Leah Hopkins, Community Engagement Specialist

The pandemic was a time of major changes to the Haffenreffer Museum’s outreach programming. Not only did 2020 mark the retirement of longtime Outreach Educator Kathy Silvia, but also the retirement of the Museum’s long-running suite of outreach programs, the Culture CaraVan. The Education Department used the pandemic as an opportunity to reset and evaluate the Museum’s outreach programming, ultimately resulting in the launch of This Land is Home, a complete inventory of the Education Collection, and a number of other initiatives, some of which are highlighted below. We cannot wait until we can return to teaching in preK-12 classrooms around Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, and hope to offer in-person outreach programming again soon. 

Click Here to launch This Land is Home

Providence Children’s Museum

In May 2021, I led a special online Cultural Connections with the Providence Children’s Museum. Inspired by the virtual educational program, This Land is Home, she shared information about traditional and contemporary growing practices from Indigenous communities in Rhode Island. Families had the opportunity to learn, ask questions, and engage with Haffenreffer Museum.

French American School of Rhode Island

In May 2021, former Assemblages Fellow and RISD faculty member Martin Smick connected the Museum with an art teacher at the French American School of Rhode Island. Together, we developed a virtual outreach program for two 3rd grade classes.

Before the Zoom program, students wrote labels for the arpilleras they’d been making over the course of the school year. Students had been learning about arpilleras as creative ways to express their experiences during the pandemic, especially in terms of processing the many changes in their daily lives. During the programs, students looked closely at one of the arpilleras in the HMA collections (2001-13-66), and shared their labels and arpilleras with Museum staff. We were impressed with the students’ creativity and their observations about life during COVID-19. 

RISD Teachers’ Lounge: Best Practices for Teaching and Learning about Native People, Parts 1 & 2: Culturally Responsive Teaching and Engaging with Native Art and Objects in Museums

In October, 2021, Leah Burgin and I participated in the RISD Teacher’s Lounge  entitled “Best Practices for Teaching and Learning about Native People, Part 1, Culturally Responsive Teaching.”  Teacher’s Lounges consider topics, issues and ideals related to teaching and learning with colleagues with educators from across K-12, colleges, and universities for aspirational conversations around topics of shared interest. Each Teachers’ Lounge  is facilitated by an invited guest who initiates the dialogue around relevant pedagogical issues.  In Part 1, we focused on providing educators with appropriate methods of teaching about Indigenous topics while being mindful of stereotypes,  harmful tropes, and having Indigenous students in the classroom.  We presented the virtual module of This Land is Home as a ready, out of the box resource that teachers can use in their classroom as a method of culturally responsive teaching.

In March 2022, we took Part 2 of the Teacher’s Lounge, entitled “Engaging with Native Art and Objects in Museums.” Our program, hosted by Sháńdíín Brown, Henry Luce Curatorial Fellow for Native American Art, focused on Native art, objects, and cultural belongings in museum collections from the RISD Museum and the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology.  We were excited as this was our first in-person professional development workshop since the beginning of the pandemic.

Cover photography by Juan Arce