Getting Started on Outreach

As Simone mentioned in her recent post, the Lux Project marked quite a few milestones this summer, both for Simone and I personally (it’s my turn to congratulate Simone, who got married this August and just completed her M.A. last week), and for the project. Our goal from day one has been to bring the contents of the Hetherington Collection to a wide audience, so this summer we embarked on our first outreach task: a visit to the BEEP summer program at Margaret Park School.

As most Classicists will tell you, the world of the ancient Mediterranean is deeply compelling to people of all ages, but especially to children (when most of us got the bug!). Because of this, and the fact that studies of the ancient world appear twice in the Manitoba grade-school curriculum, we want to bring the Hetherington Collection into the classroom locally. We rarely get the opportunity to see Mediterranean antiquities in Manitoba, and they’re even more inaccessible to school-aged children. As one of our project’s long-term goals is the creation of teaching modules based on the objects in the collection, Simone and I have been anxious to introduce our work to the elementary classroom.

The teachers involved in the  BEEP  program graciously invited us to demo a hands-on activity with their group of 10-12 year-olds. We were welcomed enthusiastically by the kids, who demonstrated some impressive knowledge of ancient Egypt in our preliminary discussion. (And managed a few good Illuminati/pyramid jokes too!) We had a blast creating and decorating our own mould-made lamps, based on lamp-making techniques used in Egypt and Palestine in the first few centuries CE. It was an easy (and economical) project- as it turns out, plastic drink cups make great lamp moulds. Everyone worked hard to customize their lamps and a few of the students even learned how to write their names in Greek letters to add to their lamps.

At the end of the project, we brought out a couple of lamps from the Hetherington Collection so the kids could compare their work (and many of them compare very favorably). Both Simone and I were impressed with how engaged the kids were and how interested they were in everyday objects. It never fails to amaze me how objects that were mundane in their own time can bring the past to life for us now. I hope that we were able, in some small way, to allow the students at Margaret Park School to touch the past. I know that every time I do outreach like this, I am reminded of the joy of learning about antiquity and the great privilege I have to share it with others.

We are looking forward to creating new partnerships with schools throughout Manitoba and we are both very grateful to have been invited to Margaret Park School. Here’s to more antiquity in classrooms!