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.

Week Five: Filling in the Blanks

As my last post indicated, our plan has begun to solidify. Dr. Beiler sent out my drafted email to our prospective contributors and we have begun to receive responses. Right now, we will have Drs. Lindsay, Murphree, Long, and Clark from the UCF History Department. Regulars at the museum will also be attending, including myself (of course), Dr. Beiler, Cyndi, Regina, and Betty Sample. Andrew Sandall, the Executive Director of the Daytona Beach Museum of Arts and Sciences will also help. The group is diverse and I am optimistic that the group tour will be of much value. Once we have settled on a handful of core themes, I will be able to make some headway on writing the main narrative of the grant proposal.

In the meantime, I have been filling in the blanks of the grant proposal that need no astute analysis of our collections and purpose. My last blog post detailed the most exciting aspect of last week: planning the group tour and planning session. But make no mistake – that is not all I did last week. Indeed, if my only accomplishment in two 8-hour days at the museum was drafting one email, well, that would quite underwhelming, wouldn’t it?



The work station: where the magic happens.

Besides reaching out to our initial planning group, I also synthesized the existing promotional and marketing strategies for the Public History Center. Not surprisingly, the NEH wants to see that the applicants for their Planning Grant have a thoughtful and articulated marketing strategy to expand community awareness and get visitors through their doors. It wouldn’t do the NEH much good giving a grant to an institution that has no visitors and no plan to find visitors, right? In the process, I was encouraged to find that the Public History Center has held many workshops and community events in the last year to establish a presence in Sanford. We have also printed some promotional materials, including postcards, bookmarks, and posters. In the future, finances permitting, it would be great to advertise our events via radio and, dare I say, television.

I also filled out the section for evaluation methods, something contributors to the museum have already developed. Like marketing strategies, the NEH wants to know how institutions plan to evaluate their proposed and/or implemented changes. How will they improve their plans and exhibits based on visitor feedback? As it turns out, the museum has identified (if not fully implemented) evaluative methods based on visitor surveys and other means.

The grant is slowly starting to take shape.

Week Four: Assembling Our Initial Planning Team

After switching my attention to the National Endowment for the Humanities Planning Grant, the first order of business was to assemble an initial planning team. To be sure, this initial group is not the “project team” that will collaborate on the interpretive plan (though, surely, many of them will partake in the planning and implementation of the eventual interpretive plan). No, instead this group will help give us an initial sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the museum and its collections. Perhaps, then, it would be more appropriate to call them an initial focus group? Either way, whatever the appropriate name of this group, their task is important. Theoretically, if all goes according to plan, this planning team – err, focus group – will give us the consensus on the strongest themes and narratives found in the museum.

From there, we can then begin to identify experts in the particular themes identified. These experts would then serve as consultants during the drafting of an interpretive plan. But I’m getting ahead of myself …

After consulting with Dr. Beiler about forming an initial planning group, I returned to my computer to draft an email. The email invited relevant participants to join us on a group tour of the museum in its entirety, including all its exhibits and gardens. The date was set for Thursday, June 20^th. In the email, I explained the purpose of the exercise as well as our expectations of the potential participants: We would provide each of them with one 3”x5” notecard and a pen. As we progressed through the museum tour, the participants would be asked to jot down themes that seemed especially prevalent to them. Understandably (and expectedly), each participant possesses a different background and area of specialization. The hope is that they will all notice some variation of themes. They would be advised not to write more than five strong themes (but, please, no less than three either). After our tour, the group would convene in a room and commence discussion about the diverging views of the museum. My hope, if all goes smoothly, is that the group will be able to boil down their divergent themes into several coherent ones. After that, their jobs will be done. Easy, right? That was my hope anyway, as we needed as much help as possible.

I sent the drafted email to Dr. Beiler; after changing a few things to suit her tone, she sent the email out to our prospective group. We invited many historians from the University of Central Florida History Department, the Executive Director of the Daytona Beach Museum of Arts and Sciences, and the Public History Center staff. Their expertise ranged from topics including Florida history, Southern history, Native American history, histories of race in the South, political history, agricultural history, historic preservation and public history, and, lastly, the day-to-day workings of the museum. Not a bad spread, right? Of course, not all will be able to attend, but the more the merrier.

So, with all this discussion, perhaps you are wondering: “What are these ‘themes’ he keeps talking about?” The themes will be the focal points of the museum; broadly speaking, they will be the museum’s most identifiable aspects for the community, they will also underpin the main narratives ubiquitous among the museum exhibits. Barbara Abramoff Levy, in the edited collection Interpreting Historic House Museums, notes that interpretive “themes” must “express what it is the site wants visitors to know or understand.”¹ With that said, my initial inclination is to assume that “education” will emerge as a strong theme for the Public History Center. It is, after all, a former schoolhouse (built in 1902). Plus, at least a few of the existing exhibits engage ideas about education. Of course, “education” is not a theme; however, the growth and evolution of education in Sanford (dare I say central Florida even) certainly is. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself … It will be exciting to see what our group identifies.

1. Barbara Abramoff Levy, "Interpretation Planning: Why and How," in Interpreting House Museums, ed. Jessica Foy Connelly (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002), 51.     

Week Three: Switching Gears

So with the beginning of week three of my internship, I started in earnest to develop a project team for our interpretive plan. Of course, the week was stalled somewhat by the Memorial Day Holiday; in the end, I was only able to make it to the Sanford museum on Friday (though I’m not about to complain about a 3-day weekend).

My week was nonetheless still fruitful. On Wednesday afternoon, I placed a call to Laura Keim. Laura is the curator of the Stenton House Museum in Philadelphia, PA. She is also one of the architects of the Stenton House interpretive plan (which is conveniently posted to their website – any would-be interpretive planners would be advised to check it out). We spoke for about half an hour and engaged in many aspects of the planning process. My first question, however, was how to assemble a project team. What did the project team do? When did they do it? And who did what? How did the scholarly consultants and museum staffers work together? Or did they? I garnered a clear sense of how a team should collaborate on the creation and implementation of an interpretive plan. Laura also made something else clear: an excellent institutional interpretive plan would take between 9 months and a year to complete. A good interpretive plan, if started today, still couldn’t be completed before New Year’s.  Even a shoddy plan couldn’t be churned out by the end of Summer Semester (August 2^nd). So that news brought me back to my original question – what can I do this summer that would be meaningful to the museum?

When I finally did arrive at the PHC on Friday, I relayed Laura’s advice to Dr. Beiler. A (mostly) completed sophisticated interpretive plan was looking increasingly elusive within the brief timeline of the internship. So, back to grant-writing, an idea that was thrown around initially during the first few days of the semester.

My new goal is to complete a competent first draft of an America’s Historical and Cultural Organizations Planning Grant for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Public Programs. The planning grant (if all goes well) would avail the museum with $40,000 to support, among other things, “preliminary design for any of the interpretive formats to be used” and “meeting with scholars and other content advisers, program partners, and audience representatives.” Perfect! The grant would provide the resources for the PHC to develop a sophisticated interpretive plan for the museum. With my attention now shifted to the NEH grant for the remainder of the semester. The remaining hours of Friday afternoon was spent developing an action plan to complete this task.

First things first, we needed to establish a consensus about what the museum’s strengths are moving forward. I am hardly capable of making these decisions alone, so my first step was to reach out to UCF faculty and relevant local scholars. We needed to take a group tour and decide, once and for all, what themes we intend to emphasize in the future (and which I will need to highlight in the grant). I left Friday afternoon with the intent of reaching out to these scholars first thing Monday.