We began the second day of Intensive Learning with a brief recap of Day 1. We discussed the important factors of our first day, and our major takeaways from our trip to the APS. Each student talked briefly about the document or artifact they examined at the library, and we filled in an absent classmate on some of the many things we learned about museums and curators.
We talked a little about how this Intensive Learning course is framed. While it is about American natural history museums, it is about how they function as cultural artifacts, how they are structured to tell stories to Americans about themselves. Before we went to Philadelphia, we read the opening chapter of American Monster, a book that looks at the ways in which Americans interpreted the mastodon bones they began to discover in the early 18th century. The mastodon was seen, among other things, as proof that the famous French naturalist, Buffon, was wrong to believe that the North American continent was incapable of supporting full-sized life. Peale’s museum, which we were able to see in sketches and paintings, offered natural history carefully ordered, and so suggested that human beings were capable of understanding and recreating the order of the universe. Tomorrow, we will read a piece called “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” which offers a quite interesting analysis of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where we will visit on Wednesday.
To lighten up a bit, we then began working on creating various museum exhibits to display around the hallways of the upper school. We used materials ranging from wax sticks to model magic to multicultural pipe cleaners to construct our exhibits. A number of interesting things are under construction, including a model of Peale’s mastodon, which Jessica is painstakingly putting together.