Better Education Through Collaboration: Philadelphia's Cultural Fieldwork Initiative

• In Event: Making Museums an Integral Part of Formal Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This poster session will address the question: how can collaboration between formal and informal educational institutions strengthen education at all levels of learning, but particularly for pre-service teachers? The session will do so by offering an overview of the Cultural Fieldwork Initiative (CFI), a unique and ongoing partnership developed in 2011 by Temple University’s College of Education Social Studies Certification program and the National Archives Education Program at Philadelphia. The CFI is an award of excellence winner from the Pennsylvania Council for the Social Studies and has been featured in the Journal of American History as a national model of innovation in collaborative history education.
The CFI requires Temple undergraduate and graduate students in social studies education to conduct fieldwork in regional cultural institutions as part of one of their required social studies methods classes. The class, redesigned with the implementation of the CFI, teaches students about the resources of and importance of cultural institutions. The fieldwork takes these emerging teachers out of the classroom and into new educational settings: archives, libraries, museums and historic sites. Their fieldwork project supports educational outreach goals of each institution.
More than 30 institutions in the Philadelphia region have participated in CFI since its inception. The institutions represent an interdisciplinary array and are a variety of sizes: from a large art museum like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to the Free [Public] Library of Philadelphia, to a smaller volunteer-run archive such as the John J. Wilcox Jr. LGBT Archives.
How do project directors evaluate and assess the success of the CFI? Since there are multiple educational goals, there are also multiple assessment tools, both informal and formal. Partners are surveyed at the end of each semester, to assess their satisfaction in the program and how well the project created by the fieldwork student met institutional expectations and educational goals. Students keep a fieldwork journal and professors lead discussions about fieldwork experiences. From all these anecdotal sources, as well as student statements at an end of semester celebration, it is clear that the fieldwork enriches student learning and expands their idea of classroom resources and how to utilize them.
More formal assessment tools were implemented in 2013 when the team won a small grant from Pew. Dr. Christine Woyshner, Professor of Education and co-founder of the CFI, set up specific methodologies to evaluate student learning. Preliminary findings indicate that participating in the CFI produces a measurable difference in the sophistication level of how the students teach with primary sources. Another study is currently underway to evaluate the cultural institution mentoring process and how that impacts student success.
The ongoing success and results of the CFI illustrate the importance of formal and informal educational institutions working together to improve education outcomes. Better prepared teachers connected to cultural institutions - their resources, staff, and teaching strategies - and cultural institutions more in touch with teacher education programs and the changing needs of classroom teachers is beneficial to all.

Author

• Andrea Reidell, The National Archives at Philadelphia