Please Touch the Artifacts: Education and Collections Departments Co-Design an Exhibit for Family Audiences to Practice Primary Source Inquiry

Abstract

Pack It Up! was a fully interactive history exhibit for all ages, targeting primarily families with elementary-school-aged children. It invited visitors to work collaboratively through open-ended object inquiry and primary source analysis. Collaborative exhibit design between the education and collections departments led to an exhibit that answered these questions: 1. How can an object-based exhibit be made fully hands-on? 2. How can an exhibit support young visitors to develop empathy for people from the past?3. How can an all-ages exhibit address elementary school social studies standards?Even as highly interactive exhibits become ubiquitous, in the museum field we often see artifacts and interactives as mutually exclusive. Pack It Up! made local history accessible to a unique range of audiences and learning styles without facilitation by fusing museum education and collections pedagogies. The collaboration between the collections department and the education department led to creative solutions to exhibit challenges we saw an opportunity to address. The exhibit offered a new way to use objects to teach the processes of historical inquiry to audiences of all ages.

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