#DLFmuseums: Using History as a Springboard for Community Building in K-12 Programming

We have Sarah Wilson joining us, Katherine Herman joining us and Veronica Proctor as well. They are the education department at the Autry Museum. I have worked with them for about three years. And they’re here just to present to us today. So thank you so much for showing up to support this.

00:00 - Thank you. Okay, ready? And here’s the link. Yeah, we’ve got the link there. We’re good to go. All right. Thank you so much, again, for coming on in.

00:00 - Sarah Wilson: Okay, so I will kick things off. Thank you, Dawn, for that wonderful welcome. And I’ll say my name is Sarah Wilson. I’m the Director of Education. And I’ll let my other two colleagues introduce themselves real quick.

00:00 - Katherine, doyou want to go first? Katherine Herman: Hi, everybody. Thanks for having us today. My name is Katherine Herman. I’m the Education Outreach Manager at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.

00:00 - And I work with classroom teachers to create boutique programming that fits the specific needs of that teacher in their classroom. And together with my colleagues, one of whom is Veronica, who you’ll hear from in a bit, we develop programming to supplement and complement the work that is already going on in the classroom.

00:00 - Sarah Wilson: Thank you, Katherine. Veronica, you want to introduce yourself? Veronica Proctor: Yeah. My name is Veronica Proctor, and I am an outreach coordinator in the education department and I support classroom teachers, as Katherine described. So thanks for having us today.

00:00 - Sarah Wilson: And I’ll note that the three of us represent only about a fifth of the actual department. There are quite a few. Actually, there are a lot more people in our department who really focus on on site programming, which of course has all been moved online right now.

00:00 - So, first, I want to help you get to know the Autry for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the museum is located in Griffith Park, in Los Angeles, which is the ancestral homeland of the Gabrielino Tongva. We’re going to talk about our mission quite a bit. And so I’ll just share that the Autrey’s mission is to bring together the stories of all peoples of the American West, connecting the past with the present to inspire our shared future.

With a name like Autry Museum of the American West, many expect to encounter costumes, props and memorabilia from Hollywood westerns. They also expect to encounter the archetypal narratives pushed by those same Hollywood westerns in the content that we share. Our goal is to expand people’s understanding of Western history, whether it’s 10,000 years ago, or something that happened yesterday, as well as who are the peoples of the American West.

We do this with the help of a collection that contains over 600,000 objects, two thirds of which are from native and indigenous communities from North America, Central America and South America. Our collection contains historical objects like the California stagecoach see at the top left hand corner, artifacts that blur the line between art and object like an Indian motorcycle, historical garments like the jacket worn by a Chinese railroad worker that you see on the top right hand corner and the sarape worn by California Governor Pacheco that you see on the bottom right hand corner and paintings like the Nisenan Maidu artist Harry Fonseca painting is in the left hand corner and film memorabilia like this poster for a Polish release of the movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

When the museum reopens exhibitions will include contemporary native Californian art about resistance and resilience. Iconic garments representing the American West, such as a plaid flannel shirt, an aloha shirt and denim jeans. Native Californians and their relationship with the environment. An ethno Botanical Garden, a community led exhibition about Griffith Park, the true history of cowboys going back to the vaqueros of Mexico, women in the archives and how pop culture has imagined the American West since the 19th century.

Prior to the global pandemic, we welcomed 40,000 K through 12 students to the museum for onsite programs and another 12,000 students for outreach programs. And now I’m going to turn it over to Katherine, who’s going to talk to us about…

00:00 - Katherine Herman: Thanks, Sarah. So again, my name is Katherine.

00:00 - And let’s let’s talk about what empathy is. It’s a term that we’ve all heard. It’s a term that we all embody. But what is it and why does it belong in the museum? Merriam Webster defines empathy as the action of understanding, being aware of being sensitive to the thoughts and experiences of another. In other words, imagining feelings that one doesn’t necessarily actually have. And at the Autry Museum, we like to say that history is a series of choices that people make.

So no matter what time period or event you’re studying, you can always bet that people were involved. museums are also uniquely positioned to address empathy, and specifically in history museums. The Autry’s mission statement, as Sarah mentioned, asks us to tell the stories of all peoples of the American West and so at the Autry, we’ve ultimately been given instructions to help our audiences learn about people, the choices they make, are made and the consequences good or bad of those choices.

So today, Sarah, Veronica and I will be sharing examples of educational programming at the Autry museum that really sort of center around empathy as a universal value. We also want to acknowledge that we know not all of you work in an education department. If you do, we hope that these programs we discussed today, sort of spark ideas about programs that you can create at your own institutions. If you don’t work in an education department, we hope that you can think about sort of where and how empathy plays a role in your department or your institution as a whole.

And whether you work in collections, education, conservation, library, archives, what have you. Ultimately, we’re all working with communities and with objects that belong to those communities. All right.

00:00 - And also, we just, we think our programs are awesome, and we hope you like to hear about them. So, Sarah, next slide, please. And again, please. Okay, thanks. So today, I’m going to share with you a sort of introduction to empathy projects we did with eighth grade students at one of our local schools. This project has a really simple structure and is easily replicable and is by no means a proprietary project, we’ve seen it elsewhere.

Lots of lots of teachers are using projects like this. And so this is sort of our version of it. So a few years ago, we partnered with a classroom teacher who wanted his students to learn about community and identity.

00:00 - You can spend years working to understand you know, your own community and your own identity, and how you fit within the larger context of a community. So we decided to choose the theme underneath the larger community and identity umbrella and settled on having students explore their families migration stories, which again, is another topic upon which you could spend, you know, years investigating, but we only had a couple months, so we made it work.

So together with the classroom teacher, we settled on a compelling question or a driving question, which would sort of lead the project and that question was, Why are you here? So our goal was to was to have students find out from family members, why they moved to the particular neighborhood that they did, and in some cases, how, and to use that information from all of these oral histories that the students would collect, to tell a story about the larger makeup of the community.

And to do that, we decided to focus on universal themes. It can be really hard for people of any age to relate to things that we learn about in history. I mean, we hear all the time in the education department, I’m sure many of you do to miss, why do I have to know this that happened like 100 years ago, and that it’s a it’s a challenge we all face? And so the way that we approach that in our education department is by pulling out universal values, right? Things like happiness, struggle, freedom, fairness, things that we can all latch on to at some level.

Next slide, please, Sarah. Thank you. So our process was really simple. We created a set of questions that students could use during the interview, we created the questions with the students. We taught the students basic oral history, interviewing skills, and we sent them on their way. One students had collected their oral histories.

00:00 - They then transcribed them, and worked with our education staff to pull out similarities, differences and things means that they noticed throughout all of the stories that the class had collected, then we had the students group, the stories into overall themes, which were things like education, a better future, needing to leave to find safety and happiness.

00:00 - Then we had the students use what they learned and the information they gathered to create an exhibition in their classroom, about their community and who lives there. And finally, we had students create a visual representation of that oral history. So we had them turn their analysis into something visual, like an art piece, or a, you know, a poem.

00:00 - And we had them prepare some talking points for an exhibition opening, so that when their families came on opening night, they could share their process and what they learned. Next slide, please Sarah. So this is what the room looks like on opening night. It was designed to be a simple, quiet space where families could sit down and listen to the oral histories without a lot of distraction. Of course, the interview, the interviews that we had people listened to, we we had their permission to share them.

There were plenty of families who requested that their interview stay private. And so of course, we respected that. We also had plenty of the interviews available in both English and Spanish so that the majority of visitors could enjoy them as much as they could. We also had students sitting out at a table in front, I think maybe that’s the next slide, Sarah, if you want to go the next one, oh, this is the…

00:00 - Yes, you can go one more. Thanks. So we had students welcoming visitors, handing out cookies and water and sort of explaining to them what they would see inside. And you know, after a semester of the students being super nervous and unsure about what this night would look like, it was awesome to see them just sort of beaming with pride and to see their families really proud to because their families were involved. So again, like I said, this type of project is easily replicable in the classroom, all you really need is students, family members, or, you know, members of the community that they’re close with a recording device, a computer and some headphones.

00:00 - Sarah, you can advance one more, please. So what did we learn? There were a lot of significant takeaways for us at the conclusion of this project. And the first is that empathy is multifaceted. There are so many ways that we can teach empathy.

00:00 - In a museum, we really just have to choose the path that is most appropriate for the project, the goals and for our institution.

00:00 - So in this specific project that I just spoke about, we really focused on perspective recognition, right, we weren’t asking students to step into the shoes of their interviewees per se. Instead, what we were doing was introducing them to the idea that these people they live with people, who many of us may take for granted on a daily basis, have faced significant challenges in order to create a better life for their children and for their families.

00:00 - The other takeaway was that, you know, this project began a conversation at home about core values, which then trickled into conversations in class, which led us to believe that empathy really starts at home. And so that’s another reason why we love doing these kind of projects with students. And finally, though, this may seem obvious, you cannot teach empathy in 55 minutes, or even in a semester long project like this. Empathy is a muscle that needs to be exercised in order to remain strong.

And our hope with this project is that a conversation had been started at home and in class that will then carry over once the Autry leaves the partnership. So that’s that on that, Sarah, I’m going or Veronica, I’m going to hand it over to you. Great.

00:00 - Veronica Proctor: Thank you, Katherine, for sharing that project with us. I always enjoy hearing about that. Sarah, next slide, please. Alright, so again, my name is Veronica. We are the West, documenting community and identity in the 21st century is an example of an Autry classroom with curators project, which is our outreach program. It’s an example of a project highlighting community that we worked on before the pandemic with Cal State LA.

The idea for this exhibition was created by Dr. Dawn Dennis, and she curated this exhibition with her history 2020 students during the fall semester of 2018, and this exhibition challenge the stereotypical myth of the American West, through photography and caption labels.

00:00 - The image here on this slide is of a booklet about the exhibition that I will talk about in a bit. Next slide please. So we provided support to Dr. Dennis and her students in a number of ways, one of which was facilitating different workshops at Cal State LA. During an American West workshop, the students explored the concept of the imagined West and where that concept came from. And we discussed with the students how the American West isn’t just time period from the past.

But it is a place that includes its past, its present and its future. And that place includes all of the animals, the land, the plants, and the people in it, including the students’ American West communities. Next slide, please. So we also provided support to Dr. Dennis and her students, by giving them free admission to the Autry museum to visit our La Raza exhibition. The students were able to view photographs from the La Raza publication in the exhibition, which were a powerful tool for documenting the marginalized voices of the Chicano community during the Chicano community, sorry, during the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 70s.

Next slide, please. So since the students were photographing their American West communities, we facilitated a workshop focusing on photographing community and identity using different principles of design like contrast patterns, and leading by lines, we did encourage the students to think about what made their American West communities unique, so that they could tell and capture the story that they wanted to tell about their communities, [inaudible].

Next slide, please. So these students also were writing caption labels to go along with their photographs. So we facilitated another workshop on label writing at Cal State LA. And we taught the students how to write and caption labels for their photographs. And we returned to Cal State LA A few weeks later, to facilitate a feedback forum. During this feedback forum, the students were able to share drafts of their caption labels with us.

02:15 - And in return, we gave feedback that they could use to refine their final caption labels. Next slide, please. So the final way that we provided support to Dr. Dennis and her students, was by exhibiting the photographs in a gallery at the Autry museum for several weeks. We also published all of the students caption labels in an exhibition booklet, which you can see in the bottom image on the slide. And this was for students for visitors to reference as they looked at the photographs, you can see the visitors in the top two images referring to this booklet as they’re looking at the photographs.

Um, students had the opportunity to share their photographs and their caption labels with visitors at a student exhibition opening. And after the student exhibition opening, the students artwork remained on display at the Autry museum for several weeks. Next slide, please.

03:26 - So Changemakers is the next example of an Autry classroom curators project highlighting community that we collaborated with Cal State LA on before the pandemic. Dr. Dennis also developed the idea for this exhibition, and curated this exhibition with her history 2020 students in the fall of 2019.

03:55 - And this exhibition showcased different present day changemakers from the students’ American West communities, photography and caption labels. And we provided similar support to Dr. Dennis and her students on this exhibition as we did with “We are the West” too, except for two changes. Next slide, please. So instead of having the students visit one exhibition at the Autry Museum, we had the students visit several exhibitions at the Autry Museum, including our human nature exhibition, our communities of the American West exhibition, and our investigating Griffith Park exhibition.

The students analyzed objects, artifacts, labels and quotes that represented different changemakers in the American West past and present, using a worksheet that guided them through this process. Next slide, please. And then instead of exhibiting the students photographs and caption labels at the Autry Museum, the exhibition took place in the students community at Cal State LA JFK Memorial Library for several weeks. Next slide, please.

So Dr. Dennis’s students continued to complete the changemakers assignment by coming to the Autry Museum in the spring of 2020. Once the pandemic hit, students no longer had access to the Autry Museum. But we still wanted them to have access for the artwork, objects to the labels and to the quotes.

05:45 - So we decided to bring the Autry Museum to the students virtually by creating a distance learning activities like the one on the slide. That included text and images from the exhibitions so that the students could complete the assignment virtually. Next slide, please. So, the last example of an Autry classroom curators project highlighting community that I’m going to discuss with you today is called Art and Activism. And the idea for this exhibition was created by Sonia Hanson, an art teacher at the Maywood Center for Enriched Studies.

She created this exhibition with her art students during the spring semester of 2019. And this submission, looked at the role that art plays in activism, and the exhibition did take place at their school. Next slide, please. So we also supported Sonia and her students by having them come to the Autry Museum.

06:55 - See the La Raza exhibition. We also had them participate in an art and activism workshop at the museum, in which they had the opportunity to analyze artwork, labels and quotes that represented different communities and the social issues in those communities as a form of activism. During the workshop, we did encourage the students to think about their own communities, and the social issues that affected their communities. And we also encouraged them to think about how they could use art as a way to advocate for their communities.

While the students were working on their art, we facilitated another workshop at their school on label writing, so that they could learn how they could write caption labels that told the story of their art. Next slide, please.

07:56 - So once the pandemic started, we decided to create two different distance learning activities that were based on the art and activism workshop. Both of these distance learning activities are available to middle school and high school teachers and students on our website. The first distance learning activity which can be seen on the left of the slide, features artwork that represents a desert community and the social issues that affect their community.

While the distance learning activity on the right side of the slide, features artwork representing different Native American communities, and the issues that they experienced during the Gold Rush. In both distance-learning activities, students are given the opportunity to create their own artwork that represents their communities and their social issues as a form of activism. Next slide, please. So since a majority of the Autry classroom curators, projects that we worked on, before the pandemic includeded a social action component in which students helped to create change in their community, we decided to create an Autry activist learning activity that is now available to elementary, middle school and high school students and teachers on our website.

In this activity, students learn how to help create change in their community by using a worksheet like the one on this slide that takes them through the process of thinking about their communities and the social issues in them by researching social issues and researching activities that they can do to help create change. And then students choose an activity, they actually take action, they then reflect on their experience of taking action, and then they share that experience with others.

So thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to speak today. Sarah is going to share a another project with you. So take it away, Sarah.

10:18 - Sarah Wilson: Thanks, Veronica. So now I’m going to talk about two programs that we had, one specifically an exhibition that we put together and then an educational component for an exhibition. And even though these were exhibition-related programs, the education department really drove the activities in these programs. So the first one is the citizen journalism project, which was created in conjunction with the La Raza exhibition. Veronica mentioned that earlier, the Autry hosted that exhibition in 2017, as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time L.

A. L. A. initiative. The exhibition really explores the use of photography as a narrative device in the La Raza magazine and publication. And what’s really interesting about this project in the exhibition is that the timing could not have been more perfect. We started working on the exhibition back in 2014, long before we knew what would happen in 2016. With the presidential election, however, we didn’t actually get started working on the citizen journalism project, until the fall of 2016.

When it really became clear that citizen journalists were playing an important role in political coverage, in coverage of stories of communities across the United States, both for good and for bad. We also realized that the same issues raised and discussed in the La Raza magazine and publication during the 1960s and 70s were still relevant today. The issues that were talked about in those articles included lack of safe housing, lack of people who spoke Spanish in public spaces, particularly in hospitals, and in government services, offices, income inequality, police brutality, gender abuse, women, women’s rights.

So all of those things where we’re coming up. The Vietnam War, of course, was also very prominent, but for the most part, when people came through the exhibition, one thing they kept saying to us was, gosh, we haven’t solved anything halfway. And so what we wanted to do with the citizen journalism project, was create a project that celebrated the contributions of the La Raza editors, writers, photographers, and illustrators, show the continuing need for the citizen journalism represented in the publication, and also engage with new communities and new partners in new ways.

So we reached out to schools, friends, and community organizations, such as Las Fotos Project, and right girl, you see their logos here, we also spent time just reaching out to senior citizen homes and that sort of thing. And we worked with each group to create an assignment for each participant. And the assignment was to serve as a citizen journalist for your community for one month. And so we had people start doing this in January of 2017.

That before we even gave this assignment to folks, we spent time several sit downs with each group classroom with each organization, each person who was interested, we talked about the history of citizen journalism in this country and talking about the need for ongoing citizen journalism. And one memory I have in particular is sitting down with a group of fifth graders, 10 and 11 year olds, students talking about citizen journalism and having them ask in January of 2017, but aren’t citizen journalists responsible for the election of Donald Trump until we had to begin grappling with this question of fake news and science and trusting your sources and things like that.

And so through these conversations, we’re really building communities of citizen journalists throughout Los Angeles County. We left it up to each participant to to define their own community. For some, community was their home, their synagogue, their neighborhood, their classroom, their basketball team, their swimming team, their group of friends, etc, etc. And then we left it open to each participant to decide the medium through which they wanted to share the news of their community.

And so some used photography, some wrote poetry, some wrote essays, some set of sketches, it really was quite a variety of material. And so I just wanted to show you just a couple of photographs from the first issue, the first volume, the first issue. And again, the timing was really interesting, because people were given this assignment to do beginning in January ‘17. And in fact, we had the kickoff event the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration.

And so a lot of people were really wanting to share their perspectives on things like immigration, on things like women’s rights, on income inequality, on all of that. And one thing that we kept hearing from all the participants, but particularly the really young children, we had people from as young as nine to 89 years old participating.

16:03 - What we heard from children and their parents was that no one really ever asks children their perspective on things in mainstream media in the news, we’re always asking adults what they think. But we never really asked children what they think.

16:17 - And as well, there are certain groups, we asked what they think. And we don’t always take into consideration all different perspectives, especially when sharing news and in the mainstream media. So these are the three issues that we created Signs of the Times, L. A. L. A. Portraits of a Community, and the titles of these were taken from the exhibition. And each issue is available on the website. Each issue we sent copies to those who participated, we celebrated each new issue with an opening event at the museum where participants could bring their families, they could tour the exhibition, and see how their words really created and made this kind of connective bond between the issues and the stories raised in the exhibition to today and to what’s still happening today.

17:22 - So then, the other project I want to talk about is our human nature exhibition, we wanted to do an exhibition that looked at native Californians, and how they have used traditional ecological knowledge to maintain relationships with the environments in California, and how to take that traditional ecological knowledge and solve some of our thorniest problems today. And part of the problem was that we there was no one on our team who was a native native Californian.

And so we had to go to the communities to really listen to their needs to get the content to actually get the tone of the language for labels correct, to understand how best to display objects, so that when visitors walked in, they weren’t hearing the stories from that kind of curator, voice of God approach. But really, it was more of a conversation between museum visitors and the native communities. We’re serving as advisors for this exhibition.

So we started off by holding a lot of community meetings with community members. And then we used a filming project with Casey t, which is in LA. It’s one of our local PBS syndicates, affiliates. And so as we were talking to them and recording those conversations, what they said, We really didn’t want to try and translate for visitors. We wanted to keep those quotes in tact. And so what you see in these pictures that the three that are quotations are actual quotations from the community advisors from our native advisors.

They said it better And so you’ll see that around and across the entire exhibition than we do.

19:19 - space. But we also realized that a lot of this material, a lot of this content is very new for a lot of people, for most people, actually, what we realized was that for most people, their thinking of ecological knowledge, knowledge about the environment, doesn’t stem for our visitors doesn’t stem beyond turning the lights off when you leave a room, turning off the faucet while you’re brushing your teeth, and that sort of thing. And so this was so much bigger than that.

And it was a combination of both science, ecology, environmental science, as well as culture, language, indigenous religions, tradition, ceremony, and all of that. So we realized that we needed to find a way to use labeled text and design to bridge that gap between what the native advisors were saying in quotes in some of the label text and what visitors knew. We call this meeting the visitors where they are. And so what we did, we’re really fortunate, the gallery space was brand new.

And so we had an empty gallery, blank walls, as you can see, and so we started printing out images, we wrote up very hastily, on computer paper, and on craft paper questions. We, we wrote some potential label text. And then we had visitors come in, we gave them post it notes. I think the education department’s budget on post it notes alone is in the 1000s. For this sort of very thing. We gave people Sharpies, we asked them not to write on the walls, or else our collections department would hunt them down.

But we asked questions that we told visitors as well, as you’re reading this material, if they use you if you’re not understanding if you want more clarification, or if something triggers an interesting or an emotional response, and you write that down, pop it up on the wall. And then we asked some kind of broader questions, and put those down on craft paper and invited people to sit and answer those questions by writing on the craft paper, you see that in that photograph on the bottom right hand corner.

So we did this over the course of three months, and found a way to kind of bridge where our visitors knowledge began and where our native advisors knowledge ended. And so what you see in this particular exhibition, is a space that provides room for building empathy from both sides building empathy, empathy from our visitors, but also for our native advisors, and trying to share these stories in a way where visitors can continue to ask questions, they can continue to share their perspectives of their thoughts.

And so the the end result is an exhibition that even though it is, you know, it’s open, opened in 2016, it’s evergreen, and it’s constantly building, it’s kind of like an analogue Twitter conversation, without the mean tweets and things like that. But it’s something that is constantly evolving, and, and sharing new information with us. And so that kind of wraps up our portion. We’d like to now open up the floor for questions. So I’m going to stop sharing my screen.

22:58 - But here are our email addresses if anything that we have said, sparks a thought or sparks a question in you you’d like to ask us more later on. We are happy to to help use our skills.

23:17 - And questions I guess I’m not quite sure done. And Gayle, how you’ve done this in the past questions over chat or Gayle Schechter: We tend to do both ,whatever folks are comfortable with if you want to put it in the chat. Go ahead and do that. If you want to just unmute yourself and shout it out. That’s cool too. Yeah, go right ahead. A ll right.

23:51 - So actually, one question I have is so, you definitely mentioned having to shift some programming with the pandemic and not you know, I you know, being close to the public and everything. In addition to though like the the worksheets that you created that are, you know, available on your website, which is awesome.

24:14 - presuming schools are going to be at least you know, hybrid for some time now, Are there additional kind of remote learning activities that you’re working on or have done? Sarah Wilson: Yep, I’ll share my screen real quick with you.

24:27 - Gayle said, this is our site. This is our distance learning site. And we have webinars, which are live facilitated virtual classes, students can jump in and join us. Content is animals, California, Gold Rush, women’s suffrage, transportation trails, West hidden heroes, which is essentially Veronica’s change makers program that she’s talking about. We have lessons and fun activities. So these are self paced lessons that Veronica was talking about earlier.

We have digital tours, which are essentially a virtual version of our docent led tours. We also have educational videos, a lot of these are pre recorded videos of the webinar lessons, because we know not every classroom teacher can schedule a webinar based on inequality to access, Wi-Fi, their own teaching schedule, that sort of thing.

25:27 - And then we have additional resources. And right now we are continuing to expand. We’ve got primary research collections coming to us soon from our Library and Archives friends, we are exploring with 3D maps and online games. And then next semester, we do not anticipate on site school visits to return in the fall. And so for the fall semester, we’ll be doing actual live virtual gallery tours with them since just a little bit of what we’ve been up.

26:00 - Dr. Dawn Dennis: Thank you for sharing that, Sarah. I appreciate that. Does anybody have any questions or just wants to contribute to this? Yeah, I thought so Gayle, was really cool. any last comments, Katherine or Veronica and Sarah that she wants to share with an audience about the Autry and the programs and just the opportunities there.

26:18 - Katherine Herman: We’re also still working one on one with classroom teachers to develop, you know, boutique, we call it boutique programming, but you know, whatever they need in their classroom, as long as it sort of fits our mission and scope and bandwidth, of course, we will develop that for the teachers and work with them and zoom into their classroom and leave workshops and things like that.

26:43 - Gayle Schechter: Thank you. Sarah Wilson: Do you want to share this student visual arts? Katherine Herman: Oh, yeah.

26:48 - We also have an annual student visual arts exhibition, where we send out a call for submissions, and this will actually 2020 was visions of community and the art was all students turned in their art in March, about 200 pieces of art, and then we close down.

27:08 - So we will, instead of exhibiting the student art show at the museum this year, we will be displaying it digitally. So we are going to digitize all of the artwork that we have accepted, upload all of the students labels, and hold a virtual exhibition this year. So keep an eye on us.

27:25 - Dr. Dawn Dennis: And we have a you have a date for that virtually? Katherine Herman: No. Okay. No.

27:30 - Dr. Dawn Dennis: Keep us informed ,keep us informed about that, you know. Yeah. Any other questions from the audience? Thank you guys so much for attending today to share space with the museum education department. Before we close out, Gayle, do you have any updates for our next meeting in March? Gayle Schechter: So our next meeting will take place Wednesday, March 24 2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific, we’re going to have our open topic meeting.

So if you have anything you want to talk about, in terms of what you’re working on, any projects to promote and share, just questions about linked data, anything, we’re going to be talking about that in March. And then just a quick announcement from my compatriots on the CLIR side of things. The 2021 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives program will be opening up for applications soon. There’s a link in the agenda to tell you a little bit more about the program this year, as well as links to register for two upcoming informational webinars they have for applicants.

So I definitely encourage you to reach out to the folks on our grants team. If you have any questions, I can certainly direct you to the correct folks who can help you with those. But otherwise, that’s it from me, and I’m looking, you know, thank you again to the Autry for joining us today and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone next month.

29:02 - Dr. Dawn Dennis: All right. Thank you so much, everybody.

29:05 - Thank you. .