As I mentioned last week, the Veterans Legacy Program institute has been taking up a lot of my time recently, however, I am now home and ready to push ahead on my work for Greenwood!
Since my last post, I have received significantly more and, most importantly, more varied responses to my survey on Greenwood and Orlando’s history. I’m extremely pleased that my survey managed to reach a broader audience of the local public while still staying within the designated parameters assigned by my supervisor. Given this new range of data, I wanted to provide a quick update. With a wider demographic, including several respondents under the age of 18 and over 50, I have a slightly different percentage of audience needs to address. With these new results, my survey indicates that 95% of Central Florida residents want to learn more about Orlando’s history. Those surveyed feel that the most trusted source when it comes to learning history is directly from historic sites and museums and 95% feel that a cemetery should be considered a historic site. Additionally, there is now a new front runner for the themed tour requests; “Orlando’s Early Days.” The runner up is a tie between women’s history and “Spooky Stories.” There was another write-in request for a queer history themed tour as well as a suggestion for a landscape history themed tour which could be a good idea considering the link between the city’s motto and the national “city beautiful” movement of the early 20th century and Greenwood’s links to landscape design.
I also received an additional comment from someone who said that they were excited about the possibility of using the digital tour of Greenwood Cemetery in their K-12 classroom. This is an exciting prospect that I hadn’t really considered before, but I will certainly be taking that into account while writing the narrative essays for Clio so that the language used in the tour is not only accessible for the general public, but also intelligible for a younger audience as well. One of the great things about Clio is that there is a text to speech feature that can be used along with the other extremely useful components. This tour could definitely be a great tool for Central Florida teachers to utilize in their lessons. I’m very excited by the prospect of being able to help bring local history into the classroom!
At the VLP institute at St. Augustine National Cemetery, I worked directly with Florida K-12 teachers and saw firsthand some innovative ways to help foster connections between the public and individuals buried in cemeteries. While the VLP works exclusively with Veterans, I think there are many useful components that could be transferred over to Greenwood. One of the biggest elements that I observed was that forging personal connections by involving the public in historical interpretation generates excitement about learning more so than just presenting a finished narrative with all the answers. During the VLP institute, we did this by involving our teachers in the research themselves and allowing them to become the historians. They were so excited to learn by examining primary sources and making their own discoveries. I would love to incorporate this into the Clio tours by providing primary sources and further readings that could lead the viewer to engage in this process. My initial thoughts to enact this would be to include questions for further thought and resources on where to look for the answers in each tour stop that might help spark that element of curiosity.
Next week, I’ll share some more ideas that were inspired by the institute as well as some interesting findings I’ve made as I’ve hunkered down during the development process!
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