Week Six: The Group Tour

Finally, after several weeks of planning, we held our group tour on Thursday, June 20. My goal was for the group to brainstorm some major general themes that were evident in the museum. As has been mentioned earlier in this blog, I am writing the NEH Planning Grant with the goal of acquiring the requisite funding to bring in expert consultants to help the PHC staff develop an institutional interpretive plan. But who do we want to do the consulting? What do we want consulting for? The goal for this preliminary tour was to answer those questions. Once we had established a consensus – in the most general of terms – I would begin the task of compiling a list of potential consultants, based on areas of expertise.

The group assembled in the front hall entranceway. The participants included Drs. Long, Murphree, Clark, and Lindsay, and Tiffany Rivera, all from the UCF History Department, Andy Sandall, the Executive Director of the Daytona Beach Museum of Arts and Sciences, and the staff, including Dr. Beiler, Cyndi, and Regina. Kristen, our docent, gave the group a tour of all of the exhibits, as well as the gardens outside within an hour. In some of the rooms, the group was noticeably intrigued (the 1902 classroom exhibit, as well as the Crooms Academy exhibit, for instance) while in other rooms there was a sense of underwhelmed confusion (the geography room, the “American Ingenuity” room, and even the Native American room, shorn of interpretation or actual artifacts).  

Following the tour, we convened in the “Global Village” classroom to discuss the themes that emerged. The most obvious theme that everyone agreed upon was “education.” The building and its collections were especially well suited to tell a compelling story about the history of education in Florida. After that, however, consensus became a little more elusive. Many good ideas emerged, but none that had the support of the entire group. Eventually, we settled on themes that, while conveniently flexible in their definitions and usages, were also somewhat vague. The group decided that the museum was well positioned to engage narratives about “community” and “local” history. While very true, these themes don’t lend themselves to identifying nationally-recognized scholars as potential scholars. While there are obvious choices for scholars specialized in Twentieth-Century Southern education history, who is an expert in “local” history (as a humanities idea, not as a type of public history). Some of the participants thought we were getting ahead of ourselves; that the museum was nowhere near ready to begin thinking about large themes. Still, we needed to start somewhere.

Overall, the day was very productive. The input from all of the participants was invaluable, and it gave us a more coherent focus moving forward.