T-Minus Four Days Until Opening

**I accidentally posted this to our blog from last semester, so this is a few days behind schedule, but hopefully everyone saw it in its original post, and here it is now!**

 

I did a little theater in high school. It was nothing worth putting on my resume, just a few silly small-town shows. Since we’ve entered exhibition install week, though, memories of my brief stint in showbiz are flooding back. Install week is a lot like theater tech week—well-scheduled plans, last-minute alterations, small-scale catastrophes, and of course, THE question: “Will it all be done in time?”

 

I’m inclined to believe the answer is yes. All of the things we have been working on as individuals and in our teams are coming together—quite literally as we assemble the various parts of the gallery space. When we got to the eGallery this morning, there were several objects in the space, but it might have been difficult for an outsider to see what the room was going to be. Not for us, though. Thanks to months of planning (And a lot of help from Sketch Up!), we all have a vision. This construction stage is more exciting than overwhelming, because we know where we are heading, and we have plans to make it happen. Just like a theatrical production, we have memorized our lines and putting on our costumes and arranging the set is the only thing left. We know what Friday night will look like because of our planning. There is still a lot of hard work to cram into these last few days, but it will all be worth it when that curtain goes up.

 

This picture is of our “stage” in the early part of “set construction.”

 

History Books and Crochet Hooks

Public historians need a wide variety of skills. In addition to the research and writing skills that traditional historians need, public historians need to be familiar with graphic design, technological applications, customer service, and event programming, just to name a few. The HA program has broadened my horizons in many ways and helped me to begin to develop more skills that need to be kept up the sleeve of any public historian. The most recent skill I’ve picked up is one I had no idea I would ever use for academic purposes: crochet.
The Education Team (Stephanie, Erin, and I) have been working to put together video tutorials for various crafting techniques that the Buzzards used. The lot fell to me to make the tutorial for crochet, but I did not know how to crochet at all. Fortunately, once I began researching, I found that the basic stitches are not too difficult.
After some practice, I was ready to film, and Stephanie ran the camera while I tried to explain and demonstrate what I had just learned. The video editing process came next, and that was a bit of a challenge that also involved some trial and error as I tried to remember what we had learned in our iMovie training session at the Gregg Lab.
Even though I don’t plan on starting any crochet projects for a while yet, it is satisfying to have something concrete that I can use to demonstrate the learning I’ve been doing. I can clearly say, “I now know something I didn’t before.”
Thinking about this has caused me to reflect on the learning process in general and how it can be difficult to measure. We’ve been talking about this in our Interpretation class, and reading from Falk and Dierking’s book, Learning from Museums. As we are looking for jobs and internships, it’s exciting to think that our jobs will be places of learning for us, as well. We will learn new historic content, of course, but we will also develop new skills—ones we might not have even expected, like crochet! The best thing is that this will happen throughout our careers and not just the first few years, because of the very nature of museum work, and that is very exciting.
Since my video is still undergoing editing, here’s Stephanie’s on Huck Weaving—something she did not know how to do before this program, but now she’s quite talented!