“Material Migrations,” like many of the practicum courses offered in the Program in Museums and Society, gave students the chance to engage directly with objects, conduct research in and around those materials and, most distinctively, develop a final project to be shared with a general audience.  M&S practicum projects take the form of exhibitions both actual and virtual, interpretative materials (such as audio tours, gallery guides, and websites), and program development.  I like to think of them as works of “public humanities”—ways of sharing the research we do in the university with a larger audience.

In our syllabus for this course, Ben Tilghman and I asked: Why bother with such an exercise?  Our answer:  “To share what we are learning with the public.  This is a fundamental task of museums . . . in this course we extended that mission to the undergraduate classroom.”  Universities suffer from their remove from the broader community, and humanistic disciplines, without clear “practical” applications, are particularly at risk from this sort of isolation and perceived irrelevance.  On the other hand, archives, museums, and other collections with a public face are places where humanistic research can be made available, accessible, and meaningful.

Although historians are familiar with the sub-field of public history, other disciplines have not developed the potential for outreach in such a direct, institutionalized way.  It is hard to imagine the awarding of a degree in, say, public art history.  But in this class our students were taking on that very role, the role of curators presenting research through a lively interactive tool with broad dissemination.

In developing their object itineraries for the Walters and Google Earth, students had to consider both the historical narrative they were tracing and the matter of presenting it to the public.  What information would be accessible?  How could they both engage and challenge their audience?  How would they balance the nuanced elements of their story with the broader theoretical issues at stake in the project?  What is lost in the task of producing highly condensed text—and what might be gained? 

In all of our museum-based practicum courses, we face the challenge of fitting student work into an established institutional frame.  Classrooms are messy places where ideas are tested and debated.  Despite our best efforts, the many young voices we work with over the semester may not easily gel into the perfect, marketable whole that modern museums require.  Our students carefully crafted their texts, which were then polished to a sheen by Walters professionals; they constructed imaginative itineraries that we honed to fit a simpler, more streamlined model.

If it seems like the nature of university research (independent, serendipitous, evolving) cannot quite square with museum exhibitions (corporate, formal, fixed), there is nevertheless much to be gained from encouraging their intersection—for students, audiences, and collections, and for universities as well.  University humanities made more public are also more relevant, appreciated, and valued.
