The Museum Classroom is a museum-school partnership between the Autry Museum of Western Heritage and Mount Washington and Castelar Elementary Schools. The program provides the opportunity for a fifth-grade class from each school to explore issues of family, community, and self-identity using the museum’s galleries as their hands-on textbook. The students also work closely with museum educators, curators, collections managers, and exhibit designers to learn about the process of researching, analyzing, interpreting, presenting and preserving history within a museum setting. The culmination of the program is a student-designed exhibition about their own familial, cultural, and community histories. Now in its sixth year, the Museum Classroom continues to challenge and engage our museum staff in creating new ways for the students to study history.

This year, the students had the unique experience of working with author and guest curator Lisa See, who served as a mentor and model for their research and exhibition. The students learned how See was able to uncover and successful blend the multiple layers of her family and community history for the Autry Museum’s upcoming exhibition, On Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Experience. On December 16, 1999 marked the student’s first visit with Lisa See, and the following entries are from our teacher and student partners’ perspectives.

– Alyson Meyer, Education Programs Manager, Autry Museum of Western History.

The Museum Classroom is an integral part of our fifth-grade class’s social studies curriculum. The students begin by looking at immigration and migration trends in their own families. Each student interviews family members, gathers archival information, examines photographs, creates genealogy charts, and records family stories. Today, the students met Lisa See to learn how she uncovered her family’s 100-year odyssey as Chinese immigrants, as well as their interaction with and effect on their new country and community in Los Angeles. As a teacher, it is amazing to see their process unfold and their excitement grow as they peel back the layers of time and history to uncover their own family and community history.

-Lucy Hunt, Fifth-Grade Teacher, Mount Washington Elementary School

Lisa See’s research reminds me of when I asked my grandmother about my great-great-grandmother. I now know that if I want to know one of my grandmother’s stories, I can ask her questions like: Who told her the story? How many times did she hear the story? Did she like the story the first time she heard it? When I asked her about my great-great-grandma, she said that Virginia Mcgee was a great woman who migrated from Mississippi to Louisiana. She left Mississippi because she had to get away from slavery. She married James Lee Land and had seven children; their names were Ellen, Carrie, Gertrude, Ervin, Sylavester, James and Horace. She bought a kerosene lamp so she could see at night when she was escaping slavery. The kerosene lamp came to Los Angeles in 1952, when my Grandma bought it. Our family still has the kerosene lamp at my Grandma’s house, where it sits on her piano and brings back the family’s memories.

-Jeanine Jeter, Fifth-Grade Student, Mount Washington Elementary School

The Museum Classroom exhibition opens June 9 and runs through October 22, 2000. The 1999/2000 Museum Classroom program and exhibition are made possible in part by grants from the American Honda Foundation; the Henry L. Guenther Foundation; the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the City of Los Angeles; Cultural Affairs Department; and Washington Mutual.

Published in the Autry Museum’s (currently the Autry National Center) publication: Spur, 2000