Every spring, as part of the public history practicum (HIST-730), students and faculty work alongside American University’s partner institutions to develop new educational programs, future exhibits, and other interpretive works. These projects provide students opportunities to learn public history in the field, honing project management skills and practice working as a team. With every project, AU’s partners benefit from the valuable, professional assistance of talented scholars trained in the best practices of the field.

Working under the direction of the National Park Service, American University students overhauled the self-guided interpretive resources in the park’s Lockhouse 6. This historic structure is part of the innovative Canal Quarters Program, an initiative that allows visitors to spend the night in lockhouses throughout the park. The AU team developed a scrapbook, selected wall photos from the parks archives, wrote labels to supplement the photos, and produced audio clips from oral histories to tell the story of the “Development of a Sanctuary: From Canal to National Park.”

American University students worked with Smithsonian Gardens to develop the framework for an interactive, user-driven, educational website about America’s history of urban community gardening. Their project, “Greening America’s Cities: A Timeline of Community Gardens,” highlights the role of community gardens in alleviating socioeconomic challenges, notably in relation to the experience of immigrants, low-income families, and inner city children. The group developed the themes that will structure the website, produced interpretive content, and gathered photographs and videos from community gardens across the country to initially seed the site.

Menokin, the home of Francis Lightfoot Lee – a signer of the Declaration of Independence, has partially collapsed and has a tree growing in it.  offers significant challenges.  American University students took on the task of interpreting this ruin and its surrounding landscape.  Drawing on themes that highlight the social and environmental history of the site, the students produced an interpretive prospectus as well as three wayside signs. The prospectus will serve as a guide for the foundation’s future interpretive work.  It capitalizes on the resources offered by Menokin’s landscape, is designed to work well with a small staff size, and incorporates state-of-the-art interactives that draw on new media technology.

Public history students at AU recently collaborated with curators at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History museum to build the institution’s first pre-exhibition website. Working in collaboration with staff from the museum's New Media office, the students launched their website in January of 2011, complete with a curator blog, visitor surveys, and a tour of the possible objects featured in the upcoming exhibition. Learn more about their work here, or visit the American Enterprise site.

Historical interpretation comes in all shapes and sizes, and in the spring of 2010, American University students were given the chance to work in one of its most challenging forms—museum theater. Students worked alongside the staff of the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and the National Museums of American History to develop two original pieces of museum theater based on the lives of two path-breaking women inventors—Margaret E. Knight and Marion O’Brien Donovan. With the help and guidance of faculty and actors from American University’s own Performing Arts Department, students wrote scripts based on original research into these inventors' lives.

Utilizing contemporary readings on historical interpretation, exhibit design, and African American studies, American University students developed a comprehensive furnishing plan for Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial’s north slave quarters and winter kitchen. The plan broadened the popular site’s historical narrative to include free and enslaved people of color, emphasizing themes of enslaved resistance, contested living spaces, and local, regional, and international mobility. Visit the website students developed to accompany the proposed furnishing plan.

Over the course of two semesters, American University students partnered with the National Park Service to develop an interpretive plan for Arlington National Cemetery. Combining archival research with lessons in graphic design, students created a series of wayside exhibits that educate visitors about the important, though often unmarked, sites and memorials scattered across the cemetery’s 624-acre campus. Learn more about the Arlington Waysides project here.

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