Field Trip!

Field Trip! Many first encounter museums during a school visit. The best of such trips tend to feature close inspection of historic artifacts or opportunities to put the hand to the plow and learn by doing. These two approaches—“reading” an artifact as higher-level thinking or performing a historic task as kinesthetic learning—affirm the primary function of a museum, which is to create knowledge through interpretation of historic artifacts and archival material. Students can learn about agricultural land use and its environmental context by analyzing living collections (flora and fauna) and cultural landscapes. Through engagement with collections and interpreters, they can explore subjects as wide-ranging as social justice and civil rights, food security and human health, the social construction of technology (both mechanical and biotechnical), geopolitics of trade, and animal, seed, and soil science, to name a few.The book Interpreting Agriculture at Museums and Historic Sites (2017) explores the many ways that collections support knowledge creation focused on these agricultural subjects.1 Care must be taken with any teaching opportunity to balance the positive lessons with the complex realities of the past, negative or positive. Museums that interpret agriculture have received their share of criticism for being out of touch with guest interests. Living history, generally, has been criticized for emphasizing white perspectives and providing a romantic view of a past by avoiding discussion of conflict. Instead, those who use museums to teach through agriculture can set a new standard. Artifacts become the best examples of technological change over time and can help us learn about humans and landscapes, about cultural systems focused on crops and livestock, and about conflict at the heart of food security. Ultimately, using museums to teach through agriculture engages the student in the highest level of thinking. The student turns the material and immaterial culture they have studied into their own interpretation of a plow or a plot of land or a pot of stew simmering on a stove in an agricultural museum or living history farm near you.The process of knowledge acquisition in museums often begins with archival collections. These two-dimensional resources can take many forms, such as personal correspondence or articles in historic farm journals. Among the most useful for teaching are educational stereographs sold by the tens of thousands to teachers as formal curriculum materials. For example, Underwood and Underwood, the largest stereograph publisher in the early twentieth century, released its instructional guide, The United States of America through the Stereoscope: One Hundred Outlooks from Successive Standpoints in Different Parts of the World's Greatest Republic in 1904. It focused on national productivity including cattle, cotton, rice, and tobacco, among other agricultural products. Keystone View Company began its education division in 1905 and published Visual Education as a teacher's guide to its “600 Set” in 1906. Experts wrote the background information for these visual instructional materials. Another resource is the work of Frank M. McMurry, a professor at Columbia University, who, with twenty-four other educators, compiled The World Visualized for the Classroom: One Thousand Travel Studies through the Stereoscope and in Lantern Slides, Classified and Cross Referenced for Twenty-Five Different School Subjects.2 Agriculture, the second of the classification schemes in the book, addressed soil formation and drainage, crop cultivation, livestock care, and product management. Homer C. Price, dean of agriculture at Ohio State University, compiled 272 subject entries, stressing connections between agriculture and nine other subject headings including geology, industries, transportation, and physical geography among others.The stereographs described in the instructional manuals often included leading questions that teachers could use to guide class discussion. The text on the back of “A Home Garden” stereograph included a warm-up activity—“Have you ever had a garden of your own? What did you plant in it?” Then it encouraged students to create a list of plants the family raised in their garden and to discuss it in a Think-Pair-Share scenario. After more thinking and discussion of the vegetables and flowers raised, and of the garden plan, it asked students to apply what they learned to draw a plan of their garden and to put their plan into action by creating their own school garden.The stereograph began as a teaching tool. After being accessioned into a museum collection it becomes an artifact useful in teaching about historic education practices, including how schools engaged students in home-scale agricultural practices. The school garden, when implemented, became a tool to teach agriculture broadly defined. Today, schools are recommitting to campus gardens as part of a larger Edible Education initiative.3 Museums could do the same.Engaging youth with hands-on opportunities to work in soil, raise a garden crop, and prepare it for a meal can translate into lessons in soil and crop science, seed viability, and human health and nutrition, among other subjects. Museums can expand on these lessons with tools that gardeners used, little changed over the centuries, with historic seed display boxes and seed packets and with market wagons and market structures that supported sales to populations unable to raise their own fruits and vegetables.Museums teaching through agriculture provide hands-on and minds-on engagement. While digital resources may enhance understanding, they cannot compare to the act of stepping into a farming landscape. Living history farms, a type of agricultural museum, offer this unique experience. The artifacts that guests encounter at these cultural institutions can be as small as an open-pollinated seed saved from the last growing season for planting the next season. That could lead to conversations about seed-saving techniques, culturally distinctive seed repositories like Native Seeds Search, and seed research collections operated by the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service and curated by plant geneticists. There are twenty of these USDA-ARS repositories in the United States, the oldest in Ames, Iowa, founded in 1947.A seed or plant could lead a student into a research project focused on one crop or livestock breed, or other mechanical technology. Such projects should draw on three-dimensional evidence (as museums exist to collect, preserve, and interpret such evidence). Museums stress the benefits of close reading of real artifacts, but many have also embraced opportunities to digitize archival and artifact holdings to increase access and use. Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities support digitization projects at land-grant universities and museums. These translate into publicly accessible resources such as the “Farm, Field, and Fireside” digital newspaper archive at the University of Illinois, or “Core Historical Literature of Agriculture” and “HEARTH—Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition, History” at Cornell University.4 Museums often have collection portals on their web pages. These virtual collections enrich source identification, data analysis, and higher levels of thinking expressed through research projects. Results can take the form of a blog, virtual exhibit, podcast, or other online delivery (as well as a more traditional research paper), focused on a region, time period, or specific farm. The finished product can combine historic horticulture and plant science lessons with cultural practice and even contemporary perspectives on such popular perishables as celery, strawberries, or pumpkins, for instance.5The largest artifact is the landscape, including historic structures, farm fields, fences, orchards, and ecosystems. As student interests increase about historic claims to land, environmental degradation, and regenerative agriculture, this largest cultural artifact becomes essential to teaching through agriculture. The past survives in the landscape. Cultural geographers and architectural historians have studied these spaces and written eloquently about the methods to read this evidence. Organizations dedicated to agricultural museums, including the International Association of Agricultural Museums and the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums, support those working in these distinctive cultural institutions.6 Much overlap exists with others dedicated to environmental education or nature center interpretation. As a result, a rich literature exists to learn more about reading and interpreting historic and contemporary agricultural landscapes.7Between the seeds and the landscapes exist many other artifacts that support teaching through agriculture. A grain sickle, a common hand tool, can document cultural practices of grain harvest, stoop labor essential for food security, and artisanal talents of both woodworking and blacksmithing, or it can be a launchpad to talk about technological change over space and time and crop culture. Applying the social construction of technology framework to such study ensures that numerous perspectives inform exploration of the artifact(s). Yet all too often students may summarize the lesson as one of improvement. This tendency is one of the most difficult to challenge. I have participated in weeklong teacher institutes on industrialization and urged participants to apply the social construction of technology to interpret a range of harvesting technology. When asked to engage students in lessons about a sickle, a reaper, a Massey-Harris no. 30 combine, and a New Holland TR-70 combine with corn head, all teachers stressed improvement using evidence documented through statistics that confirmed savings in labor needs and faster harvest. It is difficult to move beyond these lessons that equate innovation with progress, repeated in history textbooks. Museums teaching through agriculture can complicate this history, linking certain crops to certain implements that had certain effects on people, landscapes, and the environment as well as on labor systems and the local, regional, and global food and fiber supply.Archives and artifacts cannot teach these lessons alone. The scholarship that agricultural historians generate provides the baseline. Multisensory lessons in agriculture can make new understanding created through museum collections more memorable. Holding well-worn plow handles, smelling freshly mown grass curing in the sun, hearing wheels on implements turn, seeing draft animals push into their yokes or harnesses, and tasting a meal made from a fresh harvest make quite an impression. Learning through agricultural archives, artifacts, and immersion experiences also helps students see themselves in agricultural production systems. It helps them realize the ways that agriculture influences their lives and the ways that their choices can influence agriculture.