The 18th Annual History Issues Convention was held at the New Jersey State Museum last month; the theme was “The New Model for History Institutions: How to Become an Indispensable Community Resource for Schools and the Public.” The keynote speaker, David W. Young, Executive Director of Cliveden in Philadelphia, spoke about how a Revolutionary-era historic house museum in Germantown transformed itself into a site of active community engagement, a place where museum staff and visitors work together to interpret the site in the context of 20th century history.
This presents an important question: What exactly is a museum? Is it a historic building, full of antique furniture and stories of the past? Is it a place to view a painting by Picasso or pieces of an ancient Egyptian pyramid? Can it also be a place of dialogue and democracy? A place where families come to talk about ideas, where immigrants come to learn a new language, where a community organizes about problems? Perhaps a museum is all of these things.
Certainly, today’s museum professionals are re-thinking the role museums can play in 21st century American life. In an era when museums are losing traditional sources of funding and support, addressing issues of civic engagement is a creative, even crucial, way to continue to be relevant and innovative. Our museums and historic sites are places where people may meet to engage community problems and reflect upon a shared past in creative ways. The National Park Service, which has been a leader in this conversation, defines it this way,
“Civic engagement means building communities by creating or reinforcing relationships between people and promoting a healthy dialogue about, and active participation in, civic life.”
Museums have long been interested in the concept of “shared authority” – that a museum must work collaboratively with its audience to determine interpretive goals and programming. Civic engagement takes this idea one step further; it suggests that museums can be places to form community bonds, rather than just to reflect or acknowledge them.
Historic sites and museums both big and small have embraced the idea of civic engagement. At each institution, the work takes on a different cast, depending on the specific needs of the community and the particulars of the site. By using collections or special exhibitions, many museums encourage meaningful, measured dialogue to explore fractious issues. Sometimes these dialogues are overt, facilitated discussions; other times, collection items are used to spark new ways of thinking.
Some sites have re-envisioned their institution as a civic space. They have offered up museum buildings and grounds as meeting places for community organizations. The museum will often bill itself as a safe space where groups with differing opinions can come together on neutral ground.
Other museums employ their professional expertise to help influence community problems. By historicizing contemporary debates, museum professionals can provide important context and defuse controversy. Many, many sites have re-tooled their interpretation to encourage visitors to contemplate an uncomfortable past or confront a fraught present. These sites employ history as a path to understanding civics.
With this blog, I hope to explore the creativity with which our region’s historic sites and museums have answered the call to engage more deeply with their communities. In the words of Ruth Abram, former President of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and a giant in the field of civic engagement,
“…[H]istoric sites must function as places of civic engagement, using the history they interpret as a starting place for dialogue on related contemporary issues.” [Ruth J. Abram, “Kitchen Conversations: Democracy in Action at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum” in The Public Historian, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Winter 2007), pp. 59.]
For Further Reading:
- Animating Democracy: Fostering Civic Engagement Through Arts and Culture
- “The Arts,” The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America. Harvard Kennedy School. 1999.
- Mastering Civic Engagement: A Challenge to Museums (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 2002).
- Robert D. Putnam. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
- David Thelen. “Learning Community: Lessons in Co-Creating the Civic Museum” in Museum News (May/June 2001).