Why You Should Interpret Difficult History for Children and Families at Your Museum
In the middle of July 2020, I found myself at a crossroads.
The museum where I work had reopened from Covid closures conditionally, but everything felt off. The flow of the historic house tour was changed. The group sizes were dramatically smaller. And for me personally, as the lone educator remaining on staff, I remember looking around and thinking, “now what?” There were no school groups, no scout groups, no large community events.
As far as the education department was concerned, there was nothing, except me in an empty classroom. And a ringing phone.
Because I work at a historic house museum that interprets the difficult history of slavery, many local families were reaching out to us in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, looking for resources on how to talk with their children about the history of racial injustice. In all my years of museum education, I’d never experienced so many individual families reaching out, specifically looking for programming on Black history. I’m still not sure if it was the urgency of the moment, as they grappled with the shocking tragedies, or if it was that families were desperate for anything to do after months of Covid isolation, but I think the demand was likely fueled by a perfect storm of both pressures. Regardless of why, my phone was ringing. Call after call, parents were saying, “I want to help my children understand. Do you have any kind of tour that is appropriate for children on the history of slavery?”
And just like that, a new program was born. I took my field trip program, which was sitting lifeless on the shelf, and adjusted the logistics to work better for individual families. This one small change opened up a completely new world of programming for our site, which I’ll likely write more about in the future, but that’s not the point of this post. The point here is that these family tours began to get attention from local media, and from there, it spread. I began to get calls from other historic sites, asking more about how I was approaching this subject.
Those phone calls both shocked and surprised me. “What?” I thought. I didn’t feel like I was doing anything revolutionary. But it was resonating.
Then one day, I got a call that absolutely floored me. A college professor from out of state had heard about my program, was planning a visit to Nashville, and wanted to meet me to hear more about this tour. “Sure,” I said, not sure at all about what I could tell her that she didn’t already know. But a few weeks later, we met and I was completely flummoxed by her words. She told me she’d been asked many times to speak to local school-age classes on the subject of slavery and she struggled, because she couldn’t bring herself to, as she put it, “water down the truth” to make it age-appropriate.
Because I’m a professional, I like to think I kept the sheer shock I felt from being written all over my face, but I probably didn’t. Water it down? What was she talking about? I could hardly get my words out, I was so confused. “I don’t water it down,” I explained. There’s a huge difference between “watering down” information and making it age-appropriate. I realized that many of the colleagues who were asking questions about my method were facing the same confusion.
But those weren’t the only calls I got. Since launching this tour specifically targeting a family audience, I’ve also fielded many questions from parents, who are considering the tour, but are worried about the effect the program might have on their children. Would they be overwhelmed, too sad, or somehow scarred by the learning?
Good grief, I thought one day, after walking yet another parent through the details. The same tour was being critiqued as being too light on the subject and too heavy on it, all at the same time. (And by people who hadn’t taken the tour, I might add; but that’s a subject for another day.)
That’s when I realized, both critiques were missing the point. The point of this program was not to dump a lot of hard-to-bear knowledge on the shoulders of young children. Nor was the point of this program to turn the hardness of this story into something soft and cuddly. The point of child-friendly, age-appropriate, authentic truth telling programs on Black history (or any difficult history, for that matter) is to build knowledge in the mind of the learner and to grow empathy in their heart. There’s a lot to unpack here, so we’ll focus here on the building knowledge part, and tackle empathy growth in another post.
The point of child-friendly, age-appropriate, authentic truth telling programs on Black history (or any difficult history, for that matter) is to build knowledge in the mind of the learner and to grow empathy in their heart.
Building Knowledge in the Mind of the Learner
Recently, I’ve been diving deep into Learning from Museums, the literal textbook on how people learn in the context of museums. I read the first edition of this book well over a decade ago, back when I was in grad school. The second edition, published in 2018, is updated and absolutely worth the time it takes to read it. For me, the gem of this book is how well Falk and Dierking explain the “contextual model of learning,” which is the way in which all learning is layered in our minds over time, across space, and in relationship to all of our past experiences, the macro and micro cultures in which we’ve been raised, and the unique way each of us is wired.1
As it relates to difficult history, I find that combining Falk and Dierking’s model of layering knowledge with Julia Rose’s framework from Interpreting Difficult History, provides a strong road map for teaching difficult subjects with both age-appropriateness and authenticity. If her work is unfamiliar to you, Rose explains that the learner of difficult history goes through the 5 R’s: reception, resistance, repetition, reflection, and reconsideration. Essentially, when faced with hard knowledge, the learner will experience a range of reactions over time that slowly build toward acceptance. In other words, understanding difficult history is a process.2
When you put these two frameworks in action together, you arrive at the destination of shared authority. As Rose puts it, “History workers need to be prepared to allow for the tension-filled learning moments that difficult knowledge demands.” Simply dumping all of the hard facts on a person will never be successful. The best teachers lead the learner along the path, one piece of information at a time, allowing the learner space to grow in their understanding.3
What the college professor didn’t understand was that offering only a part of the story to young children is good, and even sufficient - for the moment. She struggled because she had a huge bank of knowledge that she wanted to impart, and she wasn’t willing to give young learners time to slowly acquire and accept it all, one bit at a time. She wanted them to arrive quickly at the same place of knowledge she had already reached, over the course of her whole career. She was pushing too hard.
We Have an Ethical Obligation
That being said, as public historians, we do have an ethical obligation to keep pushing. We just need to push gently, with patient persistence. When we keep offering knowledge and opportunities to learn difficult things, we are offering the possibility of growth over time. This process will always be rewarded, but it is hard work. But more than that, it is the most important work we can do. As museum professionals, we preserve and interpret our collective heritage in the public trust. When we do not give attention to the hardest parts of our story, we are betraying that trust.
The most recent issue of History News contains an article adapted from the keynote address at last fall’s AASLH meeting by Dr. Hasen Kwarme Jeffries. His words were brilliant and perfect for this moment in time. Whether you feel like you are unable to give the right amount of weight to your difficult history programming OR if you feel afraid to try, I encourage you to seek this article out.
A text panel at Monticello address the threat of violence and separation from ones’ family as one of the differences between slavery and poverty. When I visited Monticello in June 2021, text panels like this one sparked conversations with my 10-year-old about the lasting impact and generational trauma of slavery on Black Americans. Was it a hard conversation? Of course. Was it traumatizing to him? No.
In one speech, Dr. Jeffries both challenged and encouraged the museum and public history community, saying: “We have an ethical obligation as educators and keepers of the past to get it right. …To make sure we get it right, we have to confront hard history head on. That’s one of the pushbacks I hear all the time, and we’re seeing it right now taking place in these debates around these bills that are really designed to silence conversations around hard history. That somehow talking about the past, talking about difficult subjects like slavery, is about shaming people. It’s about shaming young people, about shaming white children. Now stop. This isn’t about shaming anybody. There is no child, white or other, who’s responsible for the institution of slavery, who’s alive today. Nobody, no child, no adult. This isn’t about shame. As we explore the difficult aspects of the past, this isn’t about shame. That’s a valueless currency that we don’t traffic in.”4
Shame is “a valueless currency that we don’t traffic in.” I have chills every time I read that sentence. There is no room for shame here; we only have room for truth and empathy. And we have an ethical obligation to make room for them in programming for all ages.
Leading with Difficult History
The study of Black history and other difficult histories is a worthy pursuit, in and of itself. I will always advocate for good and consistent truth-telling, simply for its own sake. Good things come when we shine light on hard places. You never know what sorts of good things will manifest when you face the hardest parts of this work.
In the almost two years since I launched family tour programs, I’ve been amazed at the good things that have come out of a tour that walks children and families together through a difficult subject.
First of all, I have witnessed the heartbreaking beauty of adults and children working through the story of oppression and injustice together. I can talk all day about slavery and freedom, but the learning matters more when generations ponder together the living conditions of the enslaved, when they make art together inspired by African folk art, or when they look together at photographs of real people who endured something unspeakable. When families learn together, they take the lesson home with them.
Second, from a practical perspective, family tours have revitalized an education department stymied by the pandemic. Although I started with a specific tour on slavery and freedom, my lineup of family tours has grown to include several themes. And while I still work with teachers and schools, individual families have become my department’s primary audience of late. We are leaning into this audience and continue to develop new programs that encourage families to learn together.
And third, as family tours have stolen the limelight of my programming, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of research into the overlap between play, learning, intergenerational dynamics, difficult history, and the power of place. In fact, my head is simply swimming with ideas on where museum education might end up when we put all of these disparate themes together.
In short, don’t be afraid of where jumping into hard history will lead. You never know where it will take you, but I promise you won’t regret it.
Notes:
John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking, Learning from Museums, 2nd edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).
Julia Rose, Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 78-93.
Rose, Interpreting Difficult History, 79.
Dr. Hasen Kwarme Jeffries, “Getting History Right,” History News, Autumn 2021, 9.
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