In the summer of 2021, I worked as a Museum Education Intern at Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Old Sturbridge Village is a living history museum which interprets everyday life in 1830s New England. It has a collection of historic structures and reproduction buildings as well as gardens, fields, and animals which costumed interpreters use to demonstrate period activities to visitors.
The Museum Education Department
The Museum Education department at Old Sturbridge Village has two primary purposes. Primarily, the department works with visiting school groups, homeschool groups, Scout groups, and others when they visit the village. In the Museum Ed Building, educators teach young visitors period cooking, crafts, and other skills. The department also provides support for Old Sturbridge Academy (OSA), the charter school which shares a campus with the Village. Educators take classes out into the Village and lead Learning Through Experience sessions, also known as LTE’s. Students from OSA use the museum as a learning laboratory, connecting experiences in the Village with the lessons in science, math, social studies, and other subjects that they learn in the classroom.
Discovery Adventures
The Discovery Adventures summer camps are one of the biggest programs in the Museum Education department. Over the course of a week, students in age groups 6-7, 8-10, and 11-14 explore the Village and learn about the 1830’s through different themed programs, all while in costume to help make the experience immersive.
For the first few weeks of the program, I worked with the 6-7 age group. I co-taught in costume with two other educators. We did period crafts with our students, played period games, made a 19th century recipe, and taught them about life in the 1830’s by bringing them into the Village to meet with the interpreters and do hands-on activities such as gardening.In the last few weeks of the program, I worked with the 11-14 age group. This group did many of the same activities as the younger age group, but was able to complete more complicated projects.
In the last week of the program, I was a lead teacher for the “Crafts and Trades” program, which helped students experience life in the 1830’s by completing wood crafts, sewing projects, and trying out trades such as blacksmithing and coopering. One of the tasks I took charge of during the week was teaching my students how to complete woodcrafts. I leaned to use equipment like the shaving horse and draw knife so that I could teach my students how these types of projects would have been completed during the time period.
I enjoyed lead teaching this session because my students encouraged me and challenged me to develop myself as an educator. The projects we worked on utilized many skills that the students had never before experienced. I loved working on these projects with them because it kept me on my toes and made me constantly think about better, clearer ways to explain the process of doing the projects. My students were so engaged with the projects and with each other that their enthusiasm created a very positive dynamic within the group.
I was also able to teach this group a bit about my specialty: historic preservation. One of the activities we did was building a scale model of a timber frame. In the early 19th century, homes were built with heavy timber frames consisting of thick beams and corner posts without intermediate supports (studs) like wood frame structures today. I was able to teach the students about the different names for the beams, builder’s marks (used to number the beams on the ground so that the builders know exactly which pieces go together when assembling the frame), and period construction methods as we worked together to build the frame. This activity allowed me to combine my love of historic preservation and building conservation with my love of museum education.
QR Code Proposal
Each Museum Education intern was also given the opportunity to complete a personal project of their choice. After my experience working with QR codes at the James Monroe Museum, I decide to work on a similar project for the Village. I began the project by taking an inventory of the QR codes already used by the Village. The museum currently uses these codes for the CRIS Access tour, an audio tour which helps interpret the museum for blind and low vision visitors. I found, however, that not all of the codes worked when scanned, and others were missing entirely. There was also very little direction on how to use them, and staff was often unaware of their presence, making it difficult for visitors who need to access the tour to ask questions about how to use it. I also found that QR codes on the River Walk signs no longer led to any content, as the webpage which hosted the content is no longer active.
I created a proposal which presented two possible ways to utilize codes in the Village, along with rationale and methodology for their implementation. The first suggestion was meant to address concerns about the physical accessibility of the museum’s historic structures. OSV already had 3-D tours of many of its structures on their website, with more on the way as I was writing the proposal. I suggested that QR codes be posted outside of the buildings with a link to the 3-D tour, providing improved physical access to the structure, along with an option for visitors who do not wish to enter a crowded building during peak visitation times. I provided directions for placing the codes outside of the structure, including the creation of a small housing to both protect the codes from weathering and make them easier to spot for visitors. I also provided a section of potential concerns in order to offer proactive solutions for any issues what might arise if the codes are implemented.
My second suggestion was similar to the project I completed for the James Monroe Museum. I suggested the use of QR codes to offer an interactive opportunity for visitors, especially for those visiting in multi-generational groups, which can be difficult to reach all at once through one demonstration. The codes would be used in a scavenger hunt-style quiz, where families could both search for the codes and work together to answer the questions they correspond to. I again suggested a methodology for implementing the codes, as well as some design examples from my previous project at James Monroe. I offered a potential pilot location within the Village for this quiz/scavenger hunt, as well as another section addressing potential concerns and offering possible solutions for those issues.
Working with Old Sturbridge Academy
Another part of the internship was working with the students at Old Sturbridge Academy. I assisted the other educators in facilitating the LTE’s for the students, which ranged from catching and releasing different insects in a grazing field to learn about local species, to accompanying students to the dye station to learn about natural dye processes. Towards the end of the summer, I also helped the LTE coordinator by adding some information about trusses to an activity where students explored the Village’s two covered bridges, once again allowing me to bring my historic preservation experience to the internship.
