Earlham College | News from Public Affairs

Steady Increase Seen for Elementary School Students Visiting Joseph Moore Museum

That’s the sound of a mind being stretched. It’s heard a lot inside Earlham College’s Joseph Moore Museum (JMM) as droves of elementary schoolchildren experience its collected wonders, the accumulated astonishments of the natural world, whether living, never alive or once alive.

Joseph Moore Museum Education Coordinator Carol Stocksdale, assisted by student staffer Lauren Schiszik, leads a geology lesson for a group of fourth grade students on a recent field trip to the museum located adjacent to the College's Dennis Hall.

Among other instant opinions typically elicited are “wow,” “eek” and “yuk.” They’re all just other ways of asking “why?”

Close by, Carol Stocksdale witnesses these reactions with no small satisfaction, knowing that the museum is performing its mission of teaching science in ways that no words or photographs in a textbook can.

As the museum’s educational outreach coordinator, Stocksdale is helping to fulfill the wishes the institution’s founder and namesake — expressed more than a hundred years ago — that the museum should be, primarily, an “aid and stimulus” to the thousands of schoolchildren in Richmond and beyond.

More than 1,600 children in grades one through six visited the museum last year, the vast majority coming from schools located in Richmond and other Wayne County communities. Stocksdale expects that number to grow steadily as she acquaints more teachers with the scientific treasures JMM offers young visitors. The plan to increase the visibility and accessibility of the museum includes creation of a virtual tour of the facility and designing brochures that can be sent to schools outlining its diverse collections and programs.

Artifacts and specimens within the museum represent the worlds of zoology, ornithology, paleontology, archeology, geology and, with its accompanying planetarium, astronomy. John Iverson, Earlham professor of biology and the museum’s director, thinks JMM is as sophisticated as natural history museums at much larger colleges and universities.

“It is, in fact, very unusual to see one on any campus near its caliber,” Iverson says. “I know of only two others at colleges our size that could compare, although I haven’t done a definitive study.”

Before Stocksdale became educational coordinator two-and-a-half years ago, four biology faculty members handled the museum’s outreach efforts — when they could make the time. With a degree in elementary education and familiarity with Earlham as the spouse of a teaching faculty member (her husband, Mark, is an associate professor of chemistry), Stocksdale seemed the ideal choice to take over the duty. The genesis of her job, she recalls, came during a talk with her son’s first-grade teacher.

“She asked if I had any suggestions for local field trips for her class, and I recommended Joseph Moore Museum,” says Stocksdale. “Then she said that she had to justify all field trips as meeting new state standards for education. In other words, field trips had to be more than pleasant outings; teachers have to show a demonstrable educational value.”

“The Indiana Department of Education has long had teaching standards for reading and math, and recently extended those standards for science, as well,” interjects Iverson. “What that means for teachers is they have to justify specifically why they wanted to take classes on field trips. What that means for the museum is we have to address those standards and provide that information to teachers.”

Certain that she could make that possible, Stocksdale talked with Iverson about what could be arranged. Since then, she and the museum’s staff have happily coordinated visits that meet area teachers’ requirements.

“A teacher can call and say we are studying so-and-so — maybe it’s reptiles or paleontology or insects,” Stocksdale explains. “We examine the standards and, often, look over the textbooks being used in the class, then we see what we can do to arrange exhibits and demonstrations that are enjoyable and have maximum teaching and learning impact.”

Stocksdale offers several examples: “Let’s say the class is studying animal adaptations. We can use the museum’s collection of snakes and show how snakes adapt to changing environments. In some cases, the kids can also touch and handle them and thereby gain a personal relationship with snakes.

“If sixth-graders come to see the Egyptian mummy, they’ll not only see it lying in the sarcophagus and the accompanying X-ray film sheet, we’ll also talk about Egyptian mythology and look at Egyptian constellations in the planetarium. We’ll spend time talking about mummification. I have a basket full of rolls of cloth, and I’ll unroll one and talk about how much it might take to wrap a body.”

If the class focus is on insects, continues Stocksdale, the youngsters can marvel at the museum’s displays of entomological specimens collected from all over the world. The museum also has fashioned costumes of insect segments that pupils can put on in delightful pretense of being bugs.

For geology tours, meanwhile, each visiting youngster is given a small collection of interesting and colorful rocks and minerals. “For specific tours, we get out microscopes,” Stocksdale says. “The kids get very excited when they look close up at rocks and fossils.”

But for sheer awe, there is nothing more arresting to young eyes than JMM’s skeletal dinosaurs, notes Stocksdale. Stealing the show, a large allosaurus crouches in toothy ferocity. Nearby, a giant ground sloth clutches a tree in its claws. Between them, and from a much later era, a huge, un-upholstered American mastodon, keeps watch on another Pleistocene companion, a rare giant beaver.

Occasionally, rather than schoolchildren coming to JMM, JMM goes to the schools.

“We’ve done some of that, maybe half a dozen visits last year,” Stocksdale says. “Primarily we take a geology program, but we’ve done some marine life and reptiles, too.”

The museum’s student staff assists Stocksdale with the tours and school visits. The virtual tour of the museum to be created this year will provide a dynamic addition to the school visits, she says.

Ratcheting up publicity for the museum to increase awareness of the offerings of the museum is also on the docket for this year.

“That’s a big part of Carol’s job, and she has taken the lead nicely,” says Iverson, observing that while JMM has never charged schools for field trips, “in a real sense these school tours are the museum’s bread and butter program. It’s a great resource for the College as well as for the schools.”

The museum’s educational outreach program relies heavily on private funding for support and recently received grants from the Borman Family Foundation and the Wayne County Foundation to help fund the effort.

Contact:
Carol Stocksdale, education coordinator of Joseph Moore Museum
765/983-1303