Author Archives: Jaime Gomez Rodriguez

06/28/16

Being a Part of the Museum

            Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.

Kierkegaard

            The evening of June 23rd found me participating in a special event organized by the Museum’s Learning Department. They invited a group of students from the Diversity Institute at the University of Victoria (U Vic). The purpose of their workshop was to offer the group the opportunity of taking a critical look at the Modern History’s gallery view on diversity.

The students were invited to bring an object that was meaningful to them. All the objects were used to recreate the decision process that determines how objects are incorporated into a museum collection.  (Since I was also an active participant in the session, together with the other UBC student doing a CFE practice at the Museum, from now on I will refer to the group of students as “us” rather than “they”). We were given the opportunity of making any of those objects part of the Museum collection from 10 am to 11 am of the following day and also the freedom to do so in any way we found suitable. I expressed having a connection with one of the objects brought in and, together with my UBC partner, put it on display in the Maritime section of the Modern History gallery, for this contains information on the presence of Spanish explorers in British Columbia during the 18th century. This is a historic episode I have had a great interest in since I found about it, because I am originally from Colombia, a country with significant ties to the Hispanic culture. I also included in the display questions related to immigrants in British Columbia, myself included, such as “What do immigrants bring with them to BC? What do they leave behind?” The discussion that followed our intervention in the gallery, which served as a conclusion to the activity, made me aware once again that not all of us who immigrate to BC have the same motivations and needs, and that we do not all fit the same mold even if we all are in the same category.

This special activity was also a reminder of what I now think of as an inevitable tension when studying history: how in the abstractions or generalizations of collective historical processes we may lose sight and appreciation of the individual historical processes; of how we tend to think of “history” as collective and “story” as individual. Objects that are incorporated into museum collections might not tell us the individual (hi)stories behind them but they do allow us to recreate the world they were a part of, a world we might still have ties with regardless of the time and distance existing between those objects and the present, our present.

This activity brought into my attention once again a thought that I consider necessary to incorporate into this reflection: our understanding and appreciation of the present. While history allows us to revisit the past and “right our wrongs”, for example when it comes to respecting diversity, we should also be aware of the “rights” of our present world. There have been discriminatory immigration policies in British Columbia’s history that are now untenable in our society and in our educational system.  I believe all educators in BC should highlight in equal measure both the harm inflicted by those policies and the fact that we are no longer being governed by them because it is now, in the present, that those policies are unacceptable.  In this way also I believe we are more likely to offer our students a more hopeful –but not naïve- vision of the future. In light of events currently happening in other places around the world, it is an ever more significant and urgent contribution to make from all of us living right now in British Columbia.

 

 

 

 

06/20/16

A Day at the Museum: a new kind of field trip

During the second week of this CFE I have been thinking about a new kind of connection or use I would give to museums as a destination for a school field trip. I had mentioned in my first reflection that the Royal BC Museum is very much in tune with the purpose and goals of the new curriculum by becoming actively involved in the generation of knowledge through inquiry. Over the course of the last few days, I have actually thought of the Museum itself as a source of inquiry through the content of its galleries. I will refer in particular to the Natural History gallery. The Natural History gallery is divided into six sections, and the first one is focused on the Ice Age (Pleistocene epoch). Identified as “A Changing Past” in the museum maps, its very first introduces one of the “big ideas” of this gallery: change is the only constant in the natural history of BC. This section is followed prompt by “A Changing Present”, a section dedicated to present day climate change, its causes and consequences. It includes information about weather, climate, the greenhouse effect and the impact that human activity today is having on the world’s climate. It also presents major climate changes not caused by humans such as the 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano, located in Indonesia, or the climate changes that happen every thousands of years because of corresponding changes in the Earth’s orbit and orientation to the sun.

I mention all of these facts because they help me describe a realization that I wasn’t aware of before being at a museum for a sustained period of time: museums provide us with the unique opportunity of getting the whole picture of a topic, a theme or an idea. Being reminded that climate has changed throughout the history of the planet and that it is not an effect due exclusively to human activity has also helped me understand this natural phenomenon better and given me a more balanced and comprehensive approach for teaching it. By this I mean that it will allow me to go beyond a simplistic view of humans as the only “culprits” of drastic changes in the natural world, while still acknowledging that we do have a huge responsibility in doing the most we can to prevent the changes that our activities can bring upon all living and non-living things in the planet.

I will elaborate now on the idea of museums as a source of inquiry, particularly in relation to field trips. In my school experience, field trips usually have come at the end of a unit or at the end of the school year, a “fun” activity meant to wrap up the topic that has been studied.  Due to the fact that museums can provide us with the holistic view of a theme, illustrating how different disciplines contribute to our knowledge of it – in this particular case, especially mathematics and science- I am now thinking of field trips as the activity to start the unit by inciting the inquiry questions with which the students will generate their knowledge. An example of those possible questions are ones that I have asked myself while studying the gallery over the last couple of days: if human activity hasn’t been the only cause of climate change, why could the changes we are indeed causing be far more reaching and definitive than on previous occasions? How are present day changes different to previous ones? What explains the difference?

As I write this reflection, I wonder about the kind of questions the students could ask; of course, I expect their questions to be related to their cognitive and emotional development. Regardless, I remain very excited about this new way of seeing museums as “inquiry hubs”. Knowledge is meant to generate knowledge, an idea I see as a defining feature of the new curriculum, and one that is made physically tangible in places such as the Royal BC Museum.

 

06/14/16

The Royal BC Museum as a Generator of Knowledge

            The first week of my CFE has been quite a pleasant surprise. I have witnessed firsthand the role of the Royal BC Museum as an institution that embraces the spirit and aim of the new curriculum. It does so by providing its visitors, staff and volunteers with the opportunity of being the ones who actively engage with knowledge and formulate their own inquiry questions, making them generators rather than passive receptors of their own learning. I have also been greatly impressed by how the Museum reaches out to the community and does not simply wait to be visited by it.

            On the very first day at the Museum we took part in one of the “Interpretive Sessions” done with the Museum volunteers. The purpose of this session was to have us, the UBC students, and the volunteers look critically at the Mammoth exhibition and select the facts that were most interesting to each one of us so the Learning Department could reflect on how to improve the experience of all the people who visit the exhibition. Emphasis was placed on the fact that any suggestions should come from our own interest; in my case, I was very much surprised by the fact that mammoths originated in Africa and later spread to those regions where one commonly associates them with, such as Siberia.

            The next day we helped in facilitating two field trips. The first was of a Grade 1-2 group from Victoria, and the second a Grade 4-5 group from Burnaby. It may seem obvious, but the fact that a school is coming to Victoria all the way from Burnaby showed me how the Museum is a focal point, a magnet if you wish, of the greater learning community that is the whole of BC. I say this because for the last ten weeks I was very much aware of mostly one learning community- the one of the school in which I was doing my practicum. It took only two days to notice how the Museum goes beyond its nearest sphere of influence, Victoria, to schools in the mainland and even further beyond if one considers the many foreign tourists who visit it.

            The school sessions were also centered on the students as the generators of the knowledge, of the inquiry questions. The children were divided into groups, and each group was given a First Nations artifact without being told what it was. The students were encouraged to infer the use of the object, but first they had to describe it. They could also ask “wonder questions”, that is, question the artifact as if it could give them an answer. I chose a mat creaser for the two groups I worked with. This approach was very interesting, particularly with the grade 4-5 group, because the students were able to pose questions that came from their analysis of the weight, shape and features of the object. The students thought it could be a food grinder, a toy or decorating object, and were genuinely surprised by its actual use when they found the creaser in the First Nations Gallery.

            But the event that definitely caught my attention the most was the screening of a live dive at the IMAX Theatre in the Museum. This is an initiative of the Fish Eye project, an environmental organization whose main goal is to innovate the way in which students learn about the oceans. In partnership with the Museum and as part of World Oceans Day, they held a live, interactive transmission of a dive from Ogden Point. I had the opportunity of witnessing this special event, together with 4,000 students in the province, who also got to ask questions to the naturalist “guiding” us through the underwater world that was being filmed. This live screening was part of a “World Oceans Day Expo” the Museum put together for this day, and in which several other institutions and organizations were present, such as UVIC, the David Suzuki Foundation, Ocean Networks Canada and the Shaw Centre for the Salish Sea, just to mention a few. This event and the live screening have given me a new understanding of the Museum as a generator and not a mere repository of knowledge, of the work that is being done here and, equally important, of how it is being done: in partnership with the visitors, the students and the greater BC community.