Molly Brown House Museum
Heritage Education at the Molly Brown House Museum
By Heather Pressman, Director of Learning & Engagement, Historic Denver Inc.'s Molly Brown House Museum
January 2024
In June 2023, thanks in part to funding from the Institute for Heritage Education, we hosted a week-long teacher institute for Denver-area teachers. The institute was a collaboration between the Molly Brown House Museum, the American Museum of Western Art – Anschutz Collection, Center for Colorado Women’s History, Clyfford Still Museum, and Teaching with Primary Sources – Western Division.
Teachers spent the week learning how to incorporate primary sources into everything they teach. We held the event over 5 days from June 3-June 9, 2023. During this institute, teachers explored Colorado history and cultural heritage through primary sources such as art, objects, and buildings to create a lesson plan for use in their classroom. To assist in this process, we provided a guiding template from Anne Goudvis’ book Inquiry Illuminated that followed the daily themes of each day and built upon the work of the previous days.
One of our big successes was focusing on the theme of cultural heritage through a variety of media. By focusing on cultural heritage education, we were able to fully explore the importance of place including place-based learning, storytelling, and the deeper meaning behind the built environment both outside and in works of art. The use of a template to guide the daily work of the teachers was also a success. By using the practices outlined in Inquiry Illuminated (Investigate, Immerse, Coalesce, Take Public) we were able to successfully scaffold our presentations and themes throughout the week and provide an easy-to-use, accessible template for lesson plan creation that can be used by teachers to create other lesson plans in the future.
“I think this is a great model for educator development and practice-building. This week had the perfect blend of time spent working/thinking and time spent just being with art, artifacts and historical sources. A genuinely wonderful week thanks to all!” Teacher, Denver, CO.
One of our challenges is the size of our institute. This was the third year that the institute was held and each year we have been disappointed in the low number of teachers who apply and take advantage of our offering for free professional development. In 2023, we only received about 12 applications for the institute. We invited 10 participants but only 7 accepted the invitation to participate. Ideally, we would like to have 12-15 participants to fully engage in this work with a larger and more diverse group. We continue to discuss new and different ways we can reach out to teachers. We are hoping that every year we will be able to grow this institute through more marketing and word of mouth from past participants.
From IHE: In general, our colleagues find that while teachers love heritage education professional development such as this one, we all have trouble getting them in the door. We intend to assist our future grantees with marketing their professional development events in hopes of mutually increasing our impacts.
