Heritage Content to Classrooms Via the Web

Making it Real:

Using digitized heritage content to follow up on new ideas and create meaning for students.

In this section:

• Learn by doing: real processes create real understanding.
• Linking activities to relevant curricula.
• Encouraging community involvement and mentorship in the classroom.
• Rewarding student achievements

Heritage professionals can help students and teachers with the follow-up to their visit in a variety of ways using web-based activities to further expand on museum content. Teachers and students who are not able to visit the museum but are interested in enhancing their curriculum with similar material can also use these same activities to enrich their classroom experience.

Whether a class is returning from a museum visit, or is simply working on a new topic that can be enriched by heritage related content, students can often feel very enthusiastic about a piece of newly acquired knowledge. It is important that teachers be able to engage this energy as soon as possible and focus it into interesting and relevant experiences inside the classroom and, if possible, in the local community as well. Engaging high-school aged students can be particularly difficult in a fast paced, information driven culture where media are constantly evolving to be more and more exciting. Heritage professionals and educators alike can be left wondering: “how can we keep up?” By creating activities for teachers to use in their class, heritage professionals can help create a positive experience for their audience, strengthening relationships with educational audiences even when they are no longer in the museum.

While trends and styles in presentation and learning methodology continue to evolve, creative processes that relate to an object have a much longer shelf life and can be applied timelessly with a great deal of success. It is important to let students “learn by doing” and gain hands on experience by making their own work inspired by heritage related content. It is beneficial for students to be able to participate in well thought out activities that reenact the processes used to make an object found within an exhibition. An example of activities relating to Massive Change content can be found in the “Toolkit” section of the Massive Change In Action Website under the “Learning Activities” section (http://massivechangeinaction.virtualmuseum.ca/toolkit/activities/index.html).

In addition to creating engaging activities, it is also important to provide teachers with easy access to outside materials that complement the required curriculum, this can be done by linking directly to the curriculum guidelines within your digital content. By connecting each learning activity to relevant curriculum guidelines teachers can build their case for complementing their existing curriculum with rich, up-to-date and high quality content from heritage related collections. Teachers are very innovative and adaptable but due to time constraints, may have difficulty linking heritage content to their lesson plans. If this information can be organized in advance, with definitive associations to the curriculum, it will encourage teachers to access heritage related learning experiences for their students.

Heritage professionals can also collaborate with teachers and engage the community at large by helping them to find appropriate mentors for students in the classroom. This can be done both physically and via the Web, by creating a network of qualified people with interests relating to the content, who are willing to devote some of their time to role-modeling. These people could be professionals, students from higher-level academic institutions or qualified volunteers. Sometimes all it takes is a quick email or phone call to an institution or person with similar interests to initiate a valuable collaborative experience.

Finally, it is of great benefit to provide students with the opportunity to exhibit their own original work. This can also be done either physically or in the form of a web-based student gallery. During the Massive Change In Action project, students were given a high profile exhibition space in the Art Gallery of Ontario. Teachers noted a dramatic increase in the quality of student work and attributed this directly to the exhibition space. While students will often have their work shown in their own schools, it is rare they are given the opportunity to exhibit their work in a public environment (on-site or On-line). By providing exhibition spaces, heritage professionals can encourage youth to participate in culture and heritage activities in rich and meaningful ways.