Special Summer Course on Teaching History with Museums, Jul 8-18

The School of Education at Mercy College will be offering a new graduate summer course/workshop from July 8-18 on teaching history with museums:
EDUC 611 (Special Topics)--Unlocking the Rich Pedagogical Power of Museums for Grades k-12

Have you ever visited a museum? Of course you have. But have you ever thought of a museum as a visual textbook? While museums present a highly authoritative role in interpreting the past, they are in fact quite subjective. We will learn to think of museums as historical accounts and interpretations that can be analyzed and questioned like more traditional “texts.” With our newly-learned skills, we will be able to develop field trips and classrooms exercises that more fully exploit the learning potential that museums have to offer.

During this course, we will examine the characteristics of different types of museums, the challenges and limitations they face in interpreting the past, and how they serve as a form of visual history. We will take our own field trips, visiting several local museums in the New York metropolitan region representative of these types of museums to engage in first-hand learning experiences. Each trip will be followed-up with discussions of learning strategies and drawbacks for k-12 educators for teaching this type of museum.

Guaranteed to be useful for social studies and humanities lessons, enjoy a summer exploring the history around you while learning new teaching ideas that will unlock the rich pedagogical power of museums!

Interested participants should contact Dr. Eric Martone for further information.

Dr. Eric Martone
Mercy College
Dobbs Ferry, NY
Email: emartone@mercy.edu