Expanding Urban Imagination with Museums

At the Chicago Historical Society (CHS), history comes alive in a way that one can engage it in public conversation. In Making Civic Connections, 125 people, representing 19 distinct newcomer immigrant groups in Chicago, gathered together for an evening at CHS. There, they discussed unresolved questions that produced profound American struggles, including a tragic and pivotal civil war. Abraham Lincoln himself spoke (represented by scholar/actor Michael Krebs), repeating his speech on "The Last Best Hope of Earth." He addressed questions raised in the chief sentence of the Declaration: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal" and noted continuities between the revolutionary Declaration and the continuing political and social revolution. The audience, both as communities and general public, engaged "Lincoln" at crucial stages along the way, raising questions from their own experiences. Such an exchange brought historical issues critical to American identity into a current and powerful conversation between the past and the present.

Understanding systems as constructed over time requires learning about what has been, as well as imagining what can be. Museums are "public spaces" which showcase historical and cultural perspectives about life in a given place. They invite public conversation and engage their viewers in thinking through ideas and issues in an interactive way. The process of exhibit creation itself, for which museums are best known, moves from understanding to imagining and creating. Museums help us make connections, think differently, see more. Imagine Chicago has been intimately connected to local museums throughout its six-year history as external partner for the Urban Imagination Network, a seven-school, six-museum partnership focused on improving reading comprehension and helping expand urban imagination.

When the Urban Imagination Network was first established, the only connection between the schools and the museums in the partnership was the standard field trip experience. In a school system driven by test scores, there was a citywide trend to separate reading process from reading content. Visual arts were an isolated experience of the occasional arts class. Parent involvement in schools included only limited activities such as attending report-card pick-up night. For participating museums, work with schools meant primarily teacher and student workshops and occasional parent involvement as field trip chaperones.

The Urban Imagination Network gave schools a much bigger window into museums. As schools partnered with one museum each year, teachers came to see how the museum worked and how to make greater use of this resource. One of the goals of the project was to bring the exhibit approach into the schools, to reduce the distance between museum and school by creating hundreds of museums — the classrooms and hallways within the participating schools. While at first the power of the museums as unique and remarkable collections of knowledge enhanced the project’s attraction to students, teachers, and parents, the project ultimately demystified the museums. The participating schools came to understand that a museum is a way of showing and sharing knowledge, just as their own students’ exhibits are. Teachers learned to organize their work with a museum independently. Museum educators began to call on partner schools to help clarify an exhibit plan or identify programs needed for city schools.

The museum connection was especially important to enhancing family learning. When parents in the Urban Imagination Network studied transportation issues, they did so at CHS, beginning by deciding what items they would have chosen to put in their wagon as a pioneer on a long journey. Reading first person narratives of a pioneer journey helped build a personal connection to the artifacts in the exhibit hall on pioneer life in Illinois. A second activity involved thinking through the relationship among refrigerated railroad transportation, farming and the development of Chicago as a stockyard and mail order center. The activity opened up parents’ understanding of the many connected systems that constitute a city’s life. By seeing (and touching) historical objects that showcased the ways transportation had changed over time, parents could more readily imagine choices for changes in the future. This led to examining the citizen action transportation plan being debated currently in the state legislature. The museum connection helped bring the city connection alive.