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MA/PhD Theses Abstracts of Current Students & Alumni |
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Ware, Barbara (MA). Ancestors in the Attic – A Needs Assessment for a Museum Outreach Program. (Madrigal). 2001.
This study concerned the Tampa Bay History Center and its attempt to actively partner with the Hillsborough County school system. With that partnership in mind, the educational department at the History Center wanted to develop a curriculum called Ancestors in the Attic. This curriculum would illustrate the diverse cultural heritage of the Tampa Bay area. The mutual goal of this partnership between the two organizations was to contribute to the teaching of awareness, tolerance and respect for ethnic and cultural differences. The purpose of this study was to develop resource recommendations for a museum outreach program. Using questionnaire surveys done with teachers who attended a joint "hands-across the bay" in-service, I developed resource recommendations for a program titled Ancestors in the Attic in the form of a "Traveling Trunk." A pilot study surveyed a group of mostly K- 5 teachers as an internship project, and formed the basis of my thesis. It also provided a comparison of ideas between the elementary school teachers and the secondary teachers who participated in the workshop on the teaching of cultural diversity. The non-random sample represented by this workshop, provided a heterogeneous group for distribution of the questionnaires. The surveys touched on questions useful to History Center business, but mostly concentrated on questions about problems that might arise because of ethnicity or cultural differences experienced by teachers. The surveys also asked what barriers teachers perceived to a museum - school partnership. The teachers were also asked to rate the tool/resource that they found most useful for helping students to understand each other's differences. The teachers' answers provided me with information to contribute resource recommendations for the development of the trunk to be used in the History Center's outreach program.
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