Out with the Old, in with the New!

The Education Department at HistoryMiami has had the pleasure of working in the community for decades. We service a wide array of students, from ages 4 through the collegiate level. Our programs engage students in as many subject areas as we can, while sticking to our mission to educate people about South Florida history. This summer, we will officially scrap most of the programs we have and roll out a new, sophisticated, inter-disciplinary and highly interactive series of programs.

The menu for our programs once looked like an “all you can eat buffet,” and has slowly been whittled down to an a la carte list of options. The curriculum team has lately been looking at our galleries through new lenses. This reassessment, coupled with input from teachers we surveyed for the last two years, enabled the team to come up with seven new programs. We are thrilled to introduce just a few to you.

Our new Architecture: We Built this City program takes students through different techniques and tools used for the last 10,000 years in South Florida. The tour also hits the streets of downtown Miami for a first-hand look at the Art Deco and Mediterranean Revival styles for which our city is world renowned.

Technological progress presents new possibilities and problems. Did the Tequesta people have technology 10,000 years ago? Of course they did! The Technology through Time program encourages students to look creatively at tools from the Miami Circle tools from the Miami Circle archaeological site, and hypothesize how the dredges, famously put to work in the Everglades, drained our wetlands and make space for people.

Lastly, we have all come to Make Miami Home, and our new program with the same name looks at the different people who have done this over time. Were you born in South Florida? How about your grandparents? Chances are your family came here from somewhere else for one reason or another. People migrate for a variety of different reasons, and we will connect students to their family stories.

The curriculum team will spend the summer perfecting titles for the programs, inventing and crafting different hands-on projects and writing scripts for our Educators to use. Teachers may begin booking these new programs in September 2010.

-- Jenna Vaisman, School Programs Manager