Monthly E-News from Michael Bouman, Executive Director
Missouri Humanities Council
Contents:
- Museum Experience Leads to National Prize for Missouri Student
- Book Clubs Turn Twenty-Eight
- Julie Douglas on Picturing Yourself as a Real Person
- The Chautauqua-in-a-box Starter Kit
- Clark Beim-Esche on the Mark Twain Teachers' Workshop in Hannabal
- Michael's Essay on "Another Corps of Discovery"
- Call for Self-Nominations to Serve on the Board of MHC
Life-Changing Museum Experience
If you work in the museum field, you are the steward of your visitor's intelligence. The same is true if you're a teacher of any interpretive subject. Stewardship of other people is your field, and the only question is whether you do well or badly at it.
Education "forms" people, and at its best it "transforms" them. The possibility of transforming a visitor depends on how well they connect their sense of personal identity with the stories in your museum.
What we all bring to a museum visit is our sense of who we are -- our personal identity. The museum that engages our sense of who we are and then helps us connect that sense to someone else's story is expanding our sense. In effect, it is literally "making sense" and sensibility that wasn't there before.
Now comes news that a high school senior in Missouri had such an experience
during a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. She wrote an essay
about her experience and became one of ten national first-prize-winners in
the Holocaust Remembrance Project of the Holland-Knight Charitable Foundation.
She is not Jewish, she is Catholic. Like so many visitors to the Holocaust Museum, she felt no personal connection to the story of persecution and genocide. The museum changed that and changed Rachel Plassmeyer. I hope you will read the essay that won her a $10,000 scholarship. She's off to the University of Notre Dame to major in psychology and Spanish. We wish her Godspeed.
http://holocaust.hklaw.com/essays/2006/20061H.htm
Humanities Book Clubs Turn Twenty-Eight
I am thinking of a time in 1978 when public humanities programs had much more to do with documentary films than with books. Libraries sponsored film discussions. Film-makers set up residence on the porch of the state humanities council. I am thinking of a time before Ken Burns got his start with the New Hampshire Humanities Council.
The thing of it is, I helped Patricia Bates bring book clubs into the work of state humanities councils twenty-eight years ago in Vermont.
The idea of discussing books was not new, of course. People have done that as long as there have been books. What was new in the summer of 1978 was the idea of moving the group book discussion out of the classroom or living room and into the public library.
The participation of the humanities council was important in two ways. Foremost, it prompted the inclusion of professional scholars to shape a theme for each book group, to select the books, and to talk about the theme, the authors, and the books when people came together to discuss them. Second, it provided funds to buy multiple copies of the books. These were paperbacks, of course, but very soon after this idea took flight, libraries were ordering eighty to a hundred copies of each title, the hunger for the experience was so great.
I was working as a program officer at the Vermont Council on the Humanities. Patricia Bates, who later became a national "mother" of thematic book clubs, was the only salaried Program Director in a Vermont public library at that time. Libraries in Vermont were a central fixture of community life. Pat asked me what I thought of having professors come to the library for a noontime program series to review recent acquisitions to the library's collection. I countered with a question. "What if people had read the book before the scholar comes to talk about it, and what if the scholar leads them in a discussion?"
Pat: "Do you think the Council would fund that?"
Michael: "Do you want to be the first to find out?"
Pat did nothing small. With the help of an English professor named Barbara Bloy, she designed a 12-book series spanning the fall and winter seasons. "Women in Literature" was the theme, and it launched a cultural movement in Vermont, then in New England, and then nationally when the NEH prompted the American Library Association to clone the Vermont model for everyone. What many Librarians know as "Let's Talk About It" began in the brains of Bates, Bouman & Bloy in an era when no one imagined the scope of the general public's craving for a serious experience of "liberal education."
The people who participated in those programs routinely reported "the joy of knowing why I have a brain." They also spoke of "community." They said the process of meeting regularly to exchange ideas about the meanings in stories had bonded old-timers and newcomers into a new community. At some point they found that the recipe for success did not depend entirely on a good scholar nor on a good book. The group itself was one key ingredient, so if the scholar was absent or the book was irritating, success was likely anyway.
When I left Vermont in 1995, the book discussion "enterprise" had grown into a statewide discussion network served by the Vermont Center for the Book and fueld by a succession of NEH grants and boundless enthusiasm. The Center for the Book maintained a small warehouse full of the recirculating books necessary to support a "curriculum" that included thirty-two themes. This was truly a cultural phenomenon, as is Pat Bates herself, who later became one of the cultural treasures of the State of Maryland.
These memories came to mind because George Durnell, the guiding hand of the ReadMOre project, alerted me to an article in the July Library Journal titled "The Book Club Exploded" by Barbara Hoffert.
It's a great article and a good read, and it's on line at the link below. I hope you'll take a few minutes to read it. Quite a few Missouri libraries are a part of this national cultural movement now.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6349024.html
Picturing Yourself as a Real Person
Julie Douglas has written up some wonderful reflections on the importance of identity in early childhood development. I love the way Julie writes about reading and human development.
http://mohumanities.org/E-News/August06/real.htm
The Missouri Humanities Council is engaged in a review and redesign of the Chautauqua enterprise in Missouri. One of our ideas for 2007 and beyond is to test the viability of supporting "home-grown" Chautauqua festivals. Bonne Terre, Missouri is one of our leading examples of a home-grown Chautauqua. We think there are is a variety of ways to succeed.
To help others imagine and create the Chautauqua experience for themselves, we have assembled a National Directory of Chautauqua Performers and some Guidelines for creating home-grown Chautauqua festivals.
You will find the materials on our web site:
http://mohumanities.org/programs/chautauqua/index.htm
Communities that want to put a Chautauqua series together may apply for Grant support from us. I hope you'll take a look at our Directory and Guidelines and contact me or Patricia Zahn as you develop ideas and plans.
The Mark Twain Teachers' Workshop
We heard some great things about a teachers' workshop this summer at the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal. At our invitation, Clark Beim-Esche wrote about his experiences there.
http://mohumanities.org/E-News/August06/twain.htm
I've been finishing a national directory of Chautauqua talent, a project begun by my former colleague, Kathryn Ballard and some of her counterparts around the country. It's such fascinating work, I thought I'd share some of what's going on in this mother lode of the public humanities.
http://mohumanities.org/E-News/August06/corps.htm
Call for Self-Nominations to Serve on the Board of MHC
The 24-person board of the Missouri Humanities Council is composed of Missouri residents who are familiar with their communities and are known and respected as leaders and "doers." Eighteen members are elected to rotating three-year terms, and six members are appointed by the Governor of Missouri. The Council has eight board openings that need to be filled this fall. I invite you to look at our need for board members and send information if you are interested.
http://mohumanities.org/getinvolved/board_service/board_service.htm