04 Erik Holland Teacher Partners

Exactly yeah the curator of collection is what people are in museums and I’m the curator of education so I handle and manage education but my collection is the audience and so it doesn’t make any difference if it’s an elder or a toddler or a school group or a lifelong learner I work in ways to engage them in things that are here so one of the things that we talked about thinking about was I think teachers in classrooms have a difficult time identifying and then locating access to objects that can help them to effectively tell the stories and teach the class I mean meet the standards that’s what we’re all in this for and so we at the Historical Society have suitcase exhibits they’re called send trunks that teachers can check out from us and have for two weeks in their classroom and they’re object-based the whole concept of them was back in the day when I was at Fort Clark I said archaeology is something people don’t understand and I think if we could get archaeological objects into people’s classrooms these teachers would be able to teach archaeology so that their kids when they come out to a place that’s really an important place but all it is a big grass field they can make an image of it so the sand trunks were the model for them the prototype was built then and they’ve been in practice ever since and they’re up to you know pioneer women and building bridges and every one of the native cultures in the state there’s a individual trunk floor that teachers could check out so if they were doing some of the work on Indian education then needed to have a piece of beadwork and a piece of quill work to be able to look at the transitions and applications between one culture and another or the transition that’s in the same culture or you know looking at the various perspectives of that those objects are available for them and that’s what museums are and so in the gallery spaces they come in teachers with classes come in and they’re sort of overwhelmed by the wealth that they have opportunity to engage in and I think if a teacher is a really an effective teacher they could spend a little bit of time planning what it was that they needed to teach how they wanted to teach it and what objects they would use and focus that so that the energy of the students is put into the learning instead of into them I mean you’ve got to have that aha moment but you also need to have more sort of guided directed learning and museums can help with that but we can’t do it all